Baseball greats Pete Rose and Joe DiMaggio never played in the majors at the same time, but they teamed up once in an odd situation.
Rose, baseball’s all-time hit king, told a funny anecdote about the time he gave the Yankee Hall of Famer a shower when they were visiting the troops together in Vietnam during the war there. He apparently was referring to a 1967 USO-sponsored trip featuring five baseball stars.
It was so hot, nobody could sleep, Rose, 78, recalled to WFAN radio host Mike Francesa in a clip (watch below) posted Tuesday.
“All of a sudden, Joe says, ’I gotta take a shower, ” Rose remembered. “I said, ‘Joe, we’re not in downtown Saigon, we’re in the damn middle of the jungle.’ He says, ‘I don’t give a darn, I’m Joe DiMaggio, I gotta take a shower.’ ”
But the Yankee Clipper needed Rose’s help.
“The only way you can take a shower there is, a guy had to get up on a chair — me — have a bucket of water, pour it into this canvas tank, pull the chain and the guy underneath took a shower,” said Rose, the former Cincinnati Reds star and manager. “I gave Joe DiMaggio a shower.”
Then Rose gave an unsolicited appraisal of Joltin’s Joe’s junk. “The best way to describe Joe DiMaggio is he was a penis with a man hanging from it,” he said.
Rose, who is promoting a new book, “Play Hungry: The Making of a Baseball Player,” is banned from baseball for life for gambling. But stories like this (which he has told before) make us glad he isn’t banned from the talk-radio circuit.
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