Apres

Sad to hear about Kirby Puckett’s stroke yesterday.

I happened to be building a fire yesterday afternoon, and had last week’s Times ready to crumple up into tinder. It was the sports section, which I have to admit I rarely read. Which is a shame because it’s lately gotten just as good and entertaining as Sunday Styles. I hate to see these strong sectionsof the paper kind of upstaged by the NYTimes magazine and its various spin-offs, so I’m hereby recommitting myself to the smeary, rank and file folio pages.

What caught my eye was a package of stories about what lousy sports the American olympians were in Turin. I think Selena Roberts sort of overstated the case–when what she really wanted to do was write yet another pile-on piece on poor, misunderstood, crass, underachiever Bode Miller. Aside from the chronically overfunded, underperforming, belligerent, hard-partying American alpine ski teams, there was not a whole lot of evidence that American athletes are terrible, selfish, spoiled little kids–but even if they are, so what? The day is long since past when athletes of international caliber were expected to act like role models and diplomats for the human race; true, America pioneered the sports hero as well as (more recently) the sports anti-hero.

Bad sportsmen have always secretly been in the game, but it seemed a longstanding gentleman’s agreement that the press would allow the Babe Ruths and the Ty Cobbs and the Wilt Chamberlains of the world their private lecheries off-the-field; after all, no one wanted to make the kids cry, and if the greats used a little tobacky in the dug-out, well at least they tried to keep it discreet. Times certainly changed. I vaguely recall Dennis Rodman as the great iconoclast who permanently turned things around–perhaps it was Darryl Strawberry, although the cursed Strawberry did seem a morose character who would have preferred to remain, against all odds and evidence, someone to whom the kids could look up.

On the contrary, Rodman delighted in smashing this stereotype loudly and repeatedly, although one could make the argument that a little public restraint might have saved him from a less ugly public demise. Live by the code, die by the code–and a rebel without a cause doesn’t end up having a lot of reputable friends, especially in the media.

But the Puck? Whatever his off-the-field problems that came with retirement–and they seemed considerable, if they forced the man out of the public eye and, worse, out of the clubhouse, seemingly for good–Kirby earned so much good karma on the field and in the public eye that he will always be remembered as a good sport and a generous human being, a franchise player, a hall-of-famer. One of those guys who, in representing the best of the game, came to represent the best of being human.