More Puck

A.E. Housman's poem "To An Athlete Dying Young" is a good place to start today:

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields were glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

Puck lived long enough to avoid the fate of the Shropshire lad who is the subject of Housman's poem, and it is clear that his name will not die "before the man." In fact, his name will live on, not only in Minnesota but everywhere people who love baseball gather. One day on, it's not any easier to think that Puck is gone.

The tributes and enconia are everywhere - be sure to read both Star Tribune sports columnists (Jim Souhan and Patrick Reusse), both with deeply useful meditations on Puckett's too-brief life and legacy. We pass quickly over the past few years, post-Cooperstown, when it all seemed to go so wrong for Puck. If you want the details, Frank Deford's merciless 2003 SI piece is still out there on the internet, but you don't really want to know. Not today, at least.

Early though the laurel grows, it withers quicker than the rose.

In our increasingly impatient, iconoclastic world, heroes are hard to find. But maybe heroes aren't what we need so much as we need humans, with all their imperfections, their appetites and their dreams. It takes a big dream to get from the projects of Chicago to the Hall of Fame. Puck's greatest legacy may be that he had the wit and imagination to find a role that was well beyond what anyone might have expected - not baseball player, but purveyor of joy.