One of the perks, if you want to call it that, of being in the media is that you occasionally have brushes with greatness.

Over the course of 26 years in the business I’ve gotten to meet and interview not only our local athletes but some all-time greats who passed through town for one reason or another. As the saying goes, the day you meet them is the greatest day of your life; for them it’s Tuesday. They wouldn’t recognize me if I walked into their living room, but those brief interviews will always be career highlights for me.

One of those moments was the time I interviewed Pete Rose.

Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader died this past week at the age of 83. He left a rich and complicated legacy that is hard to describe in only a few hundred words, but was on full display on a Sunday afternoon in Vicksburg in July 1999.

Rose was in town to make some sort of appearance at the old Harrah’s Casino in downtown Vicksburg. Then-sports editor Mark Thornton was able to arrange a one-on-one interview and I — not quite a year into my journalism career — drew the assignment.

I asked Rose the usual questions he was certainly tired of hearing at that point, about betting on baseball, being left out of the Hall of Fame inductions that were taking place the following week, and things of that nature.

He was polite but clearly — and understandably — annoyed. If I had it to do over again maybe I’d have taken a different tact with the interview. But, really, what do you ask someone like that when you have about five minutes to ask a few newsworthy questions? Diving into old baseball stories would be great, but it’s not the time or the place when you have to do the job I was assigned.

After the interview I sat there for a while taking photos and listening as Rose did a meet and greet with casino guests and signed autographs. During the down time he made small talk with the Harrah’s PR person about blackjack and other forms of legal gambling.

For one of the few times in my career I even committed an unforgivable sin in the business by asking for an autograph.

I grew up in the twilight of Rose’s career, so he wasn’t quite the baseball hero to me that he was to those even a few years older. In fact, for whatever reason, he was never one of my favorite players as a kid.

My dad, however, was a huge Phillies fan — Rose played five seasons for them and led them to the 1980 World Series championship — so I asked Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader to sign a relatively worthless mid-1980s card (the only one I could find on short notice) for him as a gift.

“You know that will hurt the value?” Rose said.

I informed him that I didn’t care, since the card was worth about 30 cents, and he soon went back to not caring either. It was Tuesday, or in this case Sunday, for him, and this was what he was doing now. Going from town to town, appearance to appearance, autograph show to autograph show, meeting with fans and dealing with annoying local reporters who thought they’d get him to drop some bombshell about his tarnished legacy or at least reflect on the irony of being in a casino 10 years after he’d been banned from baseball for gambling.

It’s an honest living, I suppose.

“I’ve got a young family to support,” Rose said during that long-ago interview. “If a casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City wants to pay me to come there, why should I say no? What’s the difference if I make an appearance here in a casino or go to a card show in Jackson?”

Brutally honest.

Rose had a pragmatism about him that was obvious even from that one brief interaction. Go in, get the job done, do it to the best of your ability. It’s what made him a success in baseball and allowed him to carve out a complicated niche in pop culture after he broke the game’s one cardinal rule.

Whether you did or didn’t like him for what he did, do or don’t think he should be in the Hall of Fame, I think we can respect his hustle and place in history.

RIP, Pete Rose. There will probably never be another one like you.

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Ernest Bowker is the sports editor of The Vicksburg Post. He can be reached at ernest.bowker@vicksburgpost.com