Pete Rose was one of the more controversial athletes of his generation before he passed this week. One part of his legacy that wasn’t controversial to ESPN’s Tony Kornheiser is that he was a great interview.
On Tuesday’s episode of Pardon the Interruption, Kornheiser paid tribute to Rose, who he said not only should make the Hall of Fame posthumously but also was a “dream” to cover as a sports reporter.
“Pete Rose was a sportswriter’s dream,” Kornheiser said. “He would talk to anybody and everybody, and he would talk for hours.”
Kornheiser explained that not only was Rose a willing conversationalist but also a baseball encyclopedia. The league’s all-time leading hitter and three-time World Series champion had his eye on everyone else in baseball in the 1970s and could run through the skill set and statistics of all his rivals.
“It was like he was a human computer. A baseball computer,” Kornheiser said. “He knew everything about baseball.”
“Pete Rose was a sportswriter’s dream … he knew everything about baseball.”
Tony Kornheiser reacts to Pete Rose’s passing: pic.twitter.com/zApWrLUsvl
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 1, 2024
Of course, Rose was banned from baseball for life in 1989 and banned from the Hall of Fame in 1991. Rose also had multiple controversial relationships with younger women, including an alleged incident in the 1970s in which he engaged in a relationship with a teenager who later accused him of statutory rape. Rose settled with the young woman in court in 2017.
Kornheiser didn’t gloss over those unseemly actions but said it was easy to forget about all of it once you started talking baseball with Rose during his career.
“Could he be a caveman? Yes. He could be a caveman,” Kornheiser said. “When you were around him, chatting with him, were you swept away by him? Yes, you were.”
It is always difficult to capture the legacy of an athlete who achieved greatness professionally and behaved poorly in their personal life. Instead of trying to account for every deed Rose committed, Kornheiser sticks to what he knew. As someone covering sports and trying to relay athletic achievements to sports fans, Kornheiser believes there were few better.
