Kirby Without Tears

Kirby Puckett wants me to touch his eyes.

“Go ahead,” he says, both eyes shut but sensing my hesitation. “Touch ’em with your finger.”

We’re sitting knee to knee at Twins headquarters in the Metrodome. The two of us have a well-appointed conference room to ourselves this March morning, but Puckett, once engaged, is not one to put a lot of furniture between himself and another human being. I raise my left hand to his face and gingerly touch the lid that shutters the most famous bum eye in the Upper Midwest.

“You feel that eyeball?” Puckett asks. “OK, now feel the other one.”

I move my finger to his left eye. The good one.

“Big difference, right?” he says.

Big difference, I agree. The ball beneath the right lid was weirdly small, shrunken. It felt like a pea. By contrast—and that, of course, is the point of the demonstration—the ball behind the left lid is as large and plump as a table grape.

Puckett opens his eyes. The left one pops open to its normal, somewhat sleepy appearance. The right opens only a fraction of the other, to a sightless squint, a ghostly iris scarcely visible in the narrow aperture.

“The left eye is good,” he says. “My beautiful brown eye. People always knew I had excellent vision. When I was playing baseball I could tell you what the pitch was as soon as it left the pitcher’s hand. Sometimes I could see the ball go into and then off of the bat. Well, it turns out I had twenty-fifteen vision”—meaning that what a “normal” eye could see at fifteen feet, he could see with the same acuity at twenty. Puckett, whose twelve-year big-league career batting average was .318, laughs. “I don’t know why I couldn’t hit better,” he says.

“The right eye is blind, totally gone,” he continues. “I can’t see a thing. And it’s irreversible. It’s done. But there’s no pain. I put a drop in it in the morning and a drop in it at night, and that keeps it comfortable. They talk about me getting a fake eyeball because the real one is shrinking. That’s because of the surgery. When they cut my eye open, it got smaller. There’s no blood, no fluid, in there anymore. The lid won’t stay open by itself. So I’m going to have to make a choice—whether to get a prosthetic or put a patch on.”

Puckett pauses and laughs again. “You know me. I want the patch.”