So Pete Rose escaped this world without being excused for being Pete Rose. His death at 83 ends one of the more regrettable episodes in hero worship. One of the five best players to ever play the game he blotted his copybook by being found out as a bettor on MLB, a sin he knew was inviolate in MLB. And then, somehow, denying that fact for 20 years.

It all ended last week with no one getting glory. MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti, who imposed the lifetime ban in 1989, died shortly thereafter— many said as a result of the stress the case imposed on him. Successive commissioners (Fay Vincent, Bud Selig, Rob Manfred) couldn’t move on from the mess, either. And Rose? Well, he did nothing to help his chances.

Somehow, in a world that can forgive anything if your name is Kennedy, Rose and the powers that be in baseball couldn’t rehabilitate the all-time leader in hits. Rose’s immense stubborness and the vengeful arm of the media voters who decide who makes Cooperstown produced a pathetic denouement for Rose and the sport. Particularly after MLB wholeheartedly embraced the betting industry the past decade

Was he guilty? Hell, yes. Did he perpetuate lame excuses and construct a grubby martyr narrative? Sure did. Had he alienated just about everyone who could get him to Cooperstown? Oh yeah. A recent HBO documentary series on him is an accurate portrait of a rude, uncouth character still worshipped by sycophants. But whose record as a player is impeccable.

But come on. There must have been a way. No small amount of blame should also be attached to the voters who select the new members of the Hall. Voters who moonlight as journalists covering the sport. Yes, MLB has left the selection in the hands of writers and broadcasters who see no conflict in doing the two jobs simultaneously. (They also vote on yearly awards that carry large monetary rewards.)

Many are downright vindictive and petty, who believe they’re cardinals of a church they’re running. Just as they’re doing to the steroid boys, a goodly number were not enchanted by Rose when they covered him and are content to go to their graves without solving the problem of Pete. More’s the shame.

Maybe his death will accelerate the process of honouring Rose and the Barry Bonds steroid crew. (Bonds’ pre-steroid career alone is worth of inclusion.) As we have said before there are plenty of players in Cooperstown who wouldn’t have gotten in without amphetamines (Rose was a big user.) There were likely sexual deviates and racists in an age when that stuff never made the news. Just give them a plaque that records their failings as well as their soaring accomplishments.

There will still be many who want to build themselves up by tearing down others like Rose. As we saw when hockey legend Bobby Hull died last year. His obit was barely dry before the negative nabobs arrived.

As we wrote in February of 2023: “That means that the kind of people who revel in these things immediately sprung into action about Bobby’s failings. A domestic assault in the 1960s. Questionable quotes to a Russian journalist about the Nazis. His penchant for being the last guy to leave a party. One online troll called him “a terrible person”.

They’re entitled to their opinion. As Marc Antony said of Caesar,  Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.”

I’ll let Bobby’s grandson Jude make the point. Jude Hull: “You’re allowed to have whatever opinion you want of my Grandfather and his past. To air it all out not 12 hours after he passed makes me want to puke. I hope those tweets help you sleep better at night.”

Like them, Bobby was a man of his times with failings. Ones he owned. But he was also a colossus as a cultural figure. Imagine if all the actors, athletes, musicians and artists we revere today were purged for their moral failings, their addictions, their infidelities, their chumminess with tyrants, their racial attitudes. There wouldn’t be many left, would there? Why does David Crosby get a loving obit but the same people slime Bobby Hull?

So, sure, list Bobby Hull’s failings. Dig deep into them to make a point about the kind of alpha male who rarely exists anymore. And how much more virtuous you are sitting at your keyboard spilling garbage incognito. List those who third-hand get the vapours from seeing everything he did as a victim-culture thing.

In a world that needs a smile, wants a distraction from the awfulness of a bureaucratic existence, Bobby Hull distributed happiness by the ton. He changed the business of hockey to make it a better livelihood for players by going to the WHA, supporting NHLPA reform. He showed up. His HOF son Brett said his father gave his family and others “a tremendous amount of great memories…Those of us who were lucky enough to spend time with him will cherish those forever.”

So cherish Pete Rose. Thorns and all. He didn’t murder anyone. He cheated baseball by betting. There are far worse things in life.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

Nine years after September 2, 2015 the image is still searing. A little Syrian boy in shorts and a t-shirt washed up on a Turkish beach after his father’s boat capsized during a panicked escape from the civil war in their country. If you had a shred of humanity you probably resolved to do something about it. You vowed to help these desperate people.

So you unwittingly elected radicals and social engineers to the highest offices in the nations, trusting that their honeyed words about Aylan Kurdi’s sacrifice would not go to waste. What you didn’t know is your tears for a tiny lad would be re-purposed by radicals into an immigrant culture washing over Western culture. Is it correlation or causation? At this point it doesn’t matter.

There are many factors at play, but you could do worse than look at that dead boy as Patient One in the fever gripping the elites of Canada, the U.S. and the EU. While you can argue about previous conditions in Syria and the Middle East, the photo is Day One in the obliteration of Western traditional society.

It certainly contributed to the downfall of PM Stephen Harper, who was holding his own in the 2015 federal election until the Syrian war spit out that desperate family, the family that was taken down by the waves. Looking to be taken seriously in his battle for PM, Justin Trudeau used the Syrian crisis to flail Harper’s cold-hearted approach to the refugees.

For a PM whose warmth was never a strong point, Trudeau’s exploitation of the drowned little boy hit with the Liberal’s burgeoning base of white suburban women (and men who want to sleep with them). As we wrote in September of 2015: “If the campaign has had a moment where blood pressure crested, even briefly, it was in the visceral reaction to the drowned Syrian boy. The heartbreaking photo provoked an authentically Canadian dismay and a completely disproportionate response to the gravity of his desperate personal quest. 

Even flinty Post columnist Christie Blatchford was advocating open borders to assuage first-world guilt over the Syrian mess.” Before you could say Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris, the doors to Europe and North America were indiscriminately opened to penniless refugees, to the worst criminals the third world produces, to the most extreme Marxist revolutionaries, to climate-change fanatics. The pillars of western thought, built over two thousand years, are disintegrating as those immigrants (legal or otherwise) clog the streets with the politics and religions they supposedly left behind.

When a newly-elected Donald Trump sought in 2017 to limit immigration from nations with radical politics he was met with a banshee wail from MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times. Still smarting from Trump’s election they branded him a racist, a stain that follows him till today.

Making it doubly exasperating was the fact that these interlopers were not what the public had voted for. A succession of progressive politicians such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh repurposed a geopolitical tragedy, diluting the traditional population with immigrants who neither care for nor respect their adopted homes. (Hands up anyone who’s heard these demonstrators with a good word about Canada or the U.S.)

The impact of this seemingly virtuous immigration touches every corner of Western societies. Having open borders is misconstrued as being open minded. It was argued again in the U.S. vice presidential debate on Oct. 1 with Democrat Tim Walz and his CBS News allies bizarrely insisting that the newcomers haven’t made housing more expensive. GOP nominee J.D. Vance countered that the surge of buyers was a supply/ demand driver for home-price inflation. The fact this was even debatable underscores how deep the rot has become.

From housing to education to healthcare, the ballooning of Canada’s population from 35 million to 40 million ignores the reality that makes citizens feel like strangers in their own land. While the moribund Liberal/ NDP axis and their paid media still embrace the flood of illegal aliens, polls show that most Canadians agree with the CPC’s stand that the saturation point was surpassed a long time ago.

The impact was similar in Europe where the attempts to staunch the flow of refugees looking for a toehold in the generous EU turned into a raging flood. Anyone asking to slow down the process was accused of wanting more Aylan Kurdis. Landing on all manner of craft in southern Europe the refugees made their way north to the embrace of health benefits and income guarantees. By the end of the decade all the major cities in the EU were penetrated by ghettos of aliens seeking to recreate their previous Damascus home in Stockholm or Paris or Brussels.

The clash of cultures produced horrific results that those who’d invited the strangers into their homes were reluctant to admit. Stories of grooming white girls in Bradford, England, or attacking outsiders who wandered into Malmo, Sweden, were dismissed and, now, punished by new anti-hate legislation. Those who cared in 2015 are now finally realizing the impact of using Aylun Kurdi to satisfy their liberal guilt has been a disaster for their culture.

It is said that a week is a long time in politics. In this case a decade has been more than enough to bring Western Civilization to its knees.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.