Minnesota Twins legend Kirby Puckett says he was a "serious, serious park rat" when he was a young boy growing up in Chicago. "If you wanted to find me in the summertime, wintertime — whenever it was — I was at the park with my buddies," Puckett says. "We had good clean fun there and stayed out of trouble, and the park board would help us out when they could. It wasn't much, but it was just enough to keep our attention and keep us from perhaps going in the other direction."

Puckett's "park rat" experiences played a big part in his decision to join with Dave Winfield in 1993 as founding sponsor of the Twins Rookie League program, a youth baseball organization aimed at introducing the game to inner city boys and girls. Puckett still has fond memories of the program's kick-off event: "You should have seen the looks on these little kids' faces when we called their names and they came up to meet me and Dave and we presented them with their own gloves. It was something special."

The Twins Rookie League is one of a long list of charitable endeavors in which Puckett is involved. Since 1991, he has worked closely with a Minnesota charity that provides children with life-saving heart surgery. The Kirby Puckett Celebrity 8-Ball Invitational has raised more than $3 million for the charity in its first ten years. Puckett's interest in the issue stems from the heart-attack deaths of both of his parents.

It was at an 8-Ball event that Puckett met one of the first beneficiaries of the heart surgery he helped fund. The girl had the surgery when she was six years old, and is now a healthy teenager. "I'll never forget when she took the microphone and said, 'thank you so much for saving my life,'" Puckett says. "I don't cry too much, but a couple of tears fell that day."

Puckett gives back to the community in numerous other ways as well: in 1994, he created the Puckett Scholars Program, which provides a growing number of academic scholarships to minority students. When he was a Twins player Puckett started the "Because We Care" program to provide thousands of reserved-seat tickets to needy Twin Cities youngsters, and the program continues on today. Puckett joined the board of the Minnesota Twins Community Fund in 1998, and was elected board chair in 2000.