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

by David Maraniss

  Handmade welcome-home placards bobbed in the milling crowd of several hundred people that awaited him on the tarmac. The sign that captured Clemente’s feelings read simply La Familia. He embraced his father, kissed his mother, and hugged his brothers and various cousins, nephews, and nieces who came out to see him, but family in this case went beyond blood relatives. His family was all of Puerto Rico. The words of the poet Enrique Zorrilla, father of his baseball patron, Pedrin Zorrilla, were Clemente’s now: My pride is my land/For I was born here/ I don’t love it because it is beautiful/ I love it because it is mine/ Poor or rich, with burning/ I want it for my own. And his land wanted him, in a way that North America, despite his connection with Pittsburgh fans, seemingly could not. Clemente was on the ground only a minute when he was swept up by the adoring mob, raised high into the air, and carried on shoulders toward the airport gate, a ragtag band of horns, drums, and whistles lending a surging salsa rhythm to the jubilant parade.

  There was only one small note of disappointment. When a local sportswriter asked Clemente whether he intended to play winter baseball, he paused and answered, “I don’t know yet.” Those four words were grist for an ongoing conversation. The winter league in Puerto Rico was struggling enough already, as Ponce, Mayagüez, and San Juan all had lost money the previous season. The future looked no more promising despite the virtual collapse of the main competition, the Cuban winter league, under the weight of the Castro revolution. Ballparks in Havana, Cienfuegos, and Marianao were going dark night after night. “Be a patriot and go to the ball games,” Cuban government broadcasts urged, but the campaign was flopping. All the baseball equipment that came from the United States had been embargoed, and of more significance so had the talented U.S. ballplayers. Following the lead of the International League’s Havana Sugar Kings, who fled for Jersey City in July 1960, soon after Castro took over, the major leagues now were also abandoning Cuba. Winter league teams that traditionally fielded eight major leaguers apiece had zero since commissioner Ford Frick imposed a ban on Cuban play. That meant even more Americans would come to Puerto Rico, but the teams there still relied heavily on the draw of local stars, none of whom glowed brighter than Clemente. Four days after his arrival, Clemente’s ambivalence remained a major story. In a television interview with Pantalones Santiago, the colorful old pitcher who had thrown to him during his first professional tryout in 1952, the twenty-six-year-old Clemente lamented that he was so tired he could “hardly lift a bat.” Maybe he would suit up later in the season, he said, if he felt better.

  During his first month in Puerto Rico, Clemente attended almost nightly banquets in his honor, large and small. He received the Star trophy as the outstanding Latin American ballplayer in the major leagues. He brought his full Pirate uniform home from Pittsburgh with him, and began wearing it at baseball clinics he held for boys in towns around San Juan. Joe L. Brown, the Pirates general manager, came down on a sunny scouting mission and the local papers reported rumors that he had signed Clemente to a big new contract. The San Juan Star, citing “a source which is right at least half the time,” said Clemente had been signed for $40,000, which was termed “a considerable sum even if some jockeys and some professional wrestlers make more.” In fact, Clemente had not yet signed, and the amount he eventually agreed to was less than the reported figure. According to documents filed with the National League and eventually archived at the National Baseball Library at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, Clemente’s 1961 one-year contract paid him a salary of $35,000 plus a possible bonus if he avoided winter ball.

  The favorite phrase of San Juan sportswriters during Clemente’s period of inactivity that winter was that he was “resting on his World Series laurels.” Resting, perhaps, but not peacefully. On a physical level, he was an insomniac who rarely slept. And mentally, he was churning more than usual. The satisfaction he drew from starring on a championship team was tempered by a long-simmering frustration over his place in the major league firmament. Hank Aaron of the Braves and Frank Robinson of the Reds, the other great right fielders in the National League, had been dominant from the start, but it had taken Clemente six long seasons to make his breakthrough, longer than the career of the average player. Even Orlando Cepeda of the Giants, the former Santurce batboy, who idolized Roberto as a big brother, seemed to have surpassed him, hitting for a higher average, stroking nearly twice as many home runs, and driving in nearly as many runs as his Puerto Rican elder in only half as many big league seasons. To watch Clemente play was an aesthetic experience. He was an expressionist art form all his own, yet something had been holding him back. Was it his inexperience in the early years, or the reality of his uneven play, or the misperceptions of managers and sportswriters, or the lingering effects of the 1954 traffic accident, or the extra pressure of being a Spanish-speaking black Latin, or bad luck, or some combination of all of those?

  Whatever the cause, the most profound effect came on November 17, when the vote for the National League Most Valuable Player award was announced. His brother Matino had predicted that Clemente would win, but Momen knew better. He told Matino about how Les Biederman, the influential beat writer for the Pittsburgh Press, had been dismissive of Clemente when talking to his brethren in other National League towns, and talking up other Pirates. The winner was indeed a Pirate, but not Clemente. It was Dick Groat, the shortstop, who led the league in batting with a .325 average, but hit only two home runs with fifty runs batted in. Groat was a studious player, a college man from Duke, a favorite with the writers, and respected as a quiet leader by his teammates. He was a popular choice, compiling sixteen of twenty-two first-place votes and finishing more than a hundred points ahead of the next player, but was he most valuable? When Groat had missed the last three weeks of the season with a wrist injury, Ducky Schofield had filled in well enough that the Pirates just kept winning. The second place vote-getter also was a Pirate, again not Clemente. It was third baseman Don Hoak, the club’s tobacco-spitting vocal sparkplug, whose statistics (.282 average, sixteen homers, seventy-nine runs batted in) were good but unexceptional. After that were the league’s two perennial stars, Willie Mays and Ernie Banks. Next? Finishing fifth was not Clemente but Lindy McDaniel, a St. Louis relief pitcher with a 12–4 record. Tied for sixth were Ken Boyer of the Cardinals and yet another Pirate, Vernon Law, ace of the pitching staff, who would win the Cy Young award as the best pitcher. Finally, down in eighth place, there was Clemente, with 62 points from the writers, 214 fewer than Groat.

  With Clemente, this was a matter of pride. No doubt he would have been pleased had he won the award, but it was finishing eighth that wounded him deeply. He felt alienated, marked as different. Groat was a Pittsburgh area boy. Hoak had married a Pittsburgh area girl. The MVP vote, Clemente believed, was confirmation that Pittsburgh writers had campaigned against him. “The writers make me feel bad when you don’t even get considered,” he said. Before the vote, he had been brooding; afterward, he was enraged. He carried the slight with him for the rest of his career, for better and worse. He brought it up every year during contract negotiations with Joe L. Brown, the first in a perennial litany of perceived inequities. “There was this burr under his saddle,” Brown said later. “I said, ‘Bobby, you’re too big to be concerned about that. You are a great player and nobody can take that away from you. Your best years are ahead of you. You played on a World Championship team and were a big part of our winning. If someone screwed you, tough luck. You are still great.” All true, but the pain stayed with Clemente, and it was this pain that drove him forward—to prove his doubters wrong.

  Soon enough that winter, Clemente felt ready to lift a bat again and was back in uniform for the San Juan Senadores, the favorite team of his childhood. The Senadores were the third club of his winter ball career. He had played for the Santurce Cangrejeros for four and a half seasons, until founding owner Pedrin Zorrilla, out of money, had been forced to sell the franchise two days after Christmas 1956, bringing to a sad and sudden en
d a remarkable two-decade run from Josh Gibson through Willie Mays. As Zorrilla’s son, named Enrique in honor of his poet grandfather, later explained: “My father was a boy in a man’s body. He loved the game and couldn’t bear the thought of losing his team. But he couldn’t bear the thought of trading ballplayers to get the money to pay his debts.” Zorrilla conditioned the team’s sale on a promise from the new owners that they would not dump players to reduce the debt, but that promise was broken in a single day. The first action the new owners took was to sell Clemente, Juan Pizarro, and Ronnie Sanford to the Caguas Criollos for $30,000. The initial public reports said the sale of Clemente had been arranged with Zorrilla’s knowledge. By his son’s account, this infuriated the Big Crab. “That is a time when my father later told me he regretted the way he acted in a way. He stormed out of the house, went to the new owner and told him, ‘You take it back and tell the truth or I am not responsible for what I can do.’ He regretted saying that. But it was important for him for the truth to be known. That day on local radio at noon everything was cleared up and it was said the deal was made after the club’s sale, without his knowledge. But that is how the great Roberto Clemente went away from Santurce.”

  Caguas, an interior mountain city fifteen miles south of San Juan, was never more than a sideshow for Clemente. He led the league in hitting for the Criollos, but had no real commitment to playing there, even though his manager was Vic Power, his fellow major leaguer. Power and Clemente were fast friends off the field, but there was always some competitive jousting in the manager-player relationship. In his good-natured way, Power essentially accused the proud Clemente of manipulating his image. “At the start it was kind of hard because he was hurt all the time. His neck hurt. His back hurt,” Power recalled. “When I told him, ‘Okay, I’ll put someone in for you,’ he’d say, ‘No, let me play.’ And then he played. And every time he played hurt, he got two hits. I was wondering, one time when I played him if he went 0 for 4, and the press asked him, ‘Hey, what’s the matter?’ and he would say, ‘Well, I told the manager I was sick.’” Power, in other words, thought Clemente slyly used his ailments to place himself in a no-lose situation. If a Pittsburgh sportswriter had expressed the same thought, an icy stare or severe lecture would come his way, but Power could tease Clemente, no hard feelings.

  The difference was a matter of culture and familiarity. Power had endured the same slights and had been stereotyped in the same ways. Between the two of them, there was no fear of being misunderstood, but at the same time Clemente couldn’t fool Power, or bluff him, or intimidate him—they knew each other too well. Away from the ballpark, Momen and Vic enjoyed hanging out—together and with young women, the pursuers and the pursued—in Caguas, San Juan, and all points between. Clemente had classical style and good looks, but Power was more freewheeling, their different personalities most obvious at the dance halls. Power, all loose limbs, loved the salsa and merengue. For Clemente, those moves were too fast, undignified, not cool enough, and he wasn’t any good at them. He liked the boleros, the slow dances. Sometimes, Power said, Clemente would go after his girls, but no problem, he had so many he could share them. One night on a double date, Roberto took out a girl who had to be home by midnight. When they were an hour late, she told Clemente that her father would be waiting outside with a shotgun. As they approached her house, Clemente pretended his car had run out of gas. He even forced Power to get out and push. Anything to avoid the censure of an elder.

  After spending parts of two campaigns with Power in Caguas, Clemente was traded to San Juan, which would remain his home team for the rest of his career. It was for the Senadores that he finally lifted his bat in the winter of his rage, after the 1960 World Series and the eighth-place finish for most valuable player. The rejuvenation of a struggling San Juan team was immediate with Clemente in the lineup. The Senadores swept to the regular season championship, won the league playoffs, and then flew south to Venezuela in February 1961 to represent Puerto Rico in the InterAmerican series, a makeshift tournament designed to replace the Caribbean World Series, which had been scrapped because of the political situation in Cuba. San Juan was a formidable team, with Clemente banging away and Tite Arroyo, the proficient Yankee reliever, on the mound, and the regular season lineup was fortified for the tournament by two additions from Santurce, Clemente’s friends Orlando Cepeda and Juan Pizarro. In a short series, though, one great pitcher can always make the difference, and a team from Venezuela had that one unhittable ace just coming into his own—young Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals, who shut out San Juan 1–0.

  All of this, in any case, was just prelude for Clemente, preparation for a season on the mainland that would make him impossible to ignore any longer.

  • • •

  Momen arrived at Pirates camp to train for the 1961 season on March 2, a day late. He and Tite Arroyo had been delayed entry from Puerto Rico to Florida until tests came back proving they did not have the bubonic plague, a few cases of which had broken out in Venezuela during the tournament.

  On the day he reached Fort Myers, free from the plague, a story ran on the front page of the New York Times under the headline: NEGROES SAY CONDITIONS IN U.S. EXPLAIN NATIONALISTS’ MILITANCY. One of the key figures quoted in the story was Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, who in the Times account was referred to as Minister Malcolm. Interviewed at a Muslim-run restaurant on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Malcolm X said the only answer to America’s racial dilemma was for blacks to segregate themselves, by their own choice, with their own land and financial reparations due them from centuries of slavery. He dismissed the tactics of the civil rights movement as humiliating, especially the lunch-counter sit-ins that were taking place throughout the South. “To beg a white man to let you into his restaurant feeds his ego,” Minister Malcolm told the newspaper.

  This was fourteen years after Jackie Robinson broke the major league color line, seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the separate-but-equal doctrine of segregated schools, five years after Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. led the bus boycott in Montgomery, four years after the Little Rock Nine desegregated Central High School in the capital of Arkansas, one year after the first lunch-counter sit-in in Greensboro. Year by year, the issue of race was becoming more urgent. The momentum was on the side of change, but the questions were how and how fast. In baseball, where once there had been no black ballplayers, now there were a hundred competing for major league jobs, and along with numbers came enormous talent, with ten past and future most valuable players among them. Yet every black player who reported to training camp in Florida that spring of 1961 still had to confront Jim Crow segregation. Even if their private emotions were sympathetic to Malcolm X’s rage at having to beg a white man to let you into his restaurant, the issue in baseball was necessarily shaped by its own history. Having moved away from the professional Negro Leagues and busted through the twentieth century’s racial barrier, black players did not view voluntary resegregation as an option, and separate and unequal off the field was no longer tolerable.

  Wendell Smith, the influential black sportswriter who still had a column in the weekly Pittsburgh Courier but wrote daily now for the white-owned newspaper Chicago’s American, began a concerted campaign against training camp segregation that year. On January 23, a month before the spring camps opened, Smith wrote a seminal article that appeared on the top of the front page of Chicago’s American headlined NEGRO BALL PLAYERS WANT RIGHTS IN SOUTH. “Beneath the apparently tranquil surface of baseball there is a growing feeling of resentment among Negro major leaguers who still experience embarrassment, humiliation, and even indignities during spring training in the south,” Smith wrote. “The Negro player who is accepted as a first class citizen in the regular season is tired of being a second class citizen in spring training.” Smith added that leading black players were “moving cautiously and were anxious to avert becoming engulfed in fiery debate over civil rights,” but nonetheless were preparing to meet
with club owners and league executives to talk about the problem and make it a front-burner issue for the players association.

  In a drumbeat of stories for Chicago’s American and columns for the Courier, Smith documented the life of black players in Florida. While his scope was national and his campaign was for all of baseball, he often focused on the travails of black players on Chicago’s American League team, the White Sox, who trained in Sarasota. Those players included Minnie Minoso, Al Smith, and Juan Pizarro, Clemente’s friend and sometimes teammate in Puerto Rico, who had been traded from the Braves. “If you are Minoso, Smith or Pizarro . . . you are a man of great pride and perseverance . . . Otherwise you would not be where you are today, training with a major league team in Sarasota, Fla.,” Smith wrote in a Courier column. “Yet despite all your achievements and fame, the vicious system of racial segregation in Florida’s hick towns condemns you to a life of humiliation and ostracism.” Among the indignities, he wrote:

  You cannot live with your teammates.

  You cannot eat the type of food that your athletic body requires.

  You cannot get a cab in the mornings to take you to the ball park, unless it happens to be Negro-driven.

  You cannot enter the hotel in which your manager lives without first receiving special permission.

  You cannot go to a movie or night club in the heart of town, nor enjoy any of the other normal recreational facilities your white teammates enjoy so matter of factly.

  You cannot bring your wife and children to the town where you are training because accommodations are not available where you are imprisoned.