We’ll remember 2024 not for splendor, integrity, teamwork or sacrifice but for money.
All anybody talks about these days is money. How much you’ve got. How much they’ve got.
In that regard, we look at college football (and, to a lesser extent, all college sports). Coaches’ behavior as multimillionaires seeking every bonus and cash award imaginable naturally had to trickle down to players, and now even teenage ‘‘Johnny Freshman,’’ backed by court decisions, is a pro.
50 Cent’s album ‘‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’ ’’ ought to be on a loop in every Division I locker room. It certainly should be at Colorado, the leader in college capitalism.
I first talked with Deion Sanders when he was a cornerback at Florida State 37 years ago, and he was wearing a necklace with a jewel-encrusted dollar sign hanging from it. Now he’s the coach at Colorado. On Saturday, one of his sons, quarterback Shedeur Sanders, sat on the bench at the end of the Alamo Bowl wearing a Gatorade-sponsored towel over his head with large dollar signs printed on it. A family logo, obviously. Symbolic of, well, this whole thing called 2024.
It also was stunning to see Miami quarterback Cam Ward, the ACC player of the year and Davey O’Brien Award winner, play half the Pop-Tarts Bowl against Iowa State, set the record for passing touchdowns in a college career, then sit and watch his team lose.
Maybe it was the ridiculous name of the bowl that got to him. But the main message? Ain’t no money in getting injured, folks.
Which brings us to the history and legacy of Pete Rose. This one is a tough nut, an old one, but one that resonates loudly in an environment in which a U.S. president has pardoned many criminals, including his own son, and the president-elect is a convicted criminal who might pardon himself.
Rose, who died three months ago at age 83, was a man who spent much of his life trying to get pardoned by a series of Major League Baseball commissioners for his sin of gambling on the game as a player and manager, mostly with the Reds.
That Rose has the numbers to be in the Hall of Fame is beyond debate. In his crouched switch-hitter’s stance, he cranked out more hits than anybody: 4,256. But he gambled on the game when he knew it was wrong — signs at the entrance to every clubhouse proclaim it — and then lied about doing so. It took him many years to finally state, as he would write below his autograph for a fee, ‘‘I’m sorry I bet on baseball.’’
It’s a tragedy of ego. And money. As Keith O’Brien sums up in his new biography of Rose, ‘‘Charlie Hustle’’: ‘‘They were words that once upon a time could have changed his life . . . could have earned him sympathy; words that, if he had uttered them sooner and with sincerity, could have gotten him into the Hall of Fame decades ago. . . . Words that, by his own calculation, could have saved him $100 million.’’
Rose still isn’t in the Hall of Fame. He last played in 1986. Maybe he never will get in. But we baseball writers don’t have a vote on him. We never have because he was declared ‘‘permanently ineligible’’ by MLB in 1989 and never has appeared on the Hall ballot.
It’s a mess, especially now that gambling on sports is legal (though what Rose did as a player and manager never will be OK). Thus, one of MLB’s greatest players stands outside the gates, haunting us, now in death.
Many other greats are outside with him, including Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Steroids and gambling and such are moral issues, and morality, as we’ve seen, is fluid. Remember when smoking pot could earn you a prison sentence?
I look at the two baseballs I have signed by Rose. Both say ‘‘4,256’’ below his signature. I bought the things so I could talk to the man, both times in Cooperstown, New York.
One time, nobody else was in the store, and we chatted away. He said to me, ‘‘You think since 1919 I’m the only [bleeping] guy who bet on baseball?’’
He was referring to the Black Sox Scandal, which almost did in the game. Rose would sign anything there at the end — for a fee, of course — including the Dowd Report, which detailed his gambling, and his mug shot from tax-evasion charges. He was unrepentant and always after money.
It’s a mess, all right. And somehow, remembering Rose seems the perfect way to remember 2024.