Continued from Part I:

NW: Marty Brennaman (Cincinnati Reds radio announcer) and others have said that Pete not giving a news conference and coming out with a book will keep him out of the Hall of Fame.

NW: I’ve heard you say on 700 WLW (Cincinnati radio station) there’s no way you can explain everything in a 30-minute news conference.

NW: Explain Pete’s health ailments.

Rick Hill: Part of any addiction is the aspect of denial. That’s the human condition. Talk to any alcoholic and ask him if he’s got a problem and he’ll say, ‘No, I’m a social drinker. I like to drink. It’s just fun. It just makes me feel good.’ Talk to any drug addict and ask him if he’s got a drug problem and they’ll say, ‘No, no, it’s recreational, I like the high I the get from that.’ Talk to any gambler, he’ll say, ‘No, I don’t have a problem, I’m just gambling entertainment money, I like the high that I get.’ This high is caused by the dopamine released in the brain. Dopamine is the chemical responsible for pleasure. You’ve got to understand it’s probably the way God intended it. Eating is a pleasurable experience and by eating we sustain life. Sex is a pleasurable experience so by participating, we pro-create the race. Most people can be satisfied by normal rewards. Maybe you want to have sex a certain number of times a month or maybe you want to eat three times a day. But people with Pete’s brain chemistry are not satisfied with those normal rewards. They need more and more and more everyday because the brain is craving it. It’s just a chemical imbalance. It’s out of control and he needs it. The expert will tell you he that the craving is almost impossible to resist. Pete, at 62 years of age, just doesn’t have the same craving he had at 52 or 42. He’s growing older, his mind is changing, the chemical reactions are changing.

NW: What type of remorseful emotions did you see from Pete when you were writing this book?

Rick Hill: Pete struggles with any type of emotional exposure. Given, the oppositional defiant mother, who was not above getting in a bar fight and an obsessive compulsive, workaholic, perfectionist father, who played semi-pro football for 23 years for $6 a game, we get half of our genes from our mom and half from our dad and most people are a nice normal blend of that. Pete got a double dose of this feisty, competitive, compulsive spirit and he’s a workaholic. He’s not unlike Gen. Patton or Douglas McArthur. He’s a guy that’s so driven that’s the only way he feels satisfied, he’s got to operate at full throttle. He would talk candidly, and sometimes it would take three or four hours in a given afternoon for me to try to squeeze out more and more and more from him and at the end of the day I had to be satisfied that I got enough. Jayson Williams (former New Jersey Nets center) was on Barbara Walters the other night and he was crying, just weeping what looked like very genuine tears. I don’t know the merit of Jayson Williams’ case, but somebody took out a loaded shotgun in that house and now there’s a limo driver who’s dead and he’s always going to be dead. He’s not coming back. Now, Jayson Williams may get off of those charges. But someone’s dead. Pete Rose didn’t kill anybody. He bet on his team to win. I just don’t see how you can ban somebody for life for gambling when you let murderers or rapists get out of prison after a few years.

NW: Did he very seldom talk about the times he broke down in tears?

Rick Hill: To give you a real clear insight to who Pete Rose is, he got a nine minute standing ovation the night he broke Cobb’s record. Nine minutes. They don’t do that for presidents or kings or rock stars. It took eight and a half minutes for Pete Rose to cry. You and I might have lost it after two minutes; most people would have lost it after 30 seconds. Three minutes or four minutes for the toughest of characters, maybe five or six, but it took eight and a half minutes for Pete Rose to cry. Now, what does that tell you about the guy? His emotions are so very deep inside that they are almost non-existent.

NW: It almost seems like he would have been a good sergeant or something in the military.

Rick Hill: Absolutely. Let me tell you something, the men of my generation went to Vietnam. My draft number was 315, so I didn’t go, but if I had gone there’s nobody I would have wanted running point other than Pete Rose, because he’s going to bring you back alive. Now is he politically correct? No. Is he the guy that’s going to be warm and fuzzy and have heart to heart conversations with you about your personal problems? No. Absolutely not. But he’s the guy you want to leadoff on your baseball team. He’s the guy you want playing on your team, because he’s going to win and that’s what Pete Rose is all about.

NW: You were a jail guard in the movie “Liar, Liar.” Do you think your book will be the key to releasing Pete from his cell and thus helping him into the Hall?

Rick Hill: I hope so. I hope that’s a beautiful metaphor. We started the book with a metaphor and ended it with a metaphor. Wouldn’t that be nice?