Kirby Puckett: A baseball great sent to the golf course, and then home, too early
Kirby Puckett spent a good amount of his final years on the golf course, which in itself is a shame – he should have still been on the baseball diamond.
Puckett died yesterday at the all-too-young age of 45. But it really seems that a big part of him died nearly a decade earlier, when at 36, glaucoma in his right eye forced him out of professional baseball.
While leading the Minnesota Twins to two World Series championships, Puckett was baseball. In his final year in the Major Leagues, Puckett hit .314 with 23 home runs. He should have easily played into his 40s, and likely he wanted to. He was a baseball player.
Currently, baseball is lumbering along toward the World Baseball Classic, hoping to regain some of its lost allure. An allure that may have reached a zenith 15 years ago, when Puckett led the Twins over the Atlanta Braves in on of the best World Series battles in history.
Baseball will be hard pressed to ever find a player again like Kirby Puckett. Superstar ability, plus enthusiasm and loyalty. He was everything anyone could want from an athlete, and it’s a shame his game had to end much too early.
Kirby Puckett
1960-2006
–WKW
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6 comments
He was an adulterer, cheating on his wife too many times to count. He was a pervert, exposing himself to people at malls, often times urinating in public and in plain view of women and children. He was a sexual harraser, two lawsuits were filed against him which he made go away with substantial out of court settlements and worst of all he beat women--There are numerous allegations of Kirby Puckett beating, torturing and intimidating the women in his life. My personal favorite recounts the time he choked his former mistress with an electrical cord, another highlight in the career of Kirby came when he put a loaded gun to the head of his wife while she was holding their child.
Kirby Puckett was a great baseball player, but he was not a great human being. Even in death he should not be given a free pass for the things he did as a person.
Meh.
My expectations for humanity as a whole are pretty low, let alone for athletes or anyone else who spends a large chunk of their lives in the public eye.
I pretty much leave the "oh what a bad person he was" arguments to the women-folk. As a sportswriter, how he played his sport and the memories he created are what matter to me.
The U.S. is a nation where we treat like gods 16-year-olds who throw a football, or hit a golfball well. Those that would disavow an athlete's greatness over marital strife are just working to inflate their own depth, as I see it.
So, my assessment stands:
"He was everything anyone could want from an athlete"
--WKW
The thing about swinging at the first pitch is you either get a hit fast or get out fast. In baseball, he got more first-pitch hits than anyone in history. In life, he got out far too fast. In his personal life, it sounds like he got out more often than he got on base.
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