I must have been around eight or nine when the legend of Kirby Puckett first appeared on my radar screen. Sprawled on the floor of my family room, I sorted through a new pack of baseball cards as my father watched a game on TV. Red Sox players got their own pile, Yankees players another. For everyone outside my anti-pinstripe dichotomy I questioned my dad as to whether they were even worth collecting.
Between innings, I held up my pile of unknown player cards to dad, who sorted them out, telling me stories about each.
"Oh!" he said suddenly. "Cool! You've got a Kirby Puckett."
"Who's Kirby Puckett?" I asked, thinking only of vacuum cleaners and Nintendo characters.
"He's one of the most loveable, talented men in baseball." My dad paused, looking with a smile at the game on TV. "Everybody loves Kirby Puckett. Everybody."
After my father's glowing endorsement, so did I. He became one of the few players I interrupted my American League East obsession to root for, one of the few players for whom I specifically combed Sports Illustrated. By 1996, when his time with the Twins was cut short by glaucoma, Kirby Puckett embodied what I loved about baseball: he was heart and grit, humility and teamwork, talent and resolve. He was small-town-boy-makes-good. He was the genuine article.
There's almost no need to spend time lauding the things that made Puck, who died on Monday from a stroke, so great. In the coming days his lifetime statistics will be trotted out in every sports page in America. He'll be described as a scrappy, butterball Hall of Famer who carried the Twins on his back to two World Championships. He'll be remembered for a dazzling career, tragically and suddenly abbreviated by near blindness.
But the Legend of Kirby Puckett goes deeper than commemorating him as the second youngest member of the Hall of Fame, at 45, to pass away after Lou Gehrig, who died at age 37. Or his undisputed status as the greatest player to ever grace the Twin Cities.
Yes, Puckett was the Twins. Yes, Puckett was a great philanthropist. Yes, Puckett was a damn good ball player.
Those are the easy things to remember. Those are the things that I remember of Puckett as I read ESPN obituaries and watch career highlight montages. But maybe the legacy that Puckett leaves is less about his lionized career than the ephemeral nature of our greatest heroes.
I remember when the legend ended almost as well as when it began. In early March of 2003 a faded No. 34 smiled up at me from the cover of Sports Illustrated, next to the headline: "The Secret Life of Kirby Puckett." Inside, the mountain of evidence against my childhood pin-up seemed irrefutable: charges of sexual harassment, assault and adultery all brought a man I'd seen as the epitome of athletic virtue to a querulous pile of lies and deceptions.
I was 20 at the time, no longer an eight-year-old girl looking for role models in baseball cards. I knew better than to think of people, especially athletes, as monolithic idols, but it didn't seem to make the news any less crushing. My go-to heart-of-gold player, the Roberto Clemente of my generation, was apparently just a wolf in Twins clothing. He had cheated on his wife and allegedly tried to strangle her. The myth was destroyed. The fairy tale over.
I felt betrayed; thousands of sports fans who had held up Puckett as some kind of "paragon of virtue" joined me in incredulity. I felt sadness; losing your generational good guy to a sexual harassment suit seemed to deal a final blow to my starry-eyed childhood wonder. For the past three years, I filed Puckett's tarnished reputation under hardened cynicism and bitterness as yet another example of the not-so-happily-ever after.
But last night when my computer's ESPN ticker informed me of his death, I felt a startling wave of nostalgia. I hadn't thought of him in years, but there was something still special about his memory. It had been child-like innocence to think any one man could ever be as perfect as I had thought Puckett to be. Sure, he would never sparkle in the way he had, but somehow his tribulations gave him new value and made him more accessible. Time had turned him into a new type of paragon, not of virtue, but of reality.
As I read ESPN's baseball reporters Peter Gammons and Jayson Stark wax poetic about the man I had once thought to be a video game character, I realized what it was that really upset me about his untimely end. Perhaps the most tragic element in the sudden loss of a legend like Puckett, is the reminder that his legend died long ago.
Kate Klonick '06 still cherishes her Oil Can Boyd rookie card, but burned her Roger Clemens card in disgust.
