My Hero Died Today. (Bill)
If you saw Kirby Puckett play baseball, whether or not you like the sport itself, you'd have loved him. Most of Minnesota did. A funny little round man, an amazing athlete in an almost completely average-looking body, Kirby did all those little cliches that add up to one big cliche called Playing the Game the Right Way. He was always playing at full speed, no matter what the score was, how he felt, or whether it was Spring Training or the World Series. And you could just tell he really loved to play, more than anyone you've ever seen. See that huge smile above? It seemed (in retrospect, at least) like it was just always there.
I was at this game back in 1989, where he hit a homer to win it against the A's with two outs in the tenth. He only hit 9 that year, his lowest total from 1986-1995, but you just got the sense that it was what he needed to do, so he did it. It was the same spirit with which he later told his team to climb on his back, and almost single-handedly won Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.
And he gave back to the community, the way you always wish that people who make millions to play a game would. He was everybody's hero. He was certainly mine. When, nearly ten years ago, it was announced that glaucoma had ended his career, seventeen-year-old me cried. The one sellout at the Dome that year (as I remember) was Kirby Puckett day, and they named a street outside the stadium after him.
And don't let anyone tell you (as no one will today, but some would have a week ago, and some will a month from now) that he wasn't a deserving Hall of Famer. No, his numbers won't stack up against the very greatest, and nobody loves baseball's numbers more than me. But his numbers are still very good; and he played unbelievable defense; and he was the best player on, and very visible leader of, two World Champions; and he made ten All-Star teams. It seems to me that anyone that makes ten All-Star teams ought to get a serious look (it is, after all, the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of the Most Statistically Efficient). At his peak he was loved everywhere, not just in Minnesota, for both his ability and his attitude.
Here's the thing, though: heroes aren't real. Heroes are worshiped, are blindly adored, and no mortal can possibly deserve that. As full as we are of weaknesses and failings, we project our own unfulfilled expectations on individuals who face more pressure on a daily basis than any of us will ever know, and ask them to be without sin. Those that make it unscathed through such an unpassable lifetime test do so not by virtue but by luck, or careful planning, or good PR people.
Kirby's story merely makes this truth inescapably apparent. Some six years after his retirement (and I'm not going to get the order of events straight; if you want facts, go to any news site today), his wife divorces him. He's sued multiple times, most notably by a woman who claims he sexually assaulted her in a bar bathroom (he's acquitted, but we know how much that means in the case of national sports figures). And a cover story appears in Sports Illustrated, accusing him of everything from beating his wife to hating sick kids.
The SI article's main (only, if I recall) sources were his embittered ex-wife and his embittered (alleged) ex-mistress; the most realistic assumption seems to be that the "real" Kirby fell, as we all do, somewhere between the hero we knew him to be and the demon he was portrayed as in the article. Nevertheless, all Minnesotans saw was the demon; he moved to Arizona and never looked back. He reportedly started drinking heavily. In the most recent pictures of him, he must have been carrying over 300 pounds on his 5'8" frame. (Earlier,I heard an observation like this made to suggest that we need to keep "distance"; that we shouldn't, in a sense, have heroes, because they're just human beings. That's baloney. Children, especially, need heroes. I'm grateful for Kirby; if he'd been just another good player, if he'd done the Charles Barkley, I'm-no-role-model thing, the decade from 1986 to 1995 would have been a lot different, a lot sadder probably, for me and thousands of other kids. You don't hear many people saying we should get rid of Santa Claus because he's not real; in the same way, kids need their heroes.)
I guess I was still always expecting the big homecoming. Maybe it never would have happened. But someday, I thought, he would come back, maybe with some figurehead position with the team like the one he held until 2002, and say, "Minnesota, I have faults, I'm sorry," and there'd be a kind of big state-wide figurative group hug.
Instead, Kirby Puckett had a massive stroke on Sunday and passed away on Monday, eight days shy of his forty-sixth birthday (and six days shy of my twenty-seventh). His life was far too short, and far too sad, but for twelve astoundingly wonderful years in the middle. There's no doubt that he had faults, and it seems likely that he did some terrible things, and I don't mean to make light of that; in a sense, similarly, he brought a lot of his late troubles on himself. But if anything, it seems to me that that makes it even more tragic.
So here's a thank-you to Kirby the lovable hero, and a heartfelt prayer for Kirby the unavoidably fallible human being. You were a huge part of my childhood, and I'll always remember you. I hope, and believe, that you're somewhere right now wearing a smile much like the one above.