The Machine (3 page)

Instead, he sat in his favorite chair at home, and he read stories about how the Dodgers—with their star Steve Garvey, who was being called “Captain America”—were the best team around. He read how his Reds were through. He read those stories over and over; he wanted to memorize every word. He wanted every slight, every insult, to pierce through him.

“The Dodgers are no dynasty,” he suddenly yelled toward his wife, Carol. “They’re a onetime deal! You hear me!”

Carol heard him. The phone rang—a sportswriter from Cincinnati calling to talk baseball.

“Don’t write this,” Sparky said, “but the Dodgers are done. You mark my words: you’re going to see something, boy. We’re going to give people a show like they never seen before.”

February 3, 1975

CINCINNATI

Dick Wagner’s office

Pete Rose heard himself bragging about all his walks, and it made him sick. It had come to this. Pete Rose hated taking walks. Everyone knew that. He would sometimes swing the bat at bad pitches on purpose to avoid taking a walk. This cut to the heart of Pete Rose the ballplayer. Harry Rose did not raise his son to walk. The Roses did not accept charity. Pete would by God take first base, conquer it. There was a game in 1974, the Reds trailed the St. Louis Cardinals by seven runs in the late innings. Bob Gibson was pitching for the Cardinals, “Bullet Bob,” the scariest pitcher in the game. Batters hit a measly .228 against Gibson over his seventeen-year career, and he took every hit personally. Gibson threw a pitch inside, Pete tried to pull out of the way, and the pitch ticked Pete’s uniform.

“Ball hit him,” the umpire, Bill Williams, shouted, and he pointed toward first. “Take your base.”

“The ball didn’t hit me, Bill,” Rose shouted back, and he stepped back into the batter’s box.

“Yes, it did, Pete, I heard it hit you, take your base.”

“No. You heard wrong. I’m telling you the ball didn’t hit me.”

“You’re taking the base, Pete. The ball hit you, quit being silly….”

“I’m not taking the base, Bill. Didn’t hit me. Let me back in the box.”

Pete kept arguing during a lost game that the baseball did not hit him, he did not want the free base, he wanted to get one more swing at the most intimidating pitcher of the time. In the end, the umpire made him take first base, but Pete did not take it well. For the rest of the inning, he yelled, “The ball didn’t hit me!” That’s how much Pete hated walks. He wanted to swing away. Always.

Now, though, Pete Rose talked about walks. It was humiliating. In 1974, Pete had 106 walks, the most of his career, and through gritted teeth he said that old Little League line: “Hey, a walk is as good as a hit, right?” Pete explained that all those walks helped him score the most runs in the National League. That was worth something, right? Rose looked across the desk at the Reds’ vice president of administration, Dick Wagner, to see if his words were having an effect. Wagner glared back blankly. Dick Wagner was a hard man. For years, he managed the Ice Capades. He knew how to intimidate athletes and squeeze dimes out of small-town promoters.

“Pete,” Wagner said quietly, “this is not about your walks. This is about your batting average. I believe you hit [here Wagner lifted a paper close to his face], yes, you hit .284, which is, of course, well below your usual standard. I know you were as disappointed as we were. As you know, we pay you to hit .300. Also, we noticed that you are not in quite the same shape you once were. You seem heavier this year. And with your age…”

Wagner went on like this for a while. Rose stopped listening. He never should have brought up those walks. He was Pete Rose, “Charlie Hustle,” a surefire Hall of Famer, a hitting machine. Still, what choice did he have? The Reds wanted blood. They wanted to cut his pay. Rose led the whole National League in runs scored, and they wanted to slash his salary by more than $30,000. Every year it was like this—Rose had to fight for every dime. He had to threaten to show up late to spring training. He had to threaten to sit out the
season. He had to go to these agonizing sessions (and without his agent, Reuven Katz—the Reds would not let Katz in the door) and defend himself like it was Nuremberg. This is how it was for baseball players in 1975. Teams owned players for perpetuity. Most players had second jobs in the off-season. The game was about to change, and players were about to make more money than they had ever dreamed. But it had not changed yet. And Pete Rose, with his .284 batting average in 1974, felt naked and alone.

“Just do what I did,” Johnny Bench had said in that cutting, know-everything voice he had perfected. A year earlier, Johnny had gone into his salary meeting with the Reds, and that son of a gun handed them a blank contract. Pete had to admit that was a ballsy move. Johnny said: “Pay me what you think is fair,” and he smiled and walked out of the room, like John Wayne. Yes, Pete could not deny it: John had style. But he was also coming off a great year. And the Reds loved him, they worshipped him, they paid him $150,000 just to see the smile on his face. If Pete ever did something like that, ever just gave the Reds a blank contract, they would not pay him enough to cover his car payments. Pete felt the Reds had it in for him. Of course, he felt that way about everybody.

“Pete, we feel like we are being more than fair here,” Wagner said, and his voice was beginning to boom now. Bad sign. Wagner had a nasty temper. A year before, the guy had cursed out the team chaplain. Bob Howsam had negotiated salaries himself, but that was in a gentler time. Now players were getting brassier, getting advice from agents, working more closely with their union boss, Marvin Miller. So Howsam had Wagner, his hit man, do the negotiating. “He would sit in his ivory tower and pretend that he was above it all,” Reuven Katz would say many years later. “And he would have Wagner fight his bloody battles.”

Wagner told Rose that the Reds—because they valued him, because they knew how much he had meant to them over the years, because he was named the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1973—
would not cut his salary by $30,000. They would only cut it by $10,000.

“I’m not taking a pay cut,” Pete said.

“I understand your emotions, Pete, but when you did well, the club was always willing to cater to your needs, and now…”

“I’m not taking a pay cut,” Pete said, and with that he got up and said, “And I am not some fat boy.” He stormed out of the room. On his way out to his car, he would remember, he muttered to himself, “Damn it, I cannot believe I brought up those walks.” Three days later, Rose signed a contract with the Reds. The salary numbers were not released, which suited Pete just fine. That way he did not have to explain why he had taken a $5,000 pay cut from those sons of bitches.

February 21, 1975

CINCINNATI

The Netherland Hilton

Johnny Bench felt good about the numbers in the paper. There were 650 pounds of roast beef here, 100 pounds of roast ham, 1,200 egg rolls, and 4,000 mixed drinks. There was a five-tiered, five-foot-high chocolate cake—5 being the number Johnny Bench wore as catcher of the Cincinnati Reds. The newspaper said the food alone cost $8,000, which was about right, give or take a couple hundred. People would have to be impressed. The median income in America was barely more than $12,000. Johnny Bench spent $8,000 for the food at his wedding.

Vickie Chesser wondered again how this had happened. Everything had moved so fast—too fast, her friends kept telling her. But they could not see it. Johnny was perfect. They did not know him. They had not seen the way he acted around little Phillip Buckingham.
Phillip was five, all kinds of curly hair, his body ravaged by leukemia. Sick children are drawn to ballplayers, and ballplayers are drawn to sick children, and Vickie would watch as the two of them talked, soul to soul. Sometimes, when they talked, it seemed like Phillip was the adult and Johnny the child. She saw the way Phillip looked at Johnny, so full of love, so full of life. No, her friends could never understand. For the first time in her life, she was in love, really in love.

Johnny had hoped that Bob Hope would make it in for the wedding. He knew that President Gerald Ford would not make it, not with Vietnam smoldering to its inevitable conclusion. And Johnny was not surprised when Joe DiMaggio sent his regrets. The talk show host Dinah Shore wanted to come, but she could not get away. But the singer Bobby Goldsboro was there, and John had hoped Bob Hope would make it too. They had traveled together to Vietnam to entertain the troops. There was this one time, funny story, this one time when Johnny was in the back of the plane sleeping on a bed of blankets with Tara Leigh, she was one of the Ding-A-Ling sisters, she was one of the Golddiggers, the girls who would add a little sex appeal to
The Dean Martin Show
on television. Beautiful girl. Anyway, they were huddled together, just trying to get some sleep, nothing untoward going on, and Bob Hope wandered back and ended up stepping on Johnny’s head. Bob told that story all the time. Got big laughs. Johnny had really hoped that Bob Hope would make the wedding, but his schedule would not allow it.

Vickie knew that Johnny had only called her in December because he heard from a buddy that she was “one swinging lady.” Well, he had been given bad information. She didn’t swing, you know. He called her up cold, no introduction, and invited her to come with him to Las Vegas. Her first reaction was to hang up the phone, but there was something strong in his voice, something solid. He offered to send her a plane ticket and buy her a separate room. “What do you have to lose?” he asked, and there was something about that voice, something so sure, something different from all the other guys she had dated.
Then he invited her to join him at a wedding. What could go wrong at a wedding?

Johnny had told teammates after the 1974 season ended that it was time for him to get married. He was almost twenty-seven. He’d had his fun. Johnny had always lived an orderly and planned life. Before his first full season in the major leagues—that was 1968—he announced that he would win the Rookie of the Year Award. He won that. He then told reporters that he would become the best player in baseball. That happened in 1970, when he hit 40 home runs and drove in 148 runs, numbers no catcher had ever reached. And Johnny Bench wasn’t a normal catcher; he revolutionized the position. He snagged pitches one-handed. He pounced on bunts with the quickness of a snake striking. His arm was a marvel—he threw out so many base runners that by 1972 players had more or less stopped trying to steal against him.
Time
magazine put him on the cover that year, with the understated headline: “Baseball’s Best Catcher.” He told reporters that baseball was not big enough to hold him, that he needed to stretch out, and he did that too. He sang in nightclubs. He played a guard on the television show
Mission Impossible
and a waiter on
The Partridge Family.
He hosted his own television show and opened his own restaurant in Cincinnati. Now, he said, it was time to get married. All he needed was the perfect wife. He saw Vickie Chesser in an Ultra Brite toothpaste commercial on television. She had a nice smile.

Vickie liked the way he looked. Johnny had a round-faced handsomeness; there was something vulnerable in the way he looked. And yet, at the same time, he seemed bulletproof. He seemed so sure all the time—sure of where he was going, sure of what would happen when he arrived, sure of their future together. Their courtship happened in a rush; within days of their meeting, he was talking marriage. He overwhelmed her. Vickie did not care for baseball, but her father back in South Carolina explained that Johnny Bench played with such vividness and authority that you could not take your eyes off him. Vickie understood that. He had power. When he proposed
to her three weeks after they met, she could not think of anything to say except yes.

Johnny liked that she knew nothing about baseball. It made him feel like something deep in them connected. He also liked the way they looked together. At first, Vickie had talked about having the wedding in her hometown, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, but they both knew that could not happen. Well, he knew it for sure. Johnny was a Cincinnati star. He had a Cincinnati wedding in mind, one that would stop the town cold. He did it all—wedding planner, press agent, groom. A friend offered to buy the liquor. A thousand invitations were sent out. Thirty cooks were hired to prepare the food. “It’s a chance to show my artistry,” Stuart Johnsen told the Associated Press; Johnsen was in charge of decorating the eighteen-pound baked salmon. Story after story appeared in the newspapers about the happy couple. When Johnny was asked how he would describe his future wife, he said: “Shapely.”

Vickie marveled at Johnny’s certainty; it was like he had been planning for this wedding his whole life. He wanted a big, gaudy, celebrity-filled wedding; well, that’s what she wanted too. She chose a china pattern but happily switched to Lennox Laurent because she saw how much Johnny liked it. She chose a crystal pattern and changed that too when Johnny showed a preference for Genova by Baccarat. Well, the Genova was nicer. She let him open their wedding presents. “He gets such a kick out of it,” she told a reporter. “I just like to watch him.”

While the reverend spoke at Christ Episcopal Church that day, Johnny leaned over to Vickie and whispered: “Hey, you clean up pretty nice.” And she said: “You look pretty good yourself with your hair combed.” It was like something out of a movie. At the reception, Pete Rose kidded Johnny about a quote in the paper where he talked about being a fan of bigamist Brigham Young. Pete and Merv Rettenmund were the only players from the Machine at the wedding; the others already were down in Florida getting ready for the season.

“You know what they say about married guys?” Pete said.

“What’s that?” Johnny asked.

“They can’t pull the ball no more,” Pete said. Johnny laughed. He would always pull the ball. Across the crowded room, Vickie was getting tossed and twisted and hugged from every direction. She had a nice smile.

Johnny and Vickie cut the cake, shoved pieces in each other’s mouths, kissed for the cameras. The day after the wedding, Johnny and Vickie headed for Florida and the start of a new baseball season. Before leaving, though, they got a phone call. Little Phillip Buckingham had died.