ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — For years, I vowed to avoid reading about Pete Rose. To my everlasting regret, I broke that promise this weekend.
Any Rose headline, good or bad, would make me turn the page. I did not want to read about his tax problems, I did not want to read about his futile Hall of Fame arguments, and I certainly did not want to read about a sex scandal that bizarrely emerged out of his long-running feud with a D.C. attorney.
You see, I was a Pete Rose fanatic when I was a kid. If you grew up in Tampa Bay in the 1970s, you had no major league team to follow (Atlanta was a world away to a second grader at Blanton Elementary) and so I inexplicably bonded with Pete over a 1969 deckle-edged Topps baseball card.
