For Kevin Mackey there's always something more to say, about pressure defense, the Olympic team, his all-time starting five, you name it, so long as it's basketball. The station break on the half-hour is long past due, but Alex Lekas just sits there, struck dumb while Kevin Mackey smolders on, belching diet Coke and… Read more

"I'll tell you," Mackey spumes, "I'm grateful for the chance to coach in this league. The GBA is only a bounce away from the NBA." Read more

She's also frightened. At first, she seems willing to talk—if we meet at her lawyer's office, and if I'll sign an agreement to quote her in full. What exactly do I want to know? But as soon as I pose a few questions about her and Mackey, she asks if I've been watching her house and tapping her phone. Then she's gone. Read more

Mackey can't remember the nine hours in the crack house, he says, because he was unconscious. Needle holes? Yeah, but who, what, and how, he just can't recall. What's left of self-disclosure is a twelve-step pablum cooked up for the straight reader, weak cheese that'd be stuffed back into his face if he tried it at an… Read more

Then I ask Mackey about crack, what it feels like. I myself quit using everything in Iowa in 1988, threw out the Stoly and the three hits of blotter in the freezer, the bong and the one-hitter, the single-edged blades and the amber vials, even the rusty nitrous-oxide cartridge dispenser. For eighteen years, I'd done… Read more

"I can't give you that because that would open it up too good for you. She was called, and she put herself in jeopardy to come down and get me out of there and probably save my life, O.K.? She didn't know anything. The worst thing that ever happened to Alma Massey was to meet Kevin Mackey." Read more

I tell him that some folks say CSU was raring to fire him, that the talk of his alcoholism and philandering, added to a history of recruiting violations, made him easy to kiss off, despite all the wins and banners. One source at the school told me back in 1990 that "the university has a fairly thick file on such… Read more

Mackey holds an "I led two lives" press conference, a sullen, teary public confession with wife, son and brother beside him. His lawyer negotiates with the school for a medical leave of absence, but six days after the arrest—plenty of time for local and national media to gnaw the carrion from the bones of the… Read more

That day—March 14, 1986—the rumpled-suited, fast-talking Mackey dealt Knight his first loss ever in an opening-round game and made me proud to be from CSU. Afterward—after the all-black Vikings outshot, out-rebounded, outhustled and outsmarted third-seeded Indiana; after the plump and shining Mackey shook the dour… Read more

Cleveland State University hired Kevin Mackey to coach men's basketball in 1983, the summer I graduated. No one gave a shit, me least of all. The team had gone 8-and-20; and Mackey was some no-name Boston College assistant. Besides, like a lot of CSU students, I was older, married and working for a living. We came to… Read more

Ray Fosse hit .307 in 1970, .307 with good power, and never again came close. He played out his enfeebled string, built a pension, found a broadcast job. DiMaggio, wealthy and still worshiped, is an ice-hearted, reclusive old man. Something worse happened to Pete Rose. Something odd and slow and subtle, something that… Read more

I love baseball more than any other sport—it's not even close, really—and this was the first big story I ever wrote about baseball. So when I'm sitting there with Rose at his restaurant in Florida and he's telling me about the USO trip he took to Vietnam with DiMaggio, it was like wow—not that I was in love with Pete… Read more

I love baseball more than any other sport—it's not even close, really—and this was the first big story I ever wrote about baseball. So when I'm sitting there with Rose at his restaurant in Florida and he's telling me about the USO trip he took to Vietnam with DiMaggio, it was like wow—not that I was in love with Pete… Read more

They are all that and more, and I silently forecast harrowing futures for them both. What happened to Pete Rose—his life and dreams, his present and future, all mortgaged to the past—is happening to his children, who haven't lived his cursed, infamous life yet are the means of its redemption in his eyes. Like most of… Read more

They are all that and more, and I silently forecast harrowing futures for them both. What happened to Pete Rose—his life and dreams, his present and future, all mortgaged to the past—is happening to his children, who haven't lived his cursed, infamous life yet are the means of its redemption in his eyes. Like most of… Read more

"Not only here, but where you been. They recognize me."
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What happened to Pete Rose his 4,256 hits can't undo; they can't shake his naked craving for assurance, not only that he still exists but that he will never not exist. Whatever befell him, I can imagine nothing worse: to grow old 2,500 miles from wife and children, hungry for the passing love of strangers.
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Studio City, California. Here Pete's wife, Carol, lives with 12-year-old Tyler and 7-year-old Cara. It is a fine house on a high-priced hill two turns off Ventura Boulevard, but nothing grand. The living room is enormous and completely devoid of furnishings. There is a pool out back, of course: this is L.A., where… Read more

I love baseball more than any other sport, it's not even close really, and this was the first big story I ever wrote about baseball. So when I'm sitting there with Rose at his restaurant in Florida and he's telling me about the USO trip he took to Vietnam with DiMaggio, it was like wow—not that I was in love with Pete… Read more