Jack Morris was known as a tough and fiery competitor during 18 big-league seasons. But the St. Paul native made no attempt to show a tough facade Tuesday as he reflected on the death of Twins great Harmon Killebrew.
"I lost a hero," Morris said, his voice cracking and tears welling in his eyes.
Morris, 56, was among six former Twins who gathered in the Target Field interview room to talk about Killebrew, who died Tuesday in Arizona at age 74 after a five-month battle with esophageal cancer.
Tony Oliva, Julio Becquer and Frank Quilici were teammates and close friends of Killebrew's. Native Minnesotans Morris, Kent Hrbek and Paul Molitor remembered Killebrew as their boyhood idol before they stepped onto a major league field.
Hrbek grew up in the shadow of Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington and described the Hall of Famer slugger as "Paul Bunyan with a uniform on."
Molitor, who flew to Arizona last weekend to visit Killebrew after it was revealed that he was in his final days, spoke of being thankful for the opportunity to spend time with one of his heroes. "I'm grateful that I could tell him, as a young man growing up in this state, [that I] idolized him and just that I was very appreciative of the man he was and how I was able to learn from him," said Molitor, who also is in the Hall of Fame. "I picked the guy that you would want to pick to be your idol."
Morris, the longtime Detroit Tigers ace who won Game 7 of the 1991 World Series for the Twins, said he believed that Tuesday was more of a celebration of Killebrew's life than it was a mourning of his death.
"I'll always remember the good in Harmon, and like Paul and like Kent, to remember the innocence of being a young kid who just looked up to a guy he didn't know because of what he did as a baseball player, that you hoped that maybe someday you could be like," Morris said. "As a grown man now, I look back at him not as that guy but as the guy that tried to show me you don't have to be angry, you don't have to be mad. You can love and share love."
