As a youngster, my real heroes were my parents and grandparents. Role models I could love and look up to each day.
But in my sports-mad youth, right behind them were the athletes whose posters adorned my wall, whose exploits I sought out in our daily newspaper or from the magazines 'borrowed' from school libraries.
With a dozen TV channels, tops, and no YouTube to scan for extra highlights, it was your imagination that built up these legends in your mind. The older you get, the faster you ran as a boy and all that. It was a magical time.
On Sept. 30, the news came down that Pete Rose had died at age 83. As AP put it: "baseball’s career hits leader and fallen idol who undermined his historic achievements and Hall of Fame dreams by gambling on the game he loved and once embodied, has died."
Now, I was never a huge Pete Rose fan specifically (I was a Johnny Bench guy) but he was a key cog for my favourite baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds.
I worshipped the Big Red Machine. Waking up early in the summer to rush and grab the paper to check the boxscores and the standings, seeing if the lead had grown in the NL West over the much-loathed L.A. Dodgers. I can still rattle off their everyday lineup (the Great Eight) from that time.
Rose was a driving force for those clubs, a Cincinnati kid nicknamed “Charlie Hustle,” with his Popeye forums and all-out style of play. During our endless games of 'scrub' during those summers, my buddies and I would attempt exaggerated head-first slides to be like Pete. Nothing said you cared like a face full of dirt.
He was the leadoff hitter for baseball's best team. He was on magazine covers and in TV commercials. In those days, he was everywhere. Adults would routinely highlight his all-out style as an example of how kids should play.
I was a little older when Rose broke his hero Ty Cobb’s mark of 4,191 hits. By then he had bounced around to Philadelphia and Montreal, before returning to the Reds as a player-manager. Though he still was no Johnny Bench for me, watching him break the record in a Reds uniform was still a thrill, the cherry on top of a baseball-mad youth sundae.
Of course now, we all know how things turned out. Rose was declared permanently ineligible after it was found he bet on baseball while managing the Reds.
And for the remaining years leading up to his death, "should Pete Rose be in the Hall of Fame?" became an annual circus of a debate.
When you're a very young fan, you aren't necessarily looking at the human being, just the athlete. I only saw Pete Rose as a huge part of helping my favourite team win and a shining example of how you should play hard every time, no matter what.
As you get older, you learn those athletes may not exactly be choirboys and off-the-field Rose was a rather unsavoury fellow. But for me it remains very easy to separate the two, and memories are memories.
In the immediate aftermath of his death, as I fell down the online wormhole of highlights and stories and magazine covers and cheesy commercials and Prince Valiant haircuts, it wasn't as a grown old guy tut-tutting at the failings of a flawed human being. Rather, it was as a wide-eyed kid, transported back in time and recalling endless good recollections of friends and family and fun.
And it's nice to go back every once in a while.
Question for you folks out there: Who were your childhood heroes? Who did you look up to? Athletes, movie stars, teachers, parents? I'd love to hear some of your own tales.
PQB News/VI Free Daily editor Philip Wolf welcomes your questions, comments or story ideas. He can be reached at 250-905-0029, or via email at philip.wolf@blackpress.ca.
