When I was 10, I found out my dad and Kirby Puckett shared the same barber.
This was odd for a couple of reasons: 1) He was making $3 million a year in 1992, one of the highest salaries in professional sports of that time. And 2) the barbershop was in one of the roughest neighborhoods in North Minneapolis.
It sometimes surprised me that even my dad wanted to go there, as we lived in the suburbs—but, then again, try finding a barber that can cut black hair in the suburbs of St. Paul.
This was nearly two years after the Twins won the World Series, when Kirby won the heart of every baseball fan in America outside of Atlanta. I did my shy walk towards him as he was talking about the possibility of a new contract (which he would get) and asked him to sign a piece of paper that my dad had given me.
"You doing well in school?," he asked.
"Yes, sir," I muttered, too afraid to even look at him directly in the eye out of fear that I would melt in his presence, like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
He laughed and signed my little scrap of paper. I shuffled off and tried not to stare at him as he was cracking jokes and shooting the breeze with the barbershop.
A decade later, reading Frank DeFord's scathing examination into the life of Puckett made me wince. Not because I had held Kirby Puckett in such high esteem, but that I, like many fans, had looked past his numerous transgressions in favor of remembering Game Six of the World Series, the acrobatic catches which defied his body size and the laws of physics and that free-swinging style which powered the Twins' lineup for over a decade.
Now I could have said DeFord wanted to stir up some drama to sell copies of SI. But he isn't some hack trying to make a name for himself, nor is he one to embellish the facts for the sake of moral clarity.
His piece was not only an indictment of Puckett, but a judgement on Minnesota and its fans for overlooking Puckett's problems for the sake of deification. After reading, I couldn't help but acknowledge my own duplicity, not in the crimes, but the culture which allowed such crimes to persist.
I thought about this when I listened, watched and read numerous scribes, fans and players discuss Alex Rodriguez's admission of taking performance enhancing drugs from 2001-3. This isn't a defense or prosecution of the player.
If A-Rod gets nothing more than a smattering of boos or if he loses his MVP award from 2003, has the 156 HR he accumulated stricken from his career statistics and is banned from Major League Baseball and Cooperstown, I could say either punishment is appropriate.
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