There have been few more awful tragedies in the history of baseball than the early decline and death of Kirby Puckett, who passed Monday at 45 due to complications from a stroke. For Puckett, in his day probably the most beloved player in baseball, the years between his sudden retirement at 35 and his death were sad and squalid ones in which his reputation and health were ruined. What people will remember, though, is his ebullience and charisma. He was a great player, a leader, and a champion; anyone who saw his joyous play was a little happier to be alive.

Puckett was born on the South Side of Chicago in 1960, one of the most difficult times and places in post-Emancipation America to be a young black man. He grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes, at one time the largest housing project in the world – 28 uniform blocks of concrete squeezed among a grid of highways and wide avenues designed to physically isolate them from the surrounding white-ethnic neighborhoods. The last of nine children, he grew up in a place without basic social services. Rather than busing black children into white neighborhoods, Chicago notoriously dealt with overcrowding in public schools by setting up trailers outside the projects and educating them in there. Three years ago, the city simply demolished 25 of the 28 buildings; there was nothing else to do with them.

It’s very difficult to appreciate how long the odds were against Puckett playing pro baseball. He was a 5-foot-4-inch kid who grew up in one of America’s worst ghettos, in a cold-weather city that simply doesn’t produce ballplayers. He was undrafted out of high school and worked on an auto line. Scouts only began to notice him after he put on 4 inches and tore up an open tryout the Royals were holding. He went to Bradley University in Peoria, and then transferred to Triton College, outside Chicago. Unaccountably, he ended up the third overall pick in the 1982 draft. Two years later he made his major league debut with the Twins, gathering four hits in that game.

Anyone who ever saw Puckett knows what kind of player he was, a line-drive hitter who won – and deserved – six Gold Gloves in centerfield. It should have been impossible for a 5-foot-8-inch, 210-pound man with no neck or waist to play the way he did, but there he was, diving over fences to rob home runs, stealing bases, and hitting for high averages. In one four-year stretch, he hit .328, .332, .356, and .339 with power and speed. It was only the quirk of playing in the same league as Wade Boggs that kept him from winning multiple batting titles.

More important than any of that was the sheer joy of his play – and his October triumphs. In 1987 he carried the Twins to a world championship, though they had the worst regular-season record of any World Series winner. By 1990, the team had sunk to last place; the next year, they won the pennant and defeated the Braves in the most dramatic World Series ever, in which Puckett was the hero. In Game 6, with his team facing elimination, he robbed a home run with a spectacular leap over the fence, tripled, and hit a walkoff home run in the bottom of the 11th inning to force Game 7. The sight of Puckett rounding second, his right arm raised high and a look of fierce pride on his face, is one of the indelible baseball images.

For all this and more, Puckett was loved in a way ballplayers really aren’t anymore. Part of it was his charitable work and enthusiasm; part of it was that he was so oddly shaped, and had such a funny name; part of it was that he was a high-average hitter and a hero in the clutch in a time when those weren’t so easily discounted as they are now. A lot of it was that you could imagine being Kirby Puckett, and that counted for a lot at a time when the new generation of stars – Mark McGwire, Bo Jackson, Jose Canseco – seemed to have as much in common with the average fan as Greek gods. He was an anachronism, the last star of the pre-free agency era.

Thus it was a tragedy when Puckett had his career cut short at 36. This Buddha of a man, the Yogi Berra of his time, woke up one day to find that glaucoma had robbed him of the vision in his right eye. With greedy, self-obsessed, mechanical robots coming to dominate the sport, it was all the worse that someone good and true had to suffer this fate. He went into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 2001; save a few cynics who thought he didn’t walk enough and got caught stealing too often, this was universally thought fitting and right.

That day was the last of the Kirby Puckett we thought we knew. Over the next few years, his reputation was destroyed by an unspeakably ugly divorce, revelations made by his longtime mistress, accusations of sexual harassment, and an arrest for false imprisonment and sexual assault. (He was acquitted.) Puckett, it was revealed, was a violent, crass, cruel, and bitter man, and had been all along, his image every bit as contrived as those of the posturing phonies to whom he was so often and so favorably compared. He became a recluse, left his beloved Minneapolis for Arizona, and, it seems, neglected his health to the point where it cut decades off of his life.

I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead in bringing this up. We’d all like to remember what was wonderful about Puckett, and forget what was disappointing. That would do him a disservice, just as he was done a disservice by everyone who wouldn’t let him be just a man, and instead forced him to be a symbol of what could be right about baseball, and American sports more generally.

He was important not because of what people wanted to think he represented – whether that was the lost virtue of the ballplayer or the lost virtues of a press too willing to turn flawed men into heroes – but because of what he overcame to put on a Twins uniform, what he did on the field, and, most importantly, the way he did it, with style and grace. All of that did make him a hero, in its way. It was important in people’s lives, widened their senses of possibility, and inspired them. That, not the tragedy, is worth remembering.

tmarchman@nysun.com