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

by David Maraniss

  Roberto Clemente did not add much to the total. On February 3, while he was still in San Juan, he had signed his first major league contract for $6,000.

  • • •

  When the decade started, the Pirates asked for patience. It was a five-year plan, fans were told. Then it was Operation Peach Fuzz, the force-feeding of young players who were not ready. As the fifth season approached, Rickey was feeling the harsh sting of skeptics. “I am by no means perfect,” he wrote in a private memo in his own defense. “I am not a baseball God. I have never pretended to be so. I do not claim perfection. Far from it. But I am not God damned and I will never be. No series of articles from writers anywhere can divert me from the job at hand or dull the edge of my courage to do the things I think ought to be done to bring a great team to this town. Cicero had his Cataline, Abraham Lincoln had his Vallandigham, and even ordinary individuals like myself can have detractors.” But the future will answer all critics, Rickey said. And the future was now. Nineteen fifty-five, he boasted, would be the time when “the bells will start ringing as the red wagon comes down the street. That’s when the Pittsburgh folks will shout, ‘By George, this is it!’”

  In fact, once the team went North, the fifth season of Mr. Rickey’s five-year plan was over almost as soon as it began. The Pirates lost their opener at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and never looked back. They just kept on losing, eight losses in a row. A few games were close. The scoring totals for those opening eight against the Dodgers, Giants, and Phillies were: Opponents 54, Pirates 16. Rickey’s judgment that Clemente would have trouble with right-handed pitchers was passed along to Fred Haney, the manager, who kept him on the bench as the season began, despite his productive spring. It was not until the fourth game that Clemente made his debut, on the afternoon of April 17 at Forbes Field against the Dodgers. Johnny Podres—a southpaw who later that year pitched Brooklyn to its finest hour, shutting out the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series—was on the mound when Clemente rapped a bounding shot to the left side of the infield. Shortstop Pee Wee Reese knocked the ball down but could not make a play at first. A ground ball single in a losing game with a lame last-place team; no way to know then that someday people would look back on that hit as a piece of baseball history.

  In the clubhouse under Forbes Field, dank and ancient, Clemente was given a locker next to another rookie, none other than Gene Freese. There was no animosity between them, although Clemente felt that Curt Roberts had not been given a fair chance to keep his second-base job. Freese liked to tease Clemente about the rats that roamed the encrusted tunnel between the clubhouse and dugout. Had ’em for pets down in West Virginia, he would say, knowing that Clemente could not stand the sight of them. Clemente and Freese were not strangers. They had competed against each other in the Puerto Rican winter league. Freese had played for the San Juan Senadores in 1954, and had made the All-Star team, where he met Clemente and Willie Mays. One of his proudest moments, as he would recall it decades later, came before the All-Star game when several players took part in a sixty-yard dash. There is no official record of the event, but by Freese’s account Hal Jeffcoat won, George Freese, his brother, playing for Mayagüez, finished second, he came in third, and trailing behind them were the Santurce club’s two speedsters, Mays and Clemente. “They would look fast, but in a straight dash, we beat them,” he said.

  It was typical of Pittsburgh teams of that era that Freese was best known for an oddity. To have brothers Gene and George Freese on the same team was uncommon enough, but the Pirates took it a step further. They also had Johnny and Eddie O’Brien, who were not only brothers but identical twins. No team before or since had the brother act going quite like the 1955 Pirates, though the Giants later would have three brothers Alou. And the O’Briens provided another curious dimension. If the team lacked talent in baseball, it could field one powerhouse basketball squad. The O’Briens, known as the Gold Dust Twins, had led the Seattle University Chieftains to the NCAA basketball tournament in 1952 before being recommended as baseball players to Branch Rickey by Bing Crosby, who was vice president of the Pirates board of directors. (On stationery with a Bing Crosby/Hollywood logo, the crooner wrote Rickey: “I think you’ll agree that they are colorful performers and one boy has decidedly good form and a hook slide.”) Then there was Dick Groat, the shortstop, who had been an All-American guard at Duke. And for a front line the Pirates could send out Dick Hall and Nellie King, both 6’6’’ (a center’s height in those days) and 6’4’’ Dale Long. All good for a winter recreation league, but not of much use at Forbes Field.

  Gene Freese, playing second base and then moving to third, got off to a great start. It seemed that any ball that blooped off his bat fell in front of the outfielders. No such luck for Clemente, who after a hot first two weeks began lashing the ball right at someone, making him so frustrated that he broke several batting helmets. If a white player broke a helmet, he was considered a fierce competitor; when Clemente did it some teammates and sportswriters thought it was another manifestation of showboating, like his basket catch. (Breaking helmets was a mixed blessing for the man upstairs. It cost the team money, yet profited Branch Rickey at the same time. The fiberglass and plastic batting helmet was one of his innovations, and Rickey and his friends and family owned a company, American Baseball Cap Inc., which manufactured them under Patent No. 2,698.434, issued January 4, 1955. Clemente later would give testimonials to the helmet’s effectiveness.) The general impression in the locker room was that the Puerto Rican kid barely knew any English because he didn’t speak that often and when he did, in his soft, tenor voice, his words were heavily accented. Local sportswriters, when they quoted him, spelled his comments phonetically, a practice that infuriated him. But he was learning the language quickly from a wide variety of sources, ranging from the cute inanities of television cartoons to the piercing profanities of the locker room.

  He called Freese “Magoo,” as in Mr. Magoo, because Freese liked to talk like the blind-as-a-bat cartoon character. “Hey, Magoo,” he blurted out one day in the clubhouse. “How come you Magoo get fucking bloop hit and I hit line drive out?”

  Freese had an answer. “You got an unlucky number, Clemente,” he said.

  His number was thirteen. “Hey, Hoolie!” Clemente called out to the locker room attendant. “Find me another shirt!” A legend grew later that Clemente had counted out the number of letters in his first name, last name, and mother’s maiden name, Roberto Clemente Walker, and had used the total for his new number. In fact, it was just random: No. 21 was available.

  Every two weeks of the season, the Courier ran a special box called “What They Are Doing,” which listed the batting statistics of the black starting players in both leagues. A month and a half into the season, Clemente’s name was in the top-ten batters on the paper’s list. His pal Vic Power was number one, sprinting to a .359 average in Kansas City, just ahead of Elston Howard, the man the Yankees chose to make their first black player instead of Power. Roy Campanella was tearing up the National League with ten home runs and thirty-nine runs batted in. And then came a trio whose names would be linked many times over the years as they combined to form an All-Star outfield that could not be surpassed: Willie Mays of the Giants, Henry Aaron of the Braves, and Roberto Clemente of the Pirates. Clemente had been at-bat 134 times and was hitting .284 with three homers and sixteen runs batted in. He had been hitting well over .300 until falling into the first slump of his career.

  Two weeks later, after another hot streak, he was playing well enough that the Courier spread a headline across the top of the sports page: CLEMENTE MAY BRING “ROOKIE OF THE YEAR” LAURELS TO PIRATES. The article by sports editor Bill Nunn Jr. noted that there had been “something different” about the previous season—it marked only the second time since Jackie Robinson broke in that “a Negro didn’t win either the Baseball Writers’ Association or The Sporting News National League ‘Rookie of the Year’ award.” Robinson, Don Newcombe, Sam Jethroe, Wi
llie Mays, Joe Black, and Junior Gilliam had all won in recent years. Then along came Wally Moon of the St. Louis Cardinals, who beat out Hank Aaron and Ernie Banks in 1954. In Pittsburgh, Nunn said, “they think they might have the man” to restore the tradition. “A 20-year-old rookie outfielder who came to the Pirates by way of the Brooklyn Dodgers farm club at Montreal, Roberto Clemente has proved thus far to be one of the classiest rookies in the loop. He’s the gem many experts claim may eventually lead the Pirates to the gold that goes to those teams ending in the first division. Although he speaks only a little broken English, there is nothing about the bat Clemente’s been carrying around which doesn’t put him near the head of the class when it comes to being heard. As this is being written, the speedy Puerto Rican is batting a very respectable .302.” And the Pirates, as that was being written, were already dead ducks, twenty games under .500 at 21–41.

  One phrase in Nunn’s glowing account—“he speaks only a little broken English”—reflected Clemente’s precarious position in Pittsburgh. He was black, yet as a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican was somewhat removed from the indigenous black community of Pittsburgh, and even further removed from most of his white teammates, separated by language, race, and age. The Pirates might have been mediocre, but they were for the most part an easygoing lot. Many of the single guys lived in the same apartment complex and went to the same bars. They thought Clemente was shy and wanted to be by himself. They could not see the world through his eyes: the meaning of his family life in Carolina with Don Melchor and Doña Luisa and all of his older brothers and cousins, the pride he felt for his island, the matter-of-fact racism he had encountered every day in Florida, the social isolation of being a Spanish-speaking black kid in a clubhouse of older white men, athletes who seemed from another place and generation, including one, Sid Gordon, who was born when the United States entered World War I. Only a few people were hostile; Elroy Face, the effective little fork-balling relief pitcher and hillbilly musician, had no use for Clemente from the beginning. Jack Hernon, the Post-Gazette sportswriter, for various reasons, felt the same. Most of the guys were cordial, but still there was a distance. “He was very quiet. A gentleman. Always complimentary,” Nick Koback, a rookie catcher, said of Clemente. “Sometimes he would come out on the field and bullshit with me. He’d say, ‘Hey, you—strong guy!’”

  Pittsburgh was advanced well beyond Fort Myers on racial issues, but blacks, who according to census data comprised about 16.7 percent of the population (less than most other major Northern cities), were for the most part confined to the Hill District and Homewood and efforts to move out at times met ugly acts of resistance. GO TO HILL! NEGRO FAMILY TOLD blared a headline in the Courier that summer over a story about the Sanford family, Mahlon and Beatrice and their thirteen-year-old daughter Mary, who were threatened with violence when they moved from the Hill to a rental house in the town of Glenfield. On the door of their house, where windows had been broken by vandals, the Sanfords found a scrawled note that read: Nigger—don’t let the sun set on you here. Your place is the Hill District. Don’t mar our town. Clemente did not face anything as nasty as that, but like Curt Roberts a year earlier, he heard racist bench-jockeying from opposing teams during games. Roberto had the same urgent will and strong sense of self as Jackie Robinson, and it was as hard for him as it had been for Robinson to follow Mr. Rickey’s advice to ignore the abuse.

  In the working-class neighborhoods of the old city, there was still much resistance to integration, even on the ball field. Richard Peterson, who grew up on the South Side and went on to become a professor of English and a lyrical essayist about Pittsburgh sports, was just starting to play an outfield position on his high school team that year and later recalled that he was looking for a Pirates outfielder to be his new hero. Clemente would have been the one, except for his race. “The only problem was Clemente himself,” Peterson noted a half-century later in a column in the Post-Gazette. “I was living on the South Side, at that time a shot-and-a-beer neighborhood defined by its ethnic enclaves, its steel-mill mentality and its deep distrust of minorities. My working-class father and his beer-joint buddies, while diehard Pirates fans, believed that black ballplayers were ruining baseball, and I was my father’s son. I had plenty of help in my early prejudice against black ballplayers.”

  Clemente’s first friend in Pittsburgh was Phil Dorsey, who worked at the Post Office and had served in an Army Reserve unit with Bob Friend, the starting pitcher whose name matched his personality. After Friend introduced him to Clemente in the clubhouse after a game, Dorsey gave the right fielder a ride back to his stuffy little room at the old Webster Hall Hotel. Soon they developed a routine, with Dorsey, when he was off work, driving the carless Clemente to and from games and out to eat. The life of a ballplayer comes with oceans of free time, and Dorsey helped Clemente fill them. They played pool and penny-ante poker and ate Chinese food and went to the movies. Clemente loved westerns, and would memorize lines from them as a way to learn more English. (Years later, in the clubhouse several hours before a game, a teammate saw Clemente standing in front of a mirror with a young Latin player, helping the newcomer with English by having him repeat a phrase from The Lone Ranger: “You go into town, I’ll meet you at the canyon.”)

  Realizing that Clemente was miserable at the hotel, a setting so depressingly different from his home life in Puerto Rico, Dorsey found an apartment that Clemente could share with Roman Mejias, the other Latin on the club. But Mejias stayed up late and made a lot of noise with the hangers when he put away his clothes, and part of the building turned out to be a brothel. Finally, Dorsey set up Clemente with his friends Stanley and Mamie Garland, a childless black couple who had an extra room available at their trim red-brick house at 3038 Iowa Street in Schenley Heights, a middle-class black neighborhood up the hill from the University of Pittsburgh. Mr. Garland worked at the Post Office with Dorsey, and his wife held a supervisory job at Allegheny General Hospital.

  The Garlands had let rooms to college students before, but never to a major league ballplayer. Mamie Garland had qualms about the idea. Roberto was young, single, and gorgeous. Women jostled to get near him before and after every game, and one of Dorsey’s roles became that of the gatekeeper for Clemente’s women. Mrs. Garland, before taking in Clemente, wanted to get it straight that there would be no women in the house. Clemente assured her that he did not like to party at home and that he was quiet and always trying to get his rest. He was a very peaceful person, he said. She would have no problems with him. It was just a room at first, nothing more. He went out for meals. But Mamie Garland was a good cook, and the aromas drifting up to his room from her kitchen were too much for him. One day he stocked her freezer with steaks and other cuts of beef that he had brought home from the butcher shop. They are for you, he told Mrs. Garland, as she recalled the story. Do what you want with them. But I’d like to eat at the table if it’s okay with you because I smell those steaks that you prepare. I would appreciate it if you would fix one for me. Please, one of these days, fix one for me. From then on, he ate at the table with the Garlands, and the bond deepened so that he would call them his parents in America and they thought of him as their son.

  Looking south and downhill from the rear window of the Garland house, beyond the treetops, Clemente could see the Pitt skyscraper, the Cathedral of Learning, and to its right his baseball cathedral, Forbes Field, which was only a short if steep walk down the curving streets. Around the block on Adelaide was the house of singer Billy Eckstine’s sister. Bill Nunn Jr., the sports editor of the Courier, lived four blocks away on Finland, across from the Williams Park reservoir, and nearby on Anaheim, Dakota, Bryn Mawr, and Cherokee were many of the city’s leading black judges, ministers, and nightclub owners. A quarter-mile down the slope to the north ran Centre Avenue, with the Courier offices and presses taking up a half-block at the corner of Francis Street, across from the YMCA, whose pool tables served as a social hub for the Hill, and beyond that came Wylie A
venue and an undulating three-block stretch of nightclubs surrounding the Crawford Grill No. 2, where Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Junior Gilliam, and Don Newcombe would go when the Dodgers came to town, and where the musicians entertaining on weekends included John Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, and Art Blakey. The Crawford Grill had been founded by Gus Greenlee, who also owned the Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball club in the Negro National League and made his money running the local numbers racket along with Boogie Harris, the brother of Charles (Teenie) Harris, the talented photographer for the Courier.

  The black Pittsburgh that Clemente entered was a small, tight world. He became a familiar figure on Wylie Avenue, according to Nunn, who ran with the ballplayers when he was not at the office putting out the paper, but as a black Puerto Rican who spoke another language Clemente was somewhat apart from the crowd. The Latino population in Pittsburgh then was minimal, less than 1 percent. “I think it was always tough for Clemente,” Nunn remembered. “For years in the black community there was a little tension with blacks from other countries. There were no Puerto Ricans in Pittsburgh to speak of, not like New York. The thing here was steel mills, which didn’t draw workers from the Caribbean.” Nunn noticed that when Clemente went out his female companions were as often white as black. “Some of the black women just didn’t understand him,” Nunn said.