The two most elemental questions raised by the Pete Rose gambling scandal were: do actions have consequences? and do the rules mean anything? With Rose’s suspension from major league baseball, in keeping with the rules of major league baseball, came one answer to both questions: yes.

But the affair raised other questions whose answers weren’t so clear cut, questions that had special weight here in Cincinnati. What is the cost, to both the adored and the adoring, of blind adoration? Who determines children’s heros and why? What is the difference between a tragic figure and an arrogant fool?

Cincinnati is in all ways conservative—solid, predictable, and rooted. Trends are received rather than started here; and even at that, change takes its time. There is order here and a feeling of isolation, in the positive sense. This is not a cynical town. (Neither is it a town that’s exactly bursting with humor, an idea you can prove simply by observing Cincinnatians’ unwillingness to laugh it off.) Depending on the circumstances, Cincinnati can be either pleased or defensive about its parochial image.

There is no confusion, however, about the city’s pride in being the birthplace of major league baseball. The game is important here, a factor in the collective identity, the one thing above all others that can really juice up the populace. That this baseball town is also the birthplace of Pete Rose, the most mythic player of the modern era, has always been seen as some sort of glorious gift, a blessing from the baseball gods. Rose gave Cincinnatians the kind of pleasure a long-awaited only child gives—and he received the same kind of indulgence. He was prized, pampered, and adored. He was also something of a psychological surrogate for Cincinnati. He was brash and Cincy wasn’t; but it was safe to love his brashness because he was dependable and he had endurance: he always delivered the professional goods.

But the figure of Pete Rose also reflected Cincinnati’s little conflict with its self-image. Rose’s baseball charisma, his major league records, and, eventually, his status as a sports legend gave this Midwestern city a sense of national stature and significance. If you talked about baseball—and who didn’t want to talk about baseball?—you talked about Pete Rose. And if you talked about Pete Rose, you talked about Cincinnati. At the same time, his professional work ethic and I-am-what-I-am personality reinforced the city’s sense of itself as basic and unpretentious.

The dual purpose Pete Rose served for Cincinnati was displayed perfectly in a pair of television commercials he did for a chain of local chili parlors. In one. Rose was wearing a black satin jacket and driving a red custom Porsche 935 through the city streets at night, stopping at a corner to wordlessly hand a plate of chili dogs (known locally as coneys) to a beautiful girl. Who was that masked man? In the second ad. Rose was seated in a chili parlor, offering a straightforward recommendation of the restaurant’s fare: “Them dogs are good.” Together those ads showed someone simultaneously bigger than life and reassuringly ordinary: a man who was common enough to flaunt incorrect English and important enough to get paid for it; rich enough to drive a $100,000 car and pedestrian enough to choose something fast, sexy, and red. In a word, he was perfect.

In truth, Rose’s public persona was hard not to like. He loved doing what he did (and he was good at it) and being who he was (for a while, he was good at that, too), and people with those twin loves are often fun to watch. His enthusiasm was genuine and obvious, and there was a certain charm in his shrugging rejection of false modesty. When once asked what historic figure he would most like to be, Rose answered, “Me.” It was a reasonable answer, since many baseball fans, faced with the same question, would also have chosen to be him. Mike Schmidt of the Phillies, called Pete Rose “the most likable arrogant person I’ve ever met.”

But beyond the subtle local complexities, the deal Cincinnatians cut with Pete Rose was wholly typical and very common. He would be their icon, and they in turn would let him do, with no cost to his icon status, whatever he pleased. It’s the standard fan-icon deal, and it usually works out because both parties get what they want. In this case, it was such a good deal that no one, including Rose, had to account for his nasty divorce, his uncontested paternity suit, and the public charge by one of his children that he was a lousy father. (Them deals are good.) The only miscalculation Rose and the homefolks made was to assume that nothing could take the deal out of their collective hands.

When the gambling allegations against Pete Rose surfaced last spring, the reaction of most fans here was denial: “He didn’t do it.” As the case against Rose grew stronger, the reaction was emotional defiance, expressed most succinctly by the fan who said, “I think he did it, but I don’t care.” (Or perhaps by Mr. Gradual Taylor, the local musician who recorded a rap song titled “Leave Pete Rose Alone.”) But when it finally became plain that Rose very likely had trashed the rules of baseball and then lied repeatedly about his actions, the reaction wasn’t outrage, it was confusion, followed by general municipal depression. To be sure, some fans were steamed. One called Rose “baseball’s answer to Richard Nixon.” And a local sportswriter said that “Pete has shown the judgment of a gerbil.” But noisy outrage is not Cincinnati’s style; and in any case, outrage is on some level an admission that the deal was a questionable idea to start with. There was little talk here of “betrayal.” Instead, things got awfully quiet, even as the local media went nuts with the story.

There was, however, much discussion from other quarters—network talk shows, the national press—about athletes as role models, children’s need for heros, and Rose’s “betrayal of America’s youth.” (To find out what Cincinnati youth were thinking, local TV reporters trooped into area high schools, whereupon viewers were treated to the spectacle of teenagers, their adolescent selfconsciousness compounded by the presence of cameras, offering such insights as, “Like, you know, Pete’s really great and everything, so I don’t think they should kick him out and stuff.”)

Frankly, the whole subject bewildered me. It has always seemed to me an odd idea that sports figures are to be considered role models for children, that youngsters should be encouraged to learn how to live by observing the conduct of famous strangers. It seems equally odd that those famous strangers should be expected—or trusted—to teach them. If the life conduct of a professional athlete must be something children can emulate, then why do adults themselves, as Cincinnatians have over the years, serve their own needs first by ignoring or forgiving so much of the athlete’s personal behavior? If, on the other hand, the adult fan’s test of an athlete’s hero status is strictly his professional performance, why should a kid’s test be any less realistic? Does anyone actually believe that children cannot understand the difference between a talented person and a good person?

The public nagging that follows the idea of professional athletes, especially ball players, as heros for children comes mostly from adult males who nurture a strong romantic connection to baseball, those who see the game in terms of poetry—”eternal Spring,” “divine symmetry,” and all that. Unlike the fans who practice the cult of personality (the icon-builders), these baseball romantics promote the cult of the game—”the Church of Baseball,” as the female mystic-cum-love object in Bull Durham called it. But while the personality cultists, when pushed to the wall by something like the Rose incident, react honestly (“I think he did it, but I don’t care” may be crude, but it’s direct), the game cultists get slippery when cornered. What they said about the Rose scandal was, more or less, that it had wounded the hero-starved psyches of budding athletes everywhere. What they felt, however, seemed to be something entirely different: Damn, real life, all irreverent and unpoetic, has interrupted our private services in the Church of Baseball.

It’s fine for adults to have their emotional freebies, their secret little corners where fantasy and sentiment can have free rein. That’s one of the functions of sports, and you can even go ahead and call the whole business poetry if you want to. What you cannot do, unless you want to look pretty silly, is use children as front men for adult escapism and their needs as a rationalization for grown-up fantasies gone bad. If the writers who so love baseball were really thinking of kids, they would do a quick reality check and look at the Rose case for what it is. Pete Rose was a public figure who knew the rules, contracted to abide by the rules, broke the rules, and suffered the prescribed punishment. He isn’t the only kind of public example one would choose for children, but as an object lesson he has his uses.

After “hero,” the word most frequently heard in the Rose saga was “tragic.” Pete Rose was labeled a “tragic figure,” and I guess in classic terms he is. But from close range, it was hard to apply so grand a term to someone who seemed as hellbent on insulting everyone’s intelligence as he was on bringing himself down. To watch Pete Rose handle the charges against him was to see a man on a psychological kamikaze mission.

There was one moment, though, when the word “tragic” seemed almost appropriate. During a local television interview following his press conference on the day he was suspended. Rose was asked what, in the year 1991, he would wish for if he could have anything he desired. The thought grabbed Rose. A smile crossed his face as he said that he would wish to be on Fountain Square in downtown Cincinnati, accepting the World Series trophy in front of thousands of fans. “I know what that feels like,” he said. And his wish was to feel that way again.

It was the most sincere, open, unguarded thing he had said in public in six months, and it ended up being as uncomfortable to watch as all of his stubborn denials and straight-on lies. There he was, pushing 50 and looking it, his hair spiked like a high schooler (it goes well with the Porsche), lost in reverie, turning his memories into wishes. That’s what has-beens do. American youth would survive, and adult services would resume soon enough in the Church of Baseball. But for Cincinnati, the party was over.