George Kimball/America At Large: He seemed to represent everything that was good about sport, and in retrospect, part of the charm may have been that Kirby Puckett didn't resemble an athlete at all.

He stood barely 5ft 8in tall, and packed into that frame was a pudgy little ball of energy. The late Los Angeles sportswriter Jim Murray once described him as "a cantaloupe with legs", and every time he hit a baseball or chased down a fly ball he was, in effect, striking a blow for the short, round men of the world.

And part of the charm for those of us who cover sports for a living was that Puckett was, well, charming. He was unfailingly co-operative and articulate, pleasant to deal with even following a loss. He seemed to be one of those rare baseball players who got it; he appeared to understand just how fortunate he was to be getting paid to play a kids' sport. Since the dawn of time, professional athletes have been heard to gush that they'd be as happy to play for nothing, but when Kirby Puckett said it, you actually believed him.

Off the field he was even better: over the course of his 12-year major league career with the Minnesota Twins, he devoted himself to charitable and civic causes. An African-American kid raised in the ghettoes of Chicago grew up to become the most visible embodiment of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, municipalities in which minorities are truly a minority.

At the 1992 Democratic National Convention, held in New York to nominate Bill Clinton, the leader of the Minnesota delegation rose to announce his state's vote by proclaiming: "Minnesota, the state of Walter Mondale, Hubert H Humphrey, and Kirby Puckett . . ."

Four years later Puckett was unexpectedly stricken with glaucoma in his right eye and forced to retire from baseball. He left with a .318 lifetime batting average, and the 10-time All-Star who had led the Twins to two World Series titles was made a team vice-president. The Minneapolis street on which the club's offices were located was renamed Kirby Puckett Place, and when he became eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2001, Kirby went in on the first ballot. Of course, by then that stuff was old hat to Puckett: he'd been named to the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame even earlier.

When the Twins opened the 2003 season in Detroit a few days ago their erstwhile goodwill ambassador was otherwise engaged. Five blocks away from Kirby Puckett Place, Puckett himself was back in the limelight as he occupied the defendant's seat in a 10th-floor courtroom of the Hennepin County Courthouse while a jury heard a recitation of the sordid events of last September 6th, for which Puckett was charged with sexual assault and false imprisonment.

According to the prosecution, Puckett forcibly dragged a woman into the men's toilet of an Eden Prairie saloon called the Redstone American Grill, where he roughly groped her breast before her screams attracted intervention.

According to Puckett, he merely escorted the lady in question into the men's room, where, after finding one stall occupied and another covered in vomit, he led her "like a gentleman" into a third.

Whom one chooses to believe, over the past week the reputation of the sanitary facilities at the Redstone American Grill has suffered nearly as much as Puckett's own once-good name.

Whether he did do what the prosecution claims he did - and it sounds to us as if he probably did - isn't nearly as consequential as the reappraisal of Puckett's virtuous image that has resulted. While some have chosen to interpret the unseemly incident as yet another example of a fallen star who doesn't know which way to turn when the cheering stops, the truth appears to be that nearly everything we knew about the off-field Kirby Puckett was a carefully-crafted fabrication.

Even if he is acquitted, his wholesome image is in tatters, along with the fanciful dreams of the hundreds of thousands who grew up idolising him.

Turns out the storybook marriage of Kirby and Tonya Puckett was also somewhat illusory. Six weeks after his 1986 wedding, Puckett resumed his relationship with his long-term mistress, Laura Nygren, and for the next 16 years the player followed time-honoured baseball tradition by cheating on both his wife and his mistress.

It also turns out Kirby Puckett's humanitarian activities were performed largely by Mrs Puckett, who devoted herself to his off-field projects. Kirby himself appears to have been less enthusiastic.

Laura Nygren recalled to Sports Illustrated's Frank DeFord a couple of weeks ago that Puckett's parting words on leaving for a promised visit to a child in a hospital were, "I don't give a shit. It's just another kid who's sick."

Turns out Puckett also once put a cocked gun to Tonya's head and threatened to kill her. On another occasion he tried to strangle her with an electric cord.

Tonya Puckett divorced her husband last year. Frightened by his erratic behaviour, Laura Nygren took out a restraining order on him - in the wake of threats in reponse to her demand for support for her 15-year-old son.

And the Twins, who apparently enabled the Puckett-Nygren relationship for many years by arranging joint travel, were forced to confront reality even before the rest of us were: turns out that back in 2001, the same year Puckett became eligible for the Hall of Fame, the organisation arranged a financial settlement to ensure the silence of a female employee who had accused the baseball icon of sexual harassment. Kirby was also in the bizarre habit, according to Nygren, of driving to highly public places, where he would step out of his car and urinate on the spot.

Even if he is convicted, Puckett is probably looking at a one-year sentence at most, along with (ironically) "community service", but the entire matter has caused those of us who helped craft his illusory image to re-examine just how we go about creating and perpetuating our sporting heroes.

And we plead guilty.