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kirby, kirby puckett, king of the wild frontier · by Rafi Kam
Kirby had a smile that could split the tree in Roy Hobbs backyard.
He played hard, he had fun, he carried some extra weight like John Kruk and David Wells and all of my favorite ballplayers really…
And Kirby was fucking good. No steroids or stupid superhuman tricks, just hustling, sweet-swinging, fucking good. He was one of those rare players who you could fear but at the same time secretly root for him to do well even if you were playing against him. It was that much fun just to watch him go. You could fully love and name streets or children after him if it was your team that he was playing his whole career for.
Like any good Brooklyn jewish boys, my friend Danny and I both rooted for the Mets. But Danny’s parents were both from Minnesota. His sweet mother put ketchup on spaghetti and spoke with one of those “oh yah, don’t-ya-know” accents way before anyone in Canarsie had heard the word Fargo.
Danny had a passion for the Twins and his joy was infectious. They were an easy team to root for especially as they won a lot and it bugged our poor Yankee-loving classmates to have us paying attention to their league.
Danny would evangelize on the glory of Puckett or switch sports to go on about that other Minnesota stud Herschel Walker. He had read somewhere how Walker decided when he was a kid that he was going to get tough and bulk up so he would wear chains around his mid-section and used to drag them up and down around the hills of his hometown. These were the kind of stories we thrived on. Not to mention names like Herschel and Kirby… Kirby! Kirb-y Puckett! Danny had bastardized the Davey Crockett song.
Some years later Danny invented a turn of the century Jewish boxer character named “Kid Chutzpah”, sometimes adopting the name himself. Danny was extremely quiet around strangers but as the name displayed he definitely had a healthy sense of irony as when he also used to call himself “Man of Peace, Man of Steel”.
Danny’s parents had stories too. They had gone to school with Rod Carew’s future wife. “Oh ya, and she was a nice Jewish girl. And he converted, don’t ya know!”
Baseball was everything to me back then. We played Little League or pickup games at Seaview park and my mom told me not to stay too late because the gypsies lived there. At home I accumulated books of baseball statistics and anecdotes and I pored over them religiously. I decided one day to merge my baseball card collection (terrible idea) with that of my great friend Zvi. There’s no way that could turn out badly I told myself. Most of the cards stayed at his house… We all played stickball in the schoolyard behind our elementary school which was right across the street from Danny’s house. There was a box taped up on the wall of the school and black tape spiraling up the stickball bat. Hit it over the fence for a triple or across the street for a home run.
Danny was a good all-around athlete for a kid. He never grew up too big but he was strong despite his compact frame with surprisingly large muscles. He was thin, in good shape, but above all else he had a real panache for how a player was supposed to look playing baseball.
Danny didn’t have the same competitive fire that some of our other friends did, nor the extra size that I made no good use of, but he sure as hell knew how to scoop up a ground ball with flair. Stopping the ball, bringing it up with a bounce off to his side then pivoting across for a textbook throw to first. His swing and pitching delivery were textbook too, and he’d do player impressions or switch to bat lefty convincingly. Danny was a pretty good athlete but he was an incredible and natural student of technique. Like Puckett, he made the game fun to watch.
Somewhere after Strat-o-matic and computer baseball leagues and an ugly falling out with Zvi (naturally he retained custody of the cards), came one or two MLB strikes and next thing you know I had given up on following baseball. During this time the Yankees started their late 90s dynasty. Many of the old records I used to study in baseball encyclopedias were broken with ease and everybody cheered. Me and Danny had already drifted apart as friends in high school and dramatically more so afterwards.
I started following baseball again around 2001. Puckett was already being elected into the Hall of Fame that year. Glaucoma had forced him to an early retirement in 1996. My own fan-ship was different now. I had been sort of ambivalent about my Mets affiliation ever since the late 80s when they kept getting rid of all my favorites. Even though I was getting into fantasy baseball I’d gotten over my old stats obsession. What I find is I’m still looking for people to root for when I watch this game. Style matters, attitude matters, underdogs matter, stories about this guy from your local town or how he trained when he was a kid matter, great names like Kirby matter and graceful pickups of a short hop like Danny used to make routinely are still a joy to watch.
I’m staying basically oblivious by choice to the rest of the Kirby Puckett story. You can see it summed up in a paragraph on this sports blog:
After glaucoma cut his career far too short, he careened between allegations that he had locked his wife in the basement to claims that he had cut through a door with a power saw to beat on her. Kirby also made something of a name for himself in the last couple of years for grabbing breasts and making phone calls to his longtime mistress from the house he and his (now ex-) wife shared. The AP obit story on Puck is strangely worded; circumspect about the obvious decline in his physical, and likely mental, health. Two different paragraphs use the words “the weight gain … concerned those close to him.” Tony Oliva throws in that Puckett kept getting “bigger and bigger and bigger … we were worried about him.” There’s a tangential reference at the end of the piece to the strained relationship between the ex-player and the team that still plays its home games (thanks Bud Selig!) in Minneapolis at 34 Kirby Puckett Place.
These words don’t even look like English to me. What are they saying? Like all Mets fans we knew from talented but troubled athletes. Darryl and Dwight had all the potential in the world but couldn’t get their lives straight and never took lead of the team the way they were supposed to. Kirby was the opposite of all that. The genial smile, the world series game 6 clutch catch and clutch home run: Kirby the ballplayer was golden. Do I really need to look back at him any other way?
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Last week as I put off writing about Kirby I gave some thought to what picture I would use. The catch against the wall from game 6? The celebratory arms up? For some reason I kept thinking about his 1986 Topps baseball card and I couldn’t even figure out why. It wasn’t his rookie card but it was the one I most identified with him. I think that was the year I started collecting cards…
We moved at the end of last week and as I emptied out the storage closet on Friday I came across the pathetic remains of my old baseball card collection.
And there it was, Kirby Puckett 1986 Topps in a hard plastic case for no good reason. The card really isn’t worth anything. I took me finding it just then as a sign and put the card down on top of my scanner. I would write the post sometime that day I told myself, as soon as the movers were done. And I would scan this very card which travelled with me from Canarsie to Connecticut and across 20 years. Maybe Zvi and my old baseball card collecting would get a mention.
At one point I went out to get the movers some sandwiches. When I came back to the computer the card was gone. Our things are in storage right now and I’m pretty sure I’ll find the card in one of those boxes once our new house is ready for us.
But also I take it as a bit of a sign. You can choose to remember people one particular way, you can hold on to one vision of the past for as long as you want…. But ultimately, your rememberance is only part of the whole story and furthermore, terrifyingly, you can lose even that at any time if you don’t hold on tight.
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