If I'd been told 15 years ago Kirby Puckett would be dead today, I'd have been crushed.

Outside the Blue Jays, whom I worshiped at the time, the roly-poly centrefielder was my favourite ballplayer. Once, in a rare moment of youthful brazenness, I worked up the courage to approach him - or at least, to peer through the cracks of the Minnesota Twins' dugout during one of their visits and offer a tentative "Hey, Kirby." I had no followup when he turned his head. But even getting his attention was a treasured memory.

It was impossible not to love Kirby, and not just because a 5'8" guy who looked more like a ballboy than a ballplayer somehow managed a Hall of Fame career. Running and jumping and grinning his way through a dozen seasons in the Majors, taking less money than he was worth to stay with the Minnesota Twins, committing himself to charity work - he was as close to a saint as baseball got.

At least, that's how we all saw him. Then things got a lot cloudier. And when he was felled by a stroke earlier this week at the tragically young age of 45, I didn't know what to think.

None of the allegations against him were ever proven in court. But the image of Puckett from his playing days was difficult to square with the one that emerged earlier this decade, when an alarmingly overweight Puckett re-emerged amid allegations he'd dragged a woman into a restaurant bathroom and groped her. Although he was acquitted, the charges culminated in a brutal Sports Illustrated cover story accusing him of everything from sexual harassment to attempting to strangle his ex-wife with an electrical cord.

Forced out of the game prematurely by glaucoma, it was plausible Puckett's life had spiralled out of control. But what of the allegations that even in his prime, his image was a sham - that his ex-wife was behind most of his charity efforts, even as he cheated on her and privately dismissed the plight of the sick children he visited?

Considering that most of this testimony apparently came from Puckett's ex-wife, he may just have been a victim of character assassination. But that didn't prevent the lingering suspicion that we'd been had.

When it comes to sports idols of our youth, nothing is more unsettling.

Few adults hold unvarnished views of their favourite stars, especially in this era of extreme media scrutiny. But for kids, it's different. There's a brief time when sports are magical and a few players are elevated to the level of deity.

Later in life, even as we dismiss contemporary players as overpaid brats, many of us still cling to the icons of our youth. But that only works when you can see them now as you saw them then. Finding out that a jerk like Barry Bonds is even more of a jerk than you thought is easy enough to handle. But when you're forced to view the "good guys" as crime suspects, it means being robbed of your naivete.

Like Puckett in baseball, Theo Fleury was my favourite hockey player outside Toronto. He was a different animal -- cockier, flashier, more emotional than Kirby. But he was another little guy bucking the odds -- this in a sport where being 5'6" should have disqualified him outright.

But before his career was over, Fleury had been exposed as a long-time substance abuser and proceeded to publicly unravel with suspensions, missed practices and brawls at strip clubs. Reduced to playing for the Belfast Giants of the British Elite Ice Hockey League, he's recently faced suspensions for firing a puck at a referee and attempting to climb into the crowd to fight fans.

By all accounts, Fleury has past demons that help explain his behaviour. And that's more than can be said for some of the other athletes whose images were suddenly reversed -- from the flagrant (Pete Rose's "Charlie Hustle" act falling to a gambling scandal) to the relatively minor (former Jay Roberto Alomar spitting in the face of an umpire). And then, of course, there was the granddaddy of them all - O.J. Simpson.

With Kirby, at least, we can hold out hope - bolstered by all the warm tributes that have emerged this week - that he was just the victim of slander. Or at least, that's what I'm trying to do. As you get older, you don't get to pick new sports heroes. And I'm not prepared to give up my old ones without a fight.