Spend just 10 minutes with me on any given day, and it will almost immediately become apparent just how deeply I care about Cincinnati sports. To be honest, they are all I ever really feel like talking or writing about besides philosophy and art, and they have genuinely (and embarrassingly) come to dominate my daily routine, my schedule often being crafted in a manner that best allows me to watch various Reds and Bengals games. Even my consciousness has come to be primarily occupied by everything Cincinnati sports, as that which runs in and out of my head is often nothing more than a memory or vision of my younger self running around my childhood living room in celebration of a Bengals’ touchdown or Reds’ home run.
However, despite my obviously deep love for Cincinnati sports, being a diehard Cincinnati sports fan does mean that you will have to deal with all the less-than-fun baggage that comes with it: the frustration of being perennial losers, the fact that barely any of your teams’ games will be broadcast on national television (because who really cares about Cincinnati?) and the various demeaning nicknames (e.g. Bungles) people are sure to throw at you. However, as if all this was not strenuous and frustrating enough, a new challenge has recently emerged in the past few weeks for Cincinnati sports fans: that of lingering ghosts.
In short, the Cincinnati sports world is currently being forced to confront and reckon with two of the more controversial figures from its past. Not only has former Reds announcer Thom Brennaman recently revitalized his previously dead sportscasting career (one rightfully killed off by his disgusting homophobic comments on air), but the always-heated discourse surrounding Reds legend Pete Rose (a man banned from professional baseball for gambling and barred from polite society for allegations of grooming and sexual misconduct) has once again been inflamed following Rose’s death and the release of documentary “Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose” that explored his more unsavory side.
By all accounts, these were two men who, just a few weeks ago, had been successfully cast off and thrust into some dusty and dark closet far removed from Cincinnati’s broader collective consciousness. Simply referencing their names was a taboo act of sorts, and the fact that we ever loved them religiously and cheered for them like nothing else mattered became an ugly, painful scar that nobody ever talked about. In essence, the mythic status that Brennaman’s voice and Rose’s bat both once occupied was the source of widespread guilt, shame and silence.
Yet, all the recent news about Rose’s life and Brennaman’s resurgence back into the broadcasting spotlight meant that these two have come back to haunt us from beyond the proverbial and/or literal grave. No longer can I internally tell myself that I never loved Brennaman’s manner of calling baseball games, as I now am prone to relive my happy childhood memories every time I hear his voice on Saturday afternoons; no longer can I act like I did not idolize Rose as a child, as I am now being inundated with thousands of moving and heartfelt retrospectives on his life and career by every media outlet.
Thus, all this then begs the question: What do we do now as Cincinnati sports fans? Do we continue to act like we didn’t glorify and deify Rose and Brennaman during their heyday (and potentially even during the immediate aftermath of their respective scandals), or do we finally own up to our deep connection and affection for two men with terrible track records? I, of course, have no answer to this invariably nuanced question, nor am I going to attempt to make the moral high ground. I admittedly still stand awe-struck in front of the Pete Rose exhibit at the Reds Hall of Fame despite knowing all the terrible, morally based things that he did. My point in writing this article is simply just to gesture towards the fact that this is a question/problem that the Cincinnati sports world will find themselves grappling with in the near future.
Moreover, I also would like to emphasize that this issue of moral ignorance and ambiguity is one that is not solely tethered to Cincinnati sports, but it is instead a universal fact in the sports world as a whole. In other words, it is not only Cincinnati Reds and Bengals fans who have this sort of complicated relationship with their less-than-moral sports heroes, as all sports fans actually have some sort of deeper connection to sporting figures who have rather iffy morals. Steelers fans that grew up during the 2010s, for instance, have to reckon with the fact that Antonio Brown (a man that is probably the central figure in a lot of their fondest childhood sports memories) now has an extensive arrest record and a terrible digital footprint; every living basketball fan who has once yelled “Kobe” while trying to hit a ridiculous shot has to face the fact that this idol of theirs was indeed the defendant in a murky, unresolved rape case; and the global sports community has to deal with the fact that their two greatest and most beloved stars, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, have had their fair share of run-ins with the law. In essence, every sports fan has their own lingering morally questionable ghosts that haunt them. The very act of being a fan of human players inherently means that you have to reckon with that very humanness.
