Breaking News: The Last Word On Pete Rose Is Deeply Unpleasant

There’s always an inherent problem with fancying oneself a charming rogue, and it is that being a rogue isn’t the hard part. Which leads us to Pete Rose and the HBO documentary examining his life, both backward and forward, as he leans into what might be his last play to get into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Charlie Hustle & The Matter of Pete Rose is a thorough and even-handed analysis of a man who cannot help but be simultaneously the hero and victim of his own stories. And finding the charm in that is a search that director Mark Monroe either couldn’t manage or, more likely, didn’t want to.

Up front, Rose was banned from baseball and the Hall of Fame for gambling on his own team as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds. More to the point, though, he remains banned because of the enemies he made, and keeps making. His inability/refusal to take the knee then and now leaves him a tragic, comic, and sometimes even weak figure wrapped in self-absorbed bravado. But charming? Not really, and certainly not here.

 

Therein lies the real story of Pete Rose. HBO manages the gift of showing highlights of 60-year-old baseball games, the time-machine stuff that sells every sports documentary. There he ladles on his version of charm in that face-first way of his, using his fiendish competitive streak as his personality. And frankly, it works. He isn’t a sympathetic figure as much as an indomitable one, and it is a quirk of the American psyche that we are willing to forgive all of it for someone that outwardly crazed.

 

But then the story loses itself—because Rose continues to be the one telling it. He could make a compelling case for baseball’s newfound love of gambling and how it holds him in the hypocritical grip of grudge-holding, but that would convince none of the people maintaining his ban. The Hall of Fame has always been a compromised concept. But Rose can’t help himself. Indeed, the closest he comes to getting the depth and breadth of his conundrum is when he says, “Jesse James was a nice guy away from the banks.” Evidently it was the banks’ fault for keeping money around.