Quote from ARogueTrader:
Rose is a great man?
He was a great baseball player.
O.J. was a great football player.
Ty Cobb was a great baseball player.
Jayson Williams of the New Jersey Nets was a great rebounder.
Athletic excellence doesn't make a man a great man.
At the end of his life, even Mickey Mantle confessed that he was not a great man, but a man who wasted his life as a drunk.
That admission, may have taken away the fantasy for his fans, but if it helped others fight alcoholism, that would make him a great man in my book.
When I say Pete was a great man, of course I was not speaking of his personal life or what he did off the field. I guess I should have made that clear, but I figured a bright guy such as yourself would have seen it as self-evident; for how can we ever truly know any celebrated celebrity/sports-star well enough to ever induce wether they were "great" people in their personal lives?
I say he was great because of what his actions on the field showed, because in this often miserable world filled with such wasted talents, the likes of all the Lyn Biases, Darrell Strawberries, 'The Goats', and the countless other ones we never heard of --
he fulfilled his destiny to become one of the all time great players in one of the all time great games AND This alone is all I need to go on to stand firm in my assertion that Pete Rose was a
GREAT man.
I actually met Pete Rose when I was just a little boy. My father and two uncles brought me to a sports bar in Philly after one of the games, and though I don't remember much of this encounter, I did, even at this young age, know enough to regard him as an arrogant prick by the time we left the place. He was loud, arrogant, and pompous. He brushed my father off as if he didn't even exist, a man that was a big fan of him, but all this is neither here nor there and has no place in this.
Perhaps it is true what Heraclitus say;
"A mans character is his fate". And perhaps when it comes to the worldly affairs of men, Pete reaped exactly what he sowed -- BUT know this Optional, on a much higher plane, this man you regard as a scum-bag, is smiled upon by the Gods, for he was in accord with something on that field that 99 1/2% of the rest of the world will never touch, smell, or feel. If Pete were just a little more spiritual/intuitive and less of an ego maniac, he would realize this and tell baseball to stick their honor up their ass. Frowned on, but forever immortalized by men or smiled upon by the Gods? I'll take the latter any day, for it's less hollow...
By the way man, your usually pretty good at fucking wit people, surprised you swung at the soft ball
"he was a great man" and left the rest of the post as was.