Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [103]
On trial for tax evasion in April of 1990, Rose became a daily fixture on ESPN, which provided extensive coverage of the proceedings—extensive partly to demonstrate the network’s commitment to sports journalism, and perhaps partly to show that it would not suppress or downplay bad news about sports or sports figures no matter how bad it was. In the case of Pete Rose, it could hardly have been worse.
JOHN WALSH:
The Rose story presented itself almost as a gift-wrapped box. We had essentially decided we would put people on it full-time, and we had big plans for “Decision Day”: we would get the Dowd Report, and everybody would come into work and read it very quickly and do the coverage. We had a lot of practice before we did the actual-day coverage. We had three or four false starts after hearing, “Oh, it’s going to be tomorrow,” and everybody would come in and then all of a sudden it was “Oops, it’s not going to be tomorrow.” The driving force was “We have a chance to cover this story unlike anybody else. Let’s just get on it, throw everything we can at it, and let us use every resource we can handle”—Jimmy Roberts, Charley Steiner, Dan Patrick, Chris Myers, and of course Bob Ley, who being the whiz that he is, was on top of it all.
We set up an ambitious plan for when the news would break. We had a reporter ready in Cincinnati, we had a reporter ready on the streets of New York, and we knew Jimmy Roberts was going to go to Cooperstown.
Then all of a sudden the report came out, and Bob came in and read it in his usual, like, three-and-a-half minutes and knew every question and every nuance of the report, and so we were in motion for the next day. The one thing I did was at that point the seven o’clock SportsCenter was a half-an-hour show, and I had negotiated with programming that we would be an hour. And I do remember that we did forty-two consecutive minutes of Pete Rose. I will never forget that number. We started at 7:00 and went to 7:42 on Pete Rose. The other thing I’ll always remember is a phone call I got. “I’ve never met you. My name is Don Ohlmeyer, I’m in this business, and I want to congratulate you because that’s what SportsCenter should be.” That was a great call to get.
BOB LEY:
The night we broke the Pete Rose story in ’89, our legal correspondent, Jim Zucker, had the tip and got it to us that the terms of the suspension were going to be the next morning. We broke that. The computers were crashing in the newsroom one by one. So when I started typing the story, I had to go from computer to computer. When the Dowd Report was released, everybody ran for the narrative; I ran for the footnotes, and all these people were named, including who the witnesses were who had talked to Dowd’s people. I flew out to Pennsylvania to talk to this guy who had overheard a conversation where Pete made bets. Dan had some sources too.
The next day was an eighteen-hour day. We were on the air in the morning, did a special report, the press conference from Giamatti, the press conference from Rose, then for the six o’clock show, we had reports from all over the country. Heck, somebody even went to Cooperstown. We were on till midnight. In thirty years of the network, it was one of the ten best days for news that I’ve ever been involved in, because we had this thing nailed. There was no cogent doubt on the part of anybody who worked that story that summer here that Pete had bet on baseball. I’ve talked to Pete a number of times since. Once, I spent an hour and a half with him at the Hard Rock in New York, and he continued to give me his rap of why he was innocent. He never stopped trying to make you believe his story.
NORBY WILLIAMSON:
We weren’t trying to be Woodward and Bernstein, but we were asking questions that would get us to the second, third, and fourth levels of the story. And that was John’s and Steve Anderson’s influence journalistically. What did this mean to baseball? Is this more pervasive than just the Pete Rose situation? What do we really know right now? What did the owner know? Is there any cover-up of the