Kirby Without Tears

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.