CINCINNATI — A city seemed to be turning against its hero yesterday.
The Dowd Report went on sale at the Hamilton County Courthouse. It cost $30 for the 225-page copy of John M. Dowd's investigative findings into the gambling activities of Pete Rose.
Copies of the court exhibits - the betting slips, the telephone records, the copies of the checks, all the evidence collected by baseball's special prosecutor - went for $200 more.
The courthouse, which had only 70 copies printed, was sold out by mid-day.
But no matter how they got their information on Rose, Cincinnatians devoured it and debated it. And many finally said they'd had enough of it.
Within minutes after the report was released Monday night, excerpts were recited on the air over and over, well into the night. There was an after- midnight television call-in special whose switchboard was lit up.
And by yesterday morning, the talk shows, through which callers had been expressing the city's outrage at baseball's treatment of Rose, suddenly found themselves with a new audience - the Pete Rose backlash.
Except for a couple of radio-television personalities, Rose seemed to have few public defenders. Outrage had shifted sides.
And as it did, more evidence from baseball's probe was made public.
In testimony contained in court exhibits, one former Rose associate said that the Reds' manager made calls to other managers before placing his bets on baseball games. The associate, Cincinnati body-builder Paul G. Janszen, also said that Rose once proposed getting involved in cocaine trafficking as a way to generate tax-free ready cash.
Rose's problems have been a passionate issue in this city for months, but yesterday, some citizens began to take a cynical view.
The decision by Judge Norbert A. Nadel to grant a restraining order that held off a hearing between baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti and Rose is now being called, by some, simply a home-town favor to a home-town hero in trouble. They're calling him Judge Norbert "Homer" Nadel now.
And then there were the jokes:
"Did you hear they're going to change the name of Pete Rose Way to Pete Rose Wayward?"
