Cincinnati’s Pete Rose statue a total team effort
Sculptor Tom Tsuchiya CINCINNATI knows what Pete Rose is made of.
That’s because he knows who the kid was before he was Cincinnati’s Hit King.
The artist knows the scrappy boy, swinging at a rubber ball with a broom. He knows the small kid who somehow made it big in the big leagues.
So when Tsuchiya started to immortalize the legend Pete Rose, he knew he had to build it out of that same material, that sheer will that makes the impossible possible.
Almost two years later, Tsuchiya’s done it. On Saturday, his Pete statue began his forever slide into third base in front of Great American Ball Park.
In a sense, Tsuchiya has taken clay and bronze and made it incarnate. He activated it with the energy, the essence of the man and, even at 1,130 pounds, Pete flies.
This Pete, his Pete, will never crash back into Earth.
A wind storm can’t topple him. An earthquake can’t ground him. He won’t back down an inch from that base, even if a couple of offensive linemen dance on his ankles.
Tsuchiya has made sure of that. But he didn’t do it alone because there was a lot he didn’t know.
This honor from the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum is actually the unprecedented effort of 74 designers, thinkers and makers from across the city and across the state.
Some of these are leaders in the aerospace industry. And a few of those are also volunteers.
Their work is now all unseen, buried beneath concrete and bronze on Joe Nuxhall Way.
COMPLICATED STATUE FOR A COMPLICATED MAN
There was really only one easy part to all this. And that is what his Pete had to be doing, Tsuchiya said.
His Pete had to be Charlie Hustle, who played every game like it was Game 7 of the World Series. Who ran the baseline to first, even when the pitcher technically just walked him.
But it’s this iconic slide that “captures his personality, his reckless spirit,” Tsuchiya said.
The base, the run, the win — that mattered most. The play over the player. Always. For Rose, that’s just the game, “the way I was raised to play,” he said. He has figured he’s been sliding like that since he learned to play ball here, at Boldface Park, some 68 years ago.
His was not a graceful glide, either. He always flung himself into the atmosphere, returning to this world one base at a time.
That’s the vision that Tsuchiya described when he met a fellow fan at the 2015 MLB All- Star Game in Cincinnati. That’s what he told this new friend he didn’t know how to make exactly.
Tsuchiya also didn’t know he was talking to the right person.
This was Brent Tholke, the senior technical leader of materials at GE Aviation. He works in advanced government programs. So that means his 9- to- 5 today concerns projects that he can’t talk about for another 40 years.
These days, he can say he’s worked on some older engines, such as those for the F- 16 fighter aircraft. That, in general, he knows how to make people fly.
That’s what he told Tsuchiya that day in July 2015.
DRAFTING AN ELITE ROSTER
Tholke doesn’t have to open his mouth to share how much he loves Pete Rose and his championship team.
He drives a red sedan with Big Red Machine vanity license plates.
Tholke wasn’t at the All- Star Game alone. A friend, Bob Dzugan, gave him an extra ticket earlier that day.
Dzugan used to work with Tholke at GE and is now the president of Buy Castings in Miamisburg. He’s a fabricator, which is kind of a fancy way to say he makes things that are hard to make. That list includes the new exit signs at Yankee Stadium, the bell for the Iraq Stock Exchange in Baghdad.
And like Tholke, Dzugan wears his love for Rose on his sleeve. He designed a T- shirt that reads, “Let Pete In!”
Rose was a player and manager of the Reds when Dzugan and Tholke met some 30 years ago. In the decades since, they have mastered the art of working with each other. They know how to make things work. Things such as Tsuchiya’s ambitious design.
Tholke is the material expert. Dzugan is the resources guy with a lot of project management experience, too.
But to round out the team needed to make this Pete? They needed a design analysis specialist.
FROM WHITEBOARD TO BALLPARK
Tom Wallace, chief consulting engineer for systems at GE Aviation, had a few questions.
Is this feasible? Can we make it strong enough?
Can we make it unmovable? Will it last 100 years?
So he scribbled some equations on his office whiteboard. For Wallace, Tsuchiya’s design is essentially a cantilever, a beam grounded on only one end. So he tested its feasibility with math like MC over I. FL cubed over 3EI.
Engineering 101 stuff, he says. Allegedly, easy.
The hard part? How to apply those equations, he said.
Soon, Wallace had those first answers and Tsuchiya had another expert engineer on his team.
In his day job, Wallace works on big jet planes. He, however, doesn’t just get people cruising at 39,000 feet. He has to keep them there. So he thinks of everything that could possibly go wrong. And how any design can be best defended against the elements. The “real- life things,” he calls them.
FOR LOVE OF GAME
All of their work had to be done on the weekends, during phone calls on morning commutes or lunch breaks.
Wallace even designed the statue’s foundation at his house’s wood shop on another Saturday afternoon.
He used scraps from his other projects, such as a lounge chair, to create a model of the structure that now secures that steel skeleton to the ground. This is their gift to the city. “Cincinnati, we just always appreciate people who work hard,” Tholke said. “Pete epitomized that. ... We like hard workers and people who achieve and just work through it.”
This is not just Pete. Or the statue, then.
“It’s the whole feeling,” he said. “It’s about what Cincinnati is all about.”
That emotion is another unseen element outside of Great American Ball Park. It’s inside this Pete, along with those almost 24 months of collaboration and creativity and calculations.
But there is still evidence of Dzugan, Tholke and Wallace’s time and of their effort.
Tsuchiya has hidden their signatures in the folds of that No. 14 uniform.