Kirby Without Tears

“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.”

Great hitters see things the rest of us can’t. Such as the rotation of a baseball thrown at ninety-five miles per hour from sixty feet, six inches away. Such as the split second when that ball collides with the swung bat, is crushed out of round, then rockets toward the empty stretch of AstroTurf between the futilely sprinting right fielder and the foul line or, better yet, toward some guy frantically putting on his kid’s glove in the cheap seats left of the 408 marker in center. Kirby Puckett, the greatest all-around hitter Minnesotans have ever had the pleasure to watch on an everyday basis, has something else, and that something enables him to laugh out loud at the picture of himself as a two-eyed All-Star turned one-eyed buccaneer.

“Kirby has the gift of perspective,” says his agent and one of his closest friends, Ron Shapiro. Perspective, in this case, is not to be confused with point of view or perception, about which Puckett himself will speak, in more depth, in a moment. The perspective Shapiro is talking about is Puckett’s unshakable ability to see the relative importance of the various pieces of his life and determine that, all things considered, his life is very good indeed.

It’s difficult to believe that four years have passed since the spring of 1996. The Twins had acquired the great Paul Molitor and still had the very good Chuck Knoblauch, and Puckett, at thirty-six, was having the kind of Grapefruit League that prefigured a huge regular season. Hopes for a rejuvenated organization, for a reprise of the unlikely World Series years of ’87 and ’91, rode the spring breezes. Then just like that—for Puckett and thus for the franchise—those hopes vanished. On Wednesday, March 27, Puckett blistered the ball off Atlanta’s Greg Maddux, baseball’s best pitcher at the time. The following morning people were holding their hands up in front of Puckett’s face, asking how many fingers. The “volleyball” that he said a pitched baseball looked like when he was on one of his signature streaks had, literally overnight, become a “black dot” that signaled the end of his career.

The ironies, like so many of Puckett’s 2,304 career hits, came in bunches. He had never been on the disabled list. He was showing no negative effects of the shattered jaw from the errant fastball that prematurely (by three games) ended his ’95 season. His eyesight had been so good he hadn’t bothered to have his eyes routinely examined. He’d been seeing the ball so well during that training camp, in fact, he was batting a red-hot .344, with a couple of home runs and a team-leading fourteen runs batted in.

But Puckett, a congenitally positive and life-affirming fellow, had never had much time for irony. Less even for despair. Not that there weren’t dark days during that late spring and early summer when the news about his eye was bad, then uncertain, then hopeful, then bad again, then catastrophic. “He’d be down a little bit and there’d be a little frustration,” recalls Shapiro, whose home was Puckett’s refuge during his treatment with Baltimore retinal specialist Bert Glaser. “But I never sensed anger, and nothing resembling self-pity.” Shapiro’s associate, Michael Maas, says he invited a few of his pals over to his house to play cards with Puckett during that difficult period. Maas says he could sense Puckett’s preoccupation that evening, that he was “not the same old Kirby.” Maas’s friends, however, were charmed out of their socks by the ebullient ballplayer—utterly convinced, Maas says, that they had never enjoyed the company of a more upbeat and positive person.

When, on the morning of July 12, Glaser informed Puckett that his glaucoma-impaired retina was damaged beyond fixing, three of the other four people in the room had tears in their eyes. The fourth—Puckett—said something to the effect of, “What the heck y’all crying about?” “It was amazing,” says Maas, who was there with Tonya Puckett and Shapiro. “Kirby was mentally prepared for it. He knew it could happen, and he was ready. He was looking out for everybody else, like he usually does.”

In the spring of 2000 Puckett says simply: “Life is about making adjustments.” He tells me, for instance, about regaining his depth perception, which is diminished when a person loses the sight of one eye and is not the same as, though it’s related to, perspective. “All of a sudden, man, I couldn’t play catch with my kids,” he says. “I’d stick out my glove and the ball would hit me in the chest. My kids would laugh, thinking I was fooling around, and I’d say, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy’ll get the hang of it.’ It was like starting all over again. I had to train the one eye to do the job of two, but, sure enough, it came back.” He says he learned to drive his beloved Chevy Suburban again too, though it took about six months to get it right. He admits, quite matter-of-factly, that he “might have hit some things” in the relearning process.

“I wasn’t thinking ‘Poor me.’ The word I used was ‘Wow!’ Now I knew what it was like for people who have to learn how to walk or talk all over again after an accident. Of course, my situation wasn’t that bad. And now I can do anything I want to. I can go swimming and play catch with my kids and drive my truck. You adjust. This is my fourth year now, and I’ve adjusted pretty well.”

People who know him call that a rare understatement on Puckett’s part. Dave Mona, the long-time Twin Cities PR executive, radio commentator, and sports maven about town, says, “I’ve met people who left the game suddenly and never got over it. Every conversation leads back to it. Kirby’s about as much at peace with the way things have turned out as anyone I’ve ever seen.” “I haven’t noticed any change,” says Maas, who, with Shapiro, has been part of Puckett’s small circle of intimates for fifteen years. “I’ve looked for it, but I haven’t seen it.”

Gene Larkin, the clutch-hitting journeyman who was a teammate for seven seasons, says he ran into Puckett at the Twins’ training camp earlier this year. Same old Puck, Larkin reports: “Always enthusiastic, always a smile on his face, always very encouraging to the younger players. In that sense, he hasn’t changed at all since I first met him in 1987.” Larkin, who retired from baseball in 1994 and now works as a financial planner in the Twin Cities, adds, however, that he’s speaking of Puckett on the ball field. “I don’t know Kirby-the-front-office-guy too well,” he says.

On the spring day we go eyeball to eyeball, Puckett-the-Twins-executive-vice-president sure seems to be the same person I met for the first time when he was an emerging All-Star center fielder during the ’87 season—plus a few more pounds through the midsection and minus the iconic “34” on his back. Like cops and soldiers, ballplayers can startle a fellow when they show up in a suit and tie (Who died? you wonder in the ballplayers’ case), which is what Puckett wears nowadays when he’s taking a bow (with Harmon Killebrew) at the legislature, speaking to a convention of ophthalmologists, or greeting a magazine writer in his employer’s executive suite. But the ready smile and high-pitched chortle, the rat-a-tat-tat volubility and self-mocking high spirits are familiar enough.

Now, though, there’s also a seriousness, a thoughtfulness—an almost tangible calm and maturity—in Puckett that’s attributable to more than the grownup suit and the fact that less than twenty-four hours earlier this erstwhile boy of summer turned forty. Perspective, as Shapiro has pointed out, is part of it. And much of what Puckett is about in early-middle-age retirement derives from both the tangible and mythic rewards of a storybook career—financial success beyond the wildest imaginings of the last of nine siblings from tough south Chicago, dozens of individual honors and a pair of world championships that collectively should secure his plaque at Cooperstown as early as next year, and an unqualified, unflagging statewide esteem that a governor can only dream about. But some of Puckett’s poised and cool-headed judgment he’s had from the beginning. We just didn’t see it behind all the hustle and big-game heroics and famous clubhouse horseplay.

Shapiro says Puckett virtually guaranteed his financial security when the two of them met for breakfast at a Cleveland coffee shop way back in 1985, during Kirby’s second season in the majors. “Coming out of the projects, Kirby didn’t have a lot of experience handling large sums of money,” says the agent whose client list also includes Hall of Fame–bound Cal Ripken and Eddie Murray. “What he did have was self-discipline and the values his mother and father had given him. That day in Cleveland I said, ‘Kirby, if we’re going to work together, we’re going to have a game plan. And not only are we going to invest in a prudent fashion, we’re going to budget prudently too. You’re going to live very well, but you’re not going to live like those guys who spend it as fast as they make it.’ And he bought into the plan instantly.” Even when he signed the five-year, $30 million contract that made him one of the game’s richest players, Puckett was thinking ahead and sensibly husbanding his assets for life after the cheering stopped.

“A lot of people were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear,” he tells me. “That I was going to make a lot of money and I could buy this and do that. But Ron told me what I really wanted to hear. I knew baseball wasn’t going to last forever. Some guys, they think it’s never going to end. But everything has to end. I had everything figured out. I’d told myself I was going to play until I was forty and that was going to be it. I had it all tabulated. I was going to get my 3,000th hit last year. And then, when I was forty, I was going to go home for good and go fishing.” Farsighted as they were, of course, neither Puckett nor his brain trust could anticipate the ominous black dot he woke up with on that otherwise bright March morning in Fort Myers. Yet the equanimity and grace with which he accepted his sudden loss of livelihood and stardom revealed an individual with an unusually measured take on his world.

Puckett says his biggest worry at the time was what life would be like at home in Edina. “It’s a huge adjustment for you and your wife,” he explains. “For all those years you were on the road so much she got used to her own time and space, without you being around every day—and now, all of a sudden, here you are. And I worried about the kids. How are they going to accept you after you’ve been gone so much?” He laughs and says, “Frankly, I was kind of hoping they’d say, ‘Daddy, you do whatever you want,’ but actually they love having me around. That’s why, if you see me out and about, I usually got at least one of my two kids along with me.”

The fact is, away from the Metrodome and his annual celebrity pool tournament for Children’s HeartLink and other charity work, Puckett has maintained an exceedingly low profile since his retirement. He and Tonya are said to entertain infrequently, and he himself says that even his neighbors see little of him. While he talks about them often, he deftly keeps the media away from daughter Catherine, nine, and seven-year-old Kirby Jr. Beyond the occasional sighting at the Wave (where he’s been known to bring first his Suburban and then one of his cars in for a wash on a Saturday afternoon), the nearby Davanni’s pizza emporium, and courtside at the Timberwolves’ home games, he is almost invisible. Old teammates shrug and say they don’t know much about his private life. Kent Hrbek says, “People assume that Kirby and I are joined at the hip, but the truth is I hardly ever see him. I don’t know who he hangs out with.” Even the popular notion that Kirby and Hrby are inseparable fishing partners is mistaken. “I’ve never sat in a boat with the man,” Hrbek says.

No one describes him as reclusive, but for a guy who’s willing to let a near-stranger touch-test the size of his eyeballs, Puckett is surprisingly guarded. Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor says he and Puckett sat side by side at the basketball games for at least a year before Puckett opened up and they (and their families) became close friends. “I wouldn’t say he was shy,” Taylor says, “but he’s certainly protective of his family and private time.”

Meanwhile, more than a dozen years of living out of a suitcase has apparently cured him of wanderlust; spending time with Tonya and the kids at home (he also cares for a teenaged niece) and wetting a line in his favorite fishing hole (the name of which he declines to reveal) seems to keep him happy. He has zero interest, he says, in drawing more attention to himself.

“I’m just a plain kind of guy,” he says. “That’s the way I was brought up, and that’s what it comes down to. I don’t have to be flashy or flaunt what I got. I wear a watch and a wedding ring. No gold chains and such. To each his own. I’m not knocking anybody. But I’m just an old-blue-jeans-and-tennis-shoe type of guy. Always have been, always will be.”

George Will once wrote: “[T]here is an inevitable poignancy inherent in the careers of even the best professional athletes . . . , [but] poignancy is not the same thing as sadness.” The game of baseball, Will noted, “is a remarkably cheerful business.”

Even in his postcareer semi-anonymity (the most anonymity he will likely ever enjoy), Puckett is nothing if not both cheerful and cheering. He still lights up whatever room he’s in. He still (to update Patrick Reusse’s simply perfect tribute) makes us smile. If our heart sinks at the sight of that defunct right eye, it’s because we feel sorry at least as much for ourselves as for Kirby, deprived as we are of the joy of watching him play his game. Kirby isn’t crying. Perspectively gifted, Kirby insists he’s having the time of his life, and it’s impossible not to believe him.

For the next three years Puckett will remain on the Twins’ executive masthead, helping management evaluate young talent but mainly responsible for currying what little favor the organization might still enjoy with its once fanatical public. (“Wherever he goes, it’s golden,” says Mona, who sits on the club’s Community Fund committee that Puckett now chairs.) Beyond that, he will continue to serve as a spokesperson for the national Glaucoma Foundation, and appear on talk shows and at eye clinics around the country urging folks of all ages to have their eyes screened for the condition. If he’s not the ubiquitous commercial presence he clearly could be in the Twin Cities (“People would eat, wear, what have you whatever Kirby stood up for around here,” Mona says), it’s by all accounts because he doesn’t need either the money or the exposure. He is fiercely proud of what he’s accomplished, on his own and with his Twins teammates, and for the time being, at least, he’s willing to rest on his laurels.

Comparisons are made between Puckett and the Wolves’ spectacular man-child Kevin Garnett. “I love KG,” says Puckett, a rabid fan and sometime mentor. “He’s still a kid, but he has a lot of talent. And he loves to play the game. You can see it in his eyes. What do they call it? The eye of the tiger.” But whatever the two have in common, Puckett is quick to remind the younger man of a significant difference. “I’ve told him,” Puckett says with a grin, “‘This is not your town until you guys win the championship. Until you do, it’s still ours.’”

To me, by way of a valediction, he says: “Tell everybody they don’t have to worry about Kirby. All the reports are good. I can see. I haven’t hit anything lately. I’m doing good. I got no regrets. I’m enjoying every day.”

William Swanson is a senior editor of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.