Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero

by David Maraniss

  Clemente took everything so seriously and would not give in, Tijerino wrote later. “Conversing with Clemente is something that never ends.”

  • • •

  During his travels with the Pirates in the United States, Clemente had developed a routine of visiting sick children in National League cities. The hospital visits were rarely publicized, but ailing kids seemed to know about it everywhere. Before each road trip Clemente sorted his large pile of mail in the clubhouse and made a special stack for letters from children in cities where the Pirates were headed next. One morning in Nicaragua, he brought Osvaldo Gil and a few players along on a visit to El Retiro Hospital. There he met a wheelchair-bound twelve-year-old boy named Julio Parrales, who had lost one leg and mangled another playing on the railroad tracks.

  Clemente could seem somber, reserved, cautious about letting strangers close to him, with pride bordering on arrogance. In Puerto Rico, some said he was orgulloso, meaning he had oversized pride of self. “Nobody buys Roberto Clemente cheap! I have my pride! I am a hero to my people!” he had harrumphed one midsummer day in 1967 at Shea Stadium as he angrily rejected a film company’s offer to pay him a hundred dollars to hit into a triple play for a scene in The Odd Couple. But he was also intuitive, looking for connections, and if something touched him, he reacted deeply, immediately, and took you in as part of his family. It didn’t matter who you were to the rest of the world—Jewish accountant, Greek pie maker, black postman, shy teenager, barefoot Puerto Rican wanderer—if Clemente saw something, that was that. Family was everything to him. When he saw Julio Parrales he knelt by the wheelchair and said that for the next world tournament Julio would be the team batboy. “Don’t worry, we are going to help you,” he vowed, and then turned to Gil and said they had to raise the $700 needed to enable Parrales to walk with prosthetic legs. Each player on the Puerto Rican team would end up chipping in $10, the Cubans would donate $50, and Clemente would provide the rest. But before he left the hospital, Clemente said he would see Parrales in the dugout the next time he was in Nicaragua.

  The streets of Managua were festive as December arrived, a celebratory spirit intensified by three weeks of good baseball and the approach of the Griteria de Maria festival and Christmas season. The favored Cubans won the tournament, the decisive victory coming in extra innings against the Americans, but their only loss had been to the home Nicaraguans, a glorious upset that led to a wild night of firecrackers, rifle shots, and honking cars in the crowded streets. There was no celebrating for the Puerto Rican team, which finished in the middle of the pack, beating only teams that had no baseball tradition. Gil thought Clemente might be so upset that he would never want to manage again, but it seemed just the opposite. Clemente talked to him about what they had to do better next time, as though it were assumed that he would come back as manager.

  Clemente would have to consult his wife about it, no doubt. He talked to her before he did most things, or so it seemed to Gil. “You ask your wife for advice too much,” Gil told him one night. Clemente said he relied on her because she was settled, tranquil, even-tempered, and had a better sense than he did about whether people were trustworthy. Anyway, he needled Gil, the comment reflected the sort of stereotypical macho sexism that had held people down throughout history. “The way you think about women is what happened with the major leagues and black players,” Clemente said. “They were afraid that if they let black players in, they’d take over. That’s the way you are with women.”

  One day in the old city Clemente visited a luggage shop and bought a new briefcase made of alligator skin. The handle was ghoulish; styled with the head of a baby alligator. Back at the hotel, Vic Power boomed with good-natured laughter at his friend’s purchase. Clemente worried that the briefcase looked too feminine and said he would cut off the alligator head. No, Power said, leave it like that. Maybe it would be good luck. A few days later, at Vera’s suggestion, the Clementes took a side trip to Granada on Big Lake Nicaragua. When they entered a restaurant in the old colonial town, Roberto encountered another stranger with whom he connected immediately. It was a trained spider monkey who greeted patrons as they walked into the establishment.

  “That’s the monkey we need,” Clemente told Vera. She knew he was serious. Before leaving Río Piedras, he had promised their youngest son, Ricky, that they would come home from Nicaragua with a pet monkey for him. Clemente found the proprietor and said that he wanted the monkey. But the owner was reluctant to part with it. “Anything you want, don’t worry about the amount,” Clemente insisted. “I need that monkey.” The deal was done and he left with a new family member, a primate known thereafter as Teófilo Clemente.

  Clemente flew back to Puerto Rico on December 8 bearing so many gifts that he had to call a driver to haul the cache from the airport. The monkey for Ricky, the briefcase with the little alligator head, dresses and blouses for Vera, presents for his parents and his three sons, Robertito, Luisito, and Ricky, and brothers, nieces, nephews, and friends. One of his prized gifts was a red and white hammock that he brought back for Rafael Hernández Colón of the Popular Democratic Party. To Clemente’s delight, the young liberal, a protégé of Luis Muñoz Marín, had just been elected governor of the commonwealth. Red and white were the colors of his party, and of the Puerto Rican flag. Clemente had been invited to play a key role in the inaugural ceremonies coming up in a few weeks in Old San Juan, but after much deliberation respectfully declined, following the advice of Osvaldo Gil, who also supported Hernández Colón but said the partisanship might needlessly alienate half of Roberto’s baseball fans.

  All seemed well back home after that. Vic Power ate a juicy steak, and suddenly the bone problem in his throat disappeared. Clemente loaded his family into the car for a trip to see his parents at the house he bought for them on Calle Nicolas Aguayo in the El Comandante neighborhood of Carolina. All the boys excited, the great ballplayer exuberant, his magical fingers on the steering wheel, a Hohner harmonica held by a neck brace humming and wailing at his lips, and the newest member of the family, the tailed one, Teófilo, screeching, dancing to the music, and scampering across the shoulders and legs of the little ones as the gold Cadillac Eldorado rolled down the streets of Roberto Clemente’s hometown.

  2

  Where Momen Came From

  IT HAS RAINED A LOT SINCE THEN, AS THE PROVERB goes. This was the summer of 1934, a time of relentless heat and hardship in Puerto Rico. Twelve miles to the southeast of the capital city of San Juan, in Carolina’s rural barrio of San Antón, a large family was about to grow by one. The household of Melchor and Luisa Clemente was crowded enough already. Luisa had two teenage children, Luis and Rosa Oquendo, from a first husband who died and left her widowed at an early age, and she and Melchor had produced four children of their own: Osvaldo, Justino, Andres, and Anairis. Three cousins also stayed with them in the five-room wooden house at kilometer seven on Road 887, and sugarcane workers stopped by every day for meals. With her mother pregnant again, the youngest girl, Anairis, announced that she wanted to have a little brother, but had one other wish. She hoped that he would come out white. On the Saturday afternoon of August 18, the baby was born, and Roberto Clemente Walker was soon presented to Anairis. “Here he is—a little dark.”

  The story has been told for seven decades, accompanied by laughter. Color of skin is noted in Puerto Rico—there is racism there—but it tends to be hidden and silent, with a history far different from the States. When Roberto was born in Carolina, a U.S. citizen by birthright, no laws on the island prohibited people of different shades from eating at the same restaurant, sleeping in the same hotel, or dating and marrying. Within five years of his birth, after a professional winter baseball league was formed, many talented players from the Negro Leagues, banned from organized ball in the United States, were hired to play for the San Juan Senadores and Santurce Cangrejeros and were hailed as stars by Puerto Ricans of all ages and colors. The elite of San Juan and Ponce tended to be white and boas
t of Spanish heritage, but being “a little dark” was not disqualifying.

  Luisa’s family, the Walkers, came from Loiza, the next town east from Carolina and the nave of blackness on the island. Runaway slaves, known as cimarrones, hid from the Spanish Army there in the dense, tangled mangrove swamps off the Atlantic coast, and formed their own community. In Puerto Rican folklore, there is a story that when slavery was abolished in 1873, a messenger bringing word to Loiza was killed in front of a big tree, and for years thereafter the tree dropped scraps of paper like leaves, pieces of a puzzle that former slaves tried in vain to fit together to decipher the lost message of freedom. For Luisa, the message could be found in her Baptist religion and favorite hymn, which she taught all her children. Life is nothing. Life is fleeting. Only God makes man happy.

  Melchor Clemente, already fifty-one when his youngest son was born, grew up in Gurabo, called the city of stairs, in the interior foothills to the south of Carolina. In many ways he was a man of the previous century. Slavery had ended only ten years before his birth. During his childhood, until he turned fifteen in 1898, Puerto Rico was still under Spanish domain. His relatives were poor farmers and sugarcane workers of black and Taino Indian blood. While Luisa had converted from Catholic to Baptist with her family as a child, Melchor was “not very Catholic,” as his son Justino later described him. This meant that he was not particularly religious, though his given name came from the Three Kings, Melchor, Baltazar, and Gaspar, revered in Puerto Rico as magis of the Christmas story. Melchor Clemente’s gift was not frankincense, gold, or myrrh, but sugar; he held a job as foreman for the sugarcane processing company, Central Victoria.

  Sugar then was nearing the end of a four-century run as the economic mainstay of Puerto Rico. The first sugar mill had been built in 1523, only three decades after Columbus reached the island on his second voyage to the New World. More sugar was produced in Puerto Rico in the year of Clemente’s birth than ever before, exceeding a million tons, but still the industry was dying. Devastating hurricanes, lower prices from world competition, deplorable working conditions in the fields, and a protectionist U.S. Congress—all were conspiring against it. In an effort to help mainland growers that year, lawmakers in Washington, treating Puerto Rico like a colony it could manipulate at will, passed legislation that set limits on exports, imposed higher taxes, and paid bonuses to landowners not to grow sugarcane. Jobs were still there, but work was seasonal and unpredictable, and most laborers were paid less than full-time scale. One study showed that in 1934 sugarcane cutters, with the most grueling job, averaged $5.76 a week. Foremen brought home twice that amount, but that still left Melchor Clemente little more than a dollar a week for each member of his extended family.

  By the standards of Depression-era Carolina, the Clementes were not poor. They had food, shelter, electricity, clothing, and shoes. Rainwater for drinking was collected in a water box on the kitchen roof. Everything plain inside: iron beds, one bathroom, built of concrete; bare white walls, furniture of wood and pajilla, rolled corn leaf. Bedrooms overcrowded, some children sleeping in the living room. When they were old enough, ten or twelve, the children earned pennies bringing pails of ice water to workers in the canebrake behind the house. Luisa brought in extra money sewing and making lunches for Melchor’s workers. A front room in the house served as a neighborhood grocery where they sold rice, eggs, milk, flour, and, on weekends, meat. Luisa was a dignified woman, correct and literate, reading her Bible, always finely dressed, and not bulky, but she had muscular shoulders and arms with which she could lift the carcass of a freshly slaughtered cow from a wheelbarrow and butcher it into cuts of beef. (A powerful right arm was something she passed along to her youngest son. When people later asked about his awe-inspiring throws from right field, he would say, You should see my mother. At age eighty, she could still fling a baseball from the mound to home plate.)

  Roberto’s earliest days were shaded by tragedy. He was still an infant when Anairis died from hideous burns. Luisa Clemente had two cooking stoves at her house, one in the kitchen, for family meals, and a larger one outside on the patio, where she cooked for the sugarcane workers. Known as a fogón, the outdoor stove burned firewood inside a pit made of three large rocks. One weekday afternoon, when only the women and children were in the house, Anairis was playing near the fogón and a can of gasoline spilled onto the fire and the whoosh of flames flashed onto her silk dress. Luisa took her to the municipal hospital in Carolina and stayed with her day and night. Little Anairis died three days later, burns covering 90 percent of her body. The hospital sent a man out to Central Victoria to give Melchor the sad news. The messenger’s name was Flor Zabala, which meant nothing at the time, but later would prove to be a great coincidence. It was the father of Roberto’s future wife, a woman he would not meet for another thirty years.

  One husband lost, now a daughter. Luisa tried to hide her pain, but sometimes late at night her son Justino saw her crying alone when she thought no one was watching. Roberto was too young to know his sister, but for decades after her death she remained with him. Here she is, he would say. I can feel Anairis at my side. She was part of the mysticism of his life. Clemente was haunted by fire. He had been too young to help his sister, but years later, when he was twelve, he saved a man who had crashed in Carolina by running across a highway and pulling him from the burning wreckage of his car.

  From a young age, Roberto had his own way of doing things. He was pensive, intelligent, and could not be rushed. He wanted to know how and why. His most common phrase was “momentito, momentito,” when he was interrupted or asked to do something. Time out. Wait a minute. He said momentito so often that Flora, one of the older cousins who often took care of him, shortened it and started calling him “Momen.” To his family and Puerto Rican friends, at school and on the ball fields, Momen was his nickname from then on.

  The sprawl of metropolitan San Juan eventually would reach Carolina and turn much of it into a noisy jumble of auto shops and storefronts, but it was a very different place, slow and pastoral, during Roberto’s childhood in the thirties and forties. The choke of urban life seemed far away. There was an orange grove across the street from the Clemente house, and in the other direction, behind them, a lane led back to vast fields of sugarcane. Road 887 saw little traffic, so quiet that Roberto and his childhood friend Ricardo Vicenti, who lived across the way near the orange trees, spent much of their time playing improvised variations of baseball in the dusty street. Baseball was Roberto’s favorite sport, his obsession, from an early age. “When I was a little kid, the only thing I used to do was play ball all the time,” Clemente recalled during an interview decades later. “With a paper ball, with a rubber ball, with a tennis ball.” Sometimes the ball was a tin can, emptied of beans or tomato sauce, or a lumpy sphere made of string and old rags. Often, they hit fungoes using a broomstick as the bat and a bottle cap as the ball. But it was always baseball. Rosa Semprit, a neighbor who walked by the Clemente house on her way to school, remembered that every time she saw Roberto outside he was throwing something; even if he was alone, he would be tossing a ball against a wall.

  There was not that much else for a boy to do in the barrio of San Antón. The beaches of the Atlantic were ten miles north, and El Yunque, the exotic rainforest, stood fifteen miles further east. On a clear day, the breeze carried a scent of saltwater from one direction and the mountains were visible in another, but without a car both were too far away. Many years, the lone trip to the beach as a family came on the Fourth of July, when much of the neighborhood traveled by bus caravan to Isla Verde for the day. For local entertainment, movies were projected onto a wall inside a ranch house down the street. Children attended in packs and sat on hard wooden benches, laughing at grainy movies, a few from Hollywood but most in Spanish and produced in Mexico, black-and-white short films starring the comedian Cantinflas.

  The adults walked to work. Melchor was a regular figure along the back roads, a short man with straw hat
and machete, trooping miles at a time to the fields to the west or processing plant to the north, occasionally riding an old country mare. In later years, he also carried a .38 revolver and transistor radio wherever he went. Radios were a family trademark. Melchor was a man of habits, like his son. He was said to eat precisely eight hard-boiled eggs a day. He was gone from dawn until after nightfall, so his children did not see much of him, though Roberto, as an adult, spoke nostalgically of family gatherings that included Melchor. He grew up, Clemente once said, “with people who really had to struggle.” His mother never went to a show, never learned how to dance. “But even the way we used to live, I was so happy, because my brothers and my father and mother, we used to get together at night and we would sit down and make jokes and eat whatever we have to eat. And this was something that was wonderful to me.” His older brother Justino, known to the family as Matino, had one memory less wonderful. His father was loving, but also strict, and punished the boys with a horsewhip. Melchor gave his sons this advice about nonviolence: “Don’t hit anyone, but don’t let anyone hit you, either. I’d prefer to see you in jail than in a coffin.” There was a tradition of dueling in Carolina that stretched back into the nineteenth century and was reflected in one of the town’s old nicknames, El Pueblo de los Tumbabrazos—the town of those who cut off arms.

  The old man knew nothing about baseball. The sport had reached the island from Cuba even before U.S. Marines came ashore in July 1898, but Melchor never had time for it as a young man and had not learned the basics. Once, watching from the stands, he felt sorry for his son for having to run all the way around the bases after hitting a ball while most of the other batters were allowed to return to the bench and sit down after sprinting to first base. But Roberto was not the first or only Clemente to love the game. Matino, who was seven years older, played first base in the top amateur league, a slick fielder and feared line-drive hitter. Roberto admired his older brother, and always insisted that Matino was the best ballplayer in the family but came along too soon, just at the cusp of the segregated era in professional baseball in the States. His career was cut short in any case when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in October 1950 and served three years, including eleven months in Korea with C Company of the 10th Engineers Combat Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division. Matino was Momen’s first baseball instructor, and he maintained that role, offering advice and counsel long after his little brother became a major league star.