Clemente

by The Clemente Family

  My words caused my dad to sit up.

  “Don’t go on the plane,” I told my dad.

  “Why?” he said.

  “The plane is going to crash.”

  “It’s okay,” my dad said. “Go back to sleep.”

  * * *

  VERA CLEMENTE: After my husband died, I did wait for him. I was hoping he’d come home. This went on for years. I kept his clothes in the closet. His drawers still had his clothes. This went on for a long time. Then one morning I saw Ricky sitting in front of the television. Ricky was five at the time. He was too young to really know his father. He was watching an old film about Roberto. In the film, Roberto was playing baseball with some children. Right next to Ricky, close to him on the floor, were some of Roberto’s clothes he had taken out of the drawer. It broke my heart. I put all of Roberto’s clothes that were in the closet and drawers away after that.

  One day, a little less than a month after the accident, I couldn’t find Roberto Jr. in the house. I looked all over. I found him in a back part of the house. He had gathered all of the newspaper clippings about his dad and was looking over them.

  Roberto Jr. always wanted to be like his father. I remember, not long after the crash, it was bedtime for him, and we were talking. “Mommy, tell the Pirates not to put anyone in right field,” he told me. “I want to play the right field for the Pirates.”

  I told him one day it could happen. “No, Mommy,” he told me, “I want to play right now.”

  * * *

  CLEMENTE AND ROBERTO Jr. weren’t the only ones who had premonitions about that flight. Not long before that, Pirates teammate José Pagán questioned the safety of the aircraft. “You know everything about baseball,” Pagán said. “But you know nothing about airplanes.”

  Clemente was trusting of the pilot. “The people in charge know what they’re doing,” he told Pagán. “They will not let us take off if we can’t make it. If you are supposed to die, you are going to die.”

  Just one of the five bodies aboard the plane was recovered. Clemente’s was not the one. The Federal Aviation Administration returned to Vera a suitcase that belonged to her husband. Inside was $1,000 in cash and a list of names believed to be Nicaraguan citizens. Clemente, in addition to galvanizing support in Puerto Rico that led to the donation of tons of supplies in about six days, had also told a number of Nicaraguans he would help discover whether relatives and friends had survived the earthquake. Thus, the list of names. Rescuers also found a brown sock. Vera knew it belonged to her husband.

  * * *

  THE PREMONITIONS HAVE always given Clemente’s legacy an almost spiritual, if not devotional, feel. Jon Matlack, a former pitcher for the New York Mets, met Clemente while Matlack was a teenager playing winter baseball in San Juan. Clemente invited Matlack and a group of other young players to his house. At that point, Clemente had already been a multiple All-Star. Matlack was awestruck, and not just because he was in Clemente’s presence, but because Clemente had welcomed Matlack into his home. Young players weren’t used to stars being so hospitable. Clemente laughed and joked with the group like he had known them for years. Then Matlack noticed something. His attention was drawn to the bat Clemente was holding. It was massive, and Clemente’s large hands tossed it around as if he were holding a cigar. Matlack thought it looked like a club. He became so fixated on the bat that he went to pick it up when Clemente had put it on the floor to leave the room for a moment. When Matlack picked up the bat, he was impressed at its heavy weight.

  He also thought: Any man who can swing a bat like this is going to make history.

  Matlack would find out himself years later, when his curveball was drilled to left-center for Clemente’s record-setting three thousandth hit.

  ROBERTO CLEMENTE JR.: Everything my dad was about, how he dedicated his life to helping others, is summed up, in a way, with how he died.

  VERA CLEMENTE: He would go down the street to help someone or go around the world. Whenever we traveled, he would leave the hotel to meet the real people. He would walk the streets and look for the common person. He never forgot what it was like for him growing up in Puerto Rico. When he played for the Pirates, whenever they traveled, he would visit kids in a hospital.

  We went to Nicaragua [Clemente was managing the Puerto Rican amateur baseball team that traveled to Nicaragua for the Amateur Baseball World Series], and while there Roberto and other Pirates players visited [El Retiro hospital]. He met a lot of people. One was a little boy [twelve-year-old Julio Parrales] who could not walk because of an accident. [He was wheelchair-bound after, while playing on some railroad tracks, he lost one of his legs and had the other severely injured.] Roberto really liked him. He told the boy, “I’m going to help you.” Roberto donated the prosthetic legs to Parrales so that he could walk again.

  He felt a closeness to Nicaragua, because he met so many people who were poor and needed help.

  LUIS CLEMENTE: After the earthquake you had entire countries organizing relief efforts. In Puerto Rico, it was basically Mom, Dad, some civic leaders and artists. But mostly it was Mom and Dad. It was the only time Dad really used the Clemente name.

  [The boy who had such a profound impact on Clemente died in the earthquake. Clemente never knew about the boy’s death.]

  VERA CLEMENTE: One afternoon, Roberto went on TV, channel four in Puerto Rico, to ask people to donate. So many things came in—food, clothes, and medicine. It was incredible. People in Nicaragua were telling us specifically what they needed. We were communicating by CB radio. [Two collection places for the aid were set up—at Hiram Bithorn Stadium and the Plaza Las Américas.]

  Flights started to go over with aid. The first flight had five X-ray machines. There was also a freighter. Not many people remember that there was a freighter. [It carried 210 tons of clothing and thirty-six tons of food.] Puerto Rico raised over $150,000 in money and aid.

  LUIS CLEMENTE: The rumor that’s lasted all this time is that he went to Managua because he had a girlfriend there. It’s just not true.

  VERA CLEMENTE: [Laughing.] There was no girlfriend. I was with him all the time. He was a serious and formal man and dedicated to his family. That rumor comes from the fact that we were going to bring back [a nanny] who could help with the kids.

  The first three flights were on regular cargo planes. The fourth flight was in a DC-7 cargo plane, the one that crashed. The day before the accident, we sent a boat loaded with supplies.

  Two weeks before the accident, there was a picture in the local newspaper of the plane, saying it was having problems. I didn’t know about that picture until after the accident happened.

  LUIS CLEMENTE: There were so many strange things from that flight and that day.

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: Roberto saw the plane just a little while before they were going to leave and noticed the tires. He said, “The tires look kind of low.”

  VERA CLEMENTE: I was making lunch for us [her and Roberto] before the flight. Roberto was trying to sleep to get ready for the flight to Nicaragua. I was in the kitchen and there was a song playing in my head over and over. [It was “Tragedia de Viernes Santo,” a highly popular song about a DC-4 that crashed into the ocean after departing San Juan for New York on Good Friday in 1952.]

  LUIS CLEMENTE: I think Dad was having this inner fight. He felt like something may have been wrong with the plane, and didn’t want to get on, but he also thought, “I have to go. I have to make sure everything’s okay in Nicaragua.”

  VERA CLEMENTE: He was also going to bring back five friends who were in Nicaragua working as volunteers at the Maseya hospital. When the plane took off, the water was rough, and it started to rain.

  I got a call about the accident. I didn’t accept it. I said no.

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: The divers pulled a body out of the water. It was put on a helicopter. The crowd at the beach was really large, hundreds of people. The helicopter moved slowly overhead toward where it was going to land. The crowd of people thought
the body was Roberto’s. Everyone ran, following the helicopter, but the body was the pilot.

  PIRATES TEAMMATE WILLIE STARGELL, AT CLEMENTE’S MEMORIAL SERVICE: I’ll tell you, it’s really hard to put into words all the feelings that I have for Roberto. Since I’ve been with him I’ve had a chance to know a really dynamic man who walked tall in every sense you can think of. He was proud; he was dedicated. He was in every sense you can determine a man. And I think going the way he went really typifies how he lived. Helping other people without seeking any publicity or fame. Just making sure that he could lend a hand and get the job done…The greatness that he is, we all know the ballplayer that he is. For those that did not know him as a man, they really missed a fine treat for not knowing this gentleman. I had the opportunity to play with him, to sit down and talk about the things that friends talk about. And I am losing a great friend. But he will always remain in my heart.

  RICHARD NIXON IN WHITE HOUSE STATEMENT: The best memorial we can build to his memory is to contribute generously for the relief of those he was trying to help—the earthquake victims in Nicaragua.

  PUERTO RICAN WRITER ELLIOTT CASTRO: That night on which Roberto Clemente left us physically, his immortality began.

  LUIS CLEMENTE: My dad was obsessed with the number three. He’d have visions of his sister who had died, appearing to him, holding three gold coins. Three thousand hits…his uniform number, 21…”

  VERA CLEMENTE: A few days after the crash, Roberto Jr. would pick up the phone and pretend he was talking to his father.

  ROBERTO CLEMENTE JR.: The night of the premonition…the night before that flight…the night I went to my father and told him not to fly and he told me, “Roberto, it will be okay”…all these decades later…I remember. There are pangs of guilt.

  In the days after my dad’s death, as millions of people from Puerto Rico to Pittsburgh to Nicaragua realized that my dad was indeed never coming back, photographers snapped me kissing a poster that held a picture of my father. That image was as emotional to Puerto Ricans as the picture of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting the coffin of his assassinated father.

  Now, remembering those memories today, it’s the fortieth anniversary of my father’s death. For me, the week prior was probably tougher. The day of the anniversary, I had been readying myself. I braced myself. I knew what was coming. The week before is when my emotions start flying. Every other part of the year, I’m fine. I speak to students and we talk about my father. I speak to young kids about my father and I’m okay. People ask questions about him, talk to me about him, and everything is fine. It’s the one time of the year when things get tough and I have these feelings of guilt. I feel like I could have stopped him. I went to him about my dream. I tried to tell him, but I was so young. I didn’t have all of the words to explain everything fully. If I was able to better explain about the vision I had, he would have never gotten on that plane. If I could have told him more directly, I could have saved my father’s life.

  | CHAPTER EIGHT |

  ETERNAL

  Just before the 1971 season, Clemente yet again demonstrated his ability to move people deeply. Standing before national media gathered for the annual Baseball Writers’ Association of America banquet in Houston, he was presented the Tris Speaker award, given for lifetime achievement in the sport of baseball. After his acceptance speech, Clemente received a standing ovation from more than eight hundred hardened, cynical baseball writers. It was this thought Clemente expressed that caused some eyes in the room to water:

  “If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on this Earth.”

  Clemente added that people should “live together and work together, no matter what race or nationality.”

  VERA CLEMENTE: He felt very comfortable with that 1971 Pirates team. He didn’t feel alone.

  ROBERTO CLEMENTE JR.: That team represented America. It really did.

  [The Pirates in 1971 fielded the first all-black-and-Latino lineup in major-league history. It lasted one inning, because one of the players, pitcher Dock Ellis, was taken out of the game after giving up four runs in the second inning.]

  STEVE BLASS: [Speaking of diversity of leadership.] You had a Latino player in Clemente, a black guy [in] Willie Stargell, and a white guy in Bill Mazeroski. We had the whole program covered. They were leaders—all three of them….

  TONY BARTIROME: He had experienced a lot of racism and never became bitter. If you saw the conditions the black players had to live in [during spring training in the late 1950s], you would have been shocked. They had to live there because racism prevented them from living in the better places with the white players. He fought to make things in baseball equal.

  LUIS CLEMENTE: Dad was proud he was able to help diversify that team. You saw that pride when he spoke on the night dedicated to him.

  ROBERTO CLEMENTE, ON ROBERTO CLEMENTE NIGHT AT THREE RIVERS STADIUM: I would like to dedicate this honor to all the Puerto Rican mothers. I don’t have words to express this thankfulness. I only ask those who are watching this program and are close to their parents, ask for their blessing, and that they have each other. As those friends who are watching this program or listening to it on the radio shake each other’s hands as a sign of friendship that united all of us Puerto Ricans. I’ve sacrificed these sixteen years, maybe I’ve lost many friendships due to the effort it takes for someone to try to do the maximum in sports and especially the work it takes for us, the Puerto Ricans, especially for the Latinos, to triumph in the big leagues. I have achieved this triumph for us, the Latinos. I believe that it is a matter of pride for all of us, the Puerto Ricans as well as those in the Caribbean, because we are all brothers….

  * * *

  CLEMENTE WAS, WELL, Clemente in the World Series against Baltimore. The first two games typified how he played whenever appearing in a huge moment. In the first two games, he had four hits in nine at-bats, and also made the play of the World Series. It was the kind of play he had made in Puerto Rico as a kid, in Montreal as a frustrated, budding star, and so many times as a Pirate.

  In the second game, Merv Rettenmund, one of Baltimore’s fastest players, was on second base. A ball was hit deep toward Clemente, down the right-field line, and it seemed a simple matter that Rettenmund would advance to third base. Clemente chased down the ball while at full gallop and caught it, his inertia still pulling him forward. Amazingly, Clemente stopped himself, pivoted, and made a one-hop, three-hundred-foot throw to third, which turned a routine tag by Rettenmund into a fight for survival. Rettenmund slid into third and was barely ruled safe.

  Orioles catcher Andy Etchebarren, whose career lasted from 1962 to 1978, told sportswriter Dick Young the throw was the greatest he had ever seen by an outfielder.

  VERA CLEMENTE: The night before Game 1 of the World Series, we were in Maryland. Roberto and I went to a seafood restaurant. Roberto had clams and got really sick. He had food poisoning. He was throwing up. The team doctor was worried and I was really worried. He had to get fluids intravenously in our hotel room [at the Lord Baltimore Hotel]. We didn’t sleep at all. I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to play but he did. Then he goes into the game and still plays well. Almost no one knew how sick he was. [Clemente had two hits in the game—a double in the first inning and a single to center in the second.] He was so determined.

  MANNY SANGUILLÉN: He played like a champion in that World Series. The world got to see how great he was. Funny thing, he always thought he was so much better than the way he played in that World Series. He said, “When I was younger, Manny, I played so much better.” He was always challenging himself and his teammates.

  STEVE BLASS: After the World Series [against Baltimore], we were on the team plane. [Blass pitched two complete game wins in the series. He allowed only seven hits and two runs in eighteen innings. His performance was so remarkable that he finished second in MVP voting to Clemente.] I was sitting i
n the window seat. Roberto came up to my aisle and gestured to me. I squeezed out of the aisle and went up to him. He said, “Let me hug you.” He was so genuinely happy for me. That’s how he was. I never wanted to disappoint him.

  ROBERTO CLEMENTE JR.: People saw what my dad did [Clemente hit safely in each of the seven World Series games and, in fact, hit safely in both of the World Series he played] as sort of his introduction to a large part of America. But this was a culmination of being a great player his entire life.

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: In Puerto Rico, everyone followed the three thousand hits and everyone followed the World Series. Whatever Roberto did drew the attention of all of Puerto Rico. He made everyone proud.

  VERA CLEMENTE: Roberto started talking a lot about Sports City after the World Series. He wanted to use baseball to talk about the problems facing kids.

  ROBERTO CLEMENTE, 1971: The World Series is the greatest thing that ever happened to me in baseball. Mentally it has done for me more than anything before. It gave me a chance to talk to writers more than before. I don’t want anything for myself, but through me I can help lots of people. They spend millions of dollars for dope control in Puerto Rico. But they attack the problem after the problem is there. Why don’t they attack it before it starts? You try to get kids so they don’t become addicts, and it would help to get them interested in sports and give them somewhere to learn to play them. I want to have three baseball fields, a swimming pool, basketball, tennis, a lake where fathers and sons can get together…and one of the biggest problems we have today is the father doesn’t have time for the kids and they lose control over the children.