Clemente would always have some sharp angles to him, not the easy, steady-as-you-go personality of the traditional clubhouse captain. He was shy, yet bursting with pride. He was profoundly humble, yet felt misunderstood and undervalued. Even when he wasn’t angry at a sports writer or feeling some perceived slight, it could be hard to tell by looking at him in the clubhouse. Television sportscaster Sam Nover, during an interview, told Clemente that some members of the press “come away from seeing you for the first time in the locker room and say, ‘Clemente’s a mean man. He frowns. The man never smiles’”—and then posed the question: “Is the shape of your face such that you never smile too often?” Clemente took the query seriously, and noted that some teammates had a physiognomy that made them look like they were laughing even when they were mad, whereas his was the opposite. “Now you might think I am serious when I am not serious,” he said. “This is the way that I am. And I like to be that way because sometimes you are smiling and then the next time you don’t see me smiling and say, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with you?’ So now, I am natural. That is the way I am. Nobody can say Roberto is mean. I might look mean but I really respect people.”
That Clemente defined himself as Puerto Rican, rather than by the color of his skin, also might have shaped Clendenon’s perceptions. “He kept saying, ‘I no black,’” Clendenon recalled. In fact, Clemente was proud to be a black Puerto Rican, yet never wanted to be categorized or limited by race. When he talked about the issue, especially in English, his comments occasionally were seen as rebukes of blackness, which they were not. The Pittsburgh Courier made that mistake in 1960, but later realized that it had misinterpreted Clemente’s intent and his remarks. The clearest account of his perspective on being both Puerto Rican and black came in the wide-ranging interview with sportscaster Nover. “I am between the worlds,” he said. “So anything I do will reflect on me because I am black and . . . will reflect on me because I am Puerto Rican. To me, I always respect everybody. And thanks to God, when I grew up, I was raised . . . my mother and father never told me to hate anyone, or they never told me to dislike anyone because of racial color. We never talked about that. As a matter of fact, I started listening to this talk when I came to the States.”
That leads to another way of looking at Clemente and his slow evolution as a leader in the States: language. After a decade in North America, Clemente knew English and the idioms of baseball, including the lexicon of profanity. He knew how to use variations of the all-purpose word fuck as a noun, verb, and adverb in any sentence. (“You pitch me the fuck inside and I hit the fucking ball to McKeesport.”) Clendenon suspected there were times when Clemente pretended that he couldn’t understand something in English “because he didn’t want to deal with something.” That is certainly probable, but more often Clemente wanted to speak English and insisted on doing so. It was his fear of being misinterpreted that could make him seem reserved and defensive, especially when writers lurked in the clubhouse. “I always had a theory that here was a very bright man who had taken verbal risks with English before and had been burned and didn’t care for that to happen again,” Blass recalled. “I think the writers relating what he said in pigeon English was actually secondary to the fact that he had concepts that he was trying to convey and wouldn’t be understood because his English wouldn’t convey it as well as his Spanish. And I think that frustrated him.”
Don Leppert, a backup catcher who arrived in Pittsburgh in 1961, the season after the World Series victory, said later that he was amazed by the gap between Clemente’s talent and his public recognition, and attributed that to the language barrier. Leppert placed the blame largely on the baseball writers who covered the Pirates. His locker was near Clemente’s and Leppert felt frustrated by the way some writers portrayed his teammate. “They tried to make a buffoon out of him,” Leppert recalled. “I was sitting there one night when Biederman [Les Biederman of the Pittsburgh Press] was asking Clemente something, and Biederman had a little smirk on his face. I went off on Biederman: ‘Why the hell don’t you ask him questions in Spanish?’ I didn’t endear myself to Biederman, but didn’t give a rat’s ass, either. They tried to take advantage of every malaprop.” Clemente said as much himself once to Pittsburgh writer Myron Cope. “I know I don’t speak as bad as they say I speak,” Clemente told Cope. “I know that I don’t have the good English pronunciation because my tongue belong to the Spanish. But I know where the verb, the article, the pronoun, whatever it is, go. I never in my life start a sentence with ‘me.’ I start with ‘I.’ The sportswriters [make it] ‘me.’ ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’”
And finally there were lingering questions about Clemente’s aches and pains and his constant physical laments. Since his third season, 1957, when he had suffered through a year-long slump that he attributed to an undiagnosed malaise (eventually, it was determined to be a lower-back condition), he had been unable to shake the reputation of being an oversensitive hypochondriac. In the long run, this perception was utterly contradicted by his enduring statistics; he would break Honus Wagner’s cherished record and play more games in a Pirates uniform than any player in Pittsburgh history. In the medium term, the perception would be contradicted by his determined clutch play, month after month, year after year. As Clemente himself put it one day, “Hypochondriacs cannot produce. I fucking produce!” But in the short run, whenever he took two or three days off to rest his troubled body, his behavior was deemed by some to be too sensitive and unbefitting a team leader. He probably didn’t help his own cause by talking so much about his ailments, but that reflected his desire to be perfect more than a need for excuses. His physician in San Juan, Dr. Roberto Buso, said that Clemente’s sensitive personality included a low threshold for pain. “If his back hurts he worries and then it becomes a vicious circle leading to more things,” Buso once explained. “If he has a little diarrhea he worries that he has a little stomach difficulty.” Pittsburgh, with its blue collar ethos, a milltown whose mythic figure was a giant named Joe Magarac, who by legend made steel with his bare hands, was a particularly difficult atmosphere for someone as sensitive to all things and especially pain as Clemente.
His relationship with Danny Murtaugh had been uneven precisely because of this sensitivity. Since taking over the Pirates in mid-season 1957, Murtaugh had occasionally criticized Clemente for not playing. The manager’s admiration for Clemente as a magnificent player had grown year by year, yet he never stopped sticking in the needle. It was nothing personal; that happened to be Murtaugh’s personality. The “whistling Irishman” would say what was on his mind and then forget it. Clemente’s personality was altogether different. Whatever was said about him hurt, and kept hurting. Mazeroski, who enjoyed a smoother relationship with Murtaugh, thought their manager didn’t think twice about how to handle Clemente or would have done it better. “Roberto just wasn’t the type of guy you just took off and embarrassed in front of the team,” Maz said later. “He’d crawl in a shell and the more Murtaugh hollered at him, the more moody he got.” Their periodic difficulties had busted into the open during a road trip in May 1963. Clemente had been groaning about his physical ills during a three-day series in Los Angeles, when he had played poorly and asked for a day off as the Dodgers had swept the Pirates, and Murtaugh, feeling grumpy about the losses, confronted Clemente when they reached Houston. “You let me know when you’re ready to play again,” Murtaugh said. “You’re making too much money to sit on the bench. The next time you feel like playing you’ll play and you’ll play every day until I say you won’t play.”
Clemente, acutely conscious of his dignity, felt insulted by the reproach. “You talk like I don’t want to play baseball,” he told Murtaugh.
He ended up playing 152 games that season, but the story of the encounter seeped into the press and became part of the mythology of Clemente’s fragility. Mazeroski, for one, thought the undeserved reputation was linked to the language problem. “When he was hurt he had trouble explaining himself because of th
e language problem and everyone thought he was jakin’,” Mazeroski later wrote about Clemente in Sport magazine. “I don’t think he’s ever jaked. He just could do things when he was hurt as well as the rest of us could when we were healthy and people would see this and decide that he was dogging it.”
All of this—pride, shyness, culture, language, preoccupation with his physical condition, anger over being underappreciated, even the shape of his face—could make Clemente seem guarded and at times unapproachable. Roy McHugh, a talented columnist for the Pittsburgh Press, had decided to write his first piece about Roberto early in the 1964 season after Clemente had blasted a tape-measure home run over the left-field wall at Forbes Field. In the clubhouse after the game, McHugh asked Clemente if it was the longest ball he had ever hit. Clemente took offense at the innocent question. It reminded him of all the other long balls he had hit that got no notice, going back to a home run at Wrigley Field in 1959. “It was like throwing a lighted match into a can of gasoline,” McHugh said later. “He blew up, shouting, a torrent of words. He went on for five minutes before I could get in another word.” Clemente had nothing against McHugh, but the question unwittingly hit a sensitive spot. McHugh, who was predisposed to like Clemente, or at least to present him accurately, decided to choose another subject for his column, and for several years thereafter tended to stay away from the Pirates right fielder, thinking he was too difficult.
Yet Clemente could be thoroughly engaging when he was around people who made him feel comfortable, including not only friends, family, and fellow Latin ballplayers, but also children, taxi drivers, old people, clubhouse attendants—anyone who seemed to have the soul of an underdog. “He would extend himself more to somebody who seemed unsure than to a cocky writer or player,” pitcher Blass noticed. In the same locker room where his vibes held sportswriters at bay, he was a magnet for the children of other players. He kept a jar of honey in his locker—he took a spoonful before games to relax—and shared it with the kids. Jim Marshall, a utility infielder for a few seasons in the early sixties, remembered that whenever he brought his young son Blake into the locker room, “he always ran for Roberto, sitting on his knee, the two of them eating honey.” Tony Bartirome, the pint-sized former first baseman who began working in the Pirates’ training room in 1964, recalled that reputations did not always reflect reality. Some established older white stars who were portrayed as “great guys” by the press virtually ignored the clubhouse staff, but not Clemente. In the daily give and take, he would tease them, ask about their families, offer his folklore medical advice, tip them generously. “Everybody in that clubhouse, we loved him,” Bartirome said.
During the first half of the 1964 season, several nights a week, Clemente had been calling Vera Zabala from Pittsburgh or one of the National League road cities. He was always making plans, pressing the issue of marriage. He finally persuaded Vera to come to New York for the All-Star game in July, accompanied by Ana Maria, her protective older sister, and his mother, Doña Luisa. The combination of chaperones was enough to get the visit approved by Vera’s father and brother, and the three women flew to New York on July 6, the day before the game at Shea Stadium. They were picked up at the airport by Carlos and Carmen Llanos, longtime family friends from Carolina who now lived in the Bronx. Throughout Clemente’s major league career, the Llanoses provided him a place to stay and relax when he came to New York, and eased his homesickness by plying him with good humor and Puerto Rican food and seasonings.
The Pirates were in the middle of another middling season, but had four players on the National League team: Clemente, Mazeroski, Stargell (hot in the season’s first half with eleven homers and forty-eight runs batted in; just starting to show his slugging potential), and old Smoky Burgess, the butterball catcher who was still a dangerous hitter, even at age thirty-seven. Among the four, only Clemente, leading the league again with a .345 average, had been elected to the team as a starter; the others were added to the roster by the National League manager, Walter Alston. A noteworthy feature of the game that year was that the rosters were stocked with more Latin players than ever before. The group again was led by Clemente. It also included a trio of Cubans, rookie outfielder Tony Oliva, shortstop Leo Cardenas, and right-handed pitcher Camilo Pascual; the Venezuelan shortstop Luis Aparicio (who wouldn’t play because of a groin injury); Dominican ace Juan Marichal (in the second year of a stunning seven-year string in which he averaged twenty-two wins a season); and two of Clemente’s Puerto Rican friends, Orlando Cepeda of the Giants, starting at first base for the National League, and pitcher Juan Pizarro, enjoying his best season for the White Sox in the American League. Long since a star in his homeland, Pizarro was finally getting some recognition up North. He had won eleven games already that year on his way to a nineteen and nine record.
Clemente started the All-Star game in right field and batted leadoff for the National League. This was the summer of the World’s Fair in New York, and the area around the new ballpark in Flushing Meadows was awash with foreign tourists, Midwestern family vacationers, and hard-core metropolitan baseball fans. Al Abrams rode the subway out to Shea, and noted in his Post-Gazette column that “judging by the aroma in the crowded trains, some of the great ‘unwashables’ in history were among the passengers today.” It was a hometown crowd, with a smattering of LET’S GO, METS! signs, and the largest pregame ovations went, in order, to Ron Hunt, scrappy second baseman for the Amazin’ Mets; Casey Stengel, the comic-foil old manager of the inept new club; and Sandy Koufax, the favorite son who had come home from the golden West. As Vera, Ana, and his mother watched from the stands, Roberto got one hit in three at-bats, singling in the fifth inning and racing around to score on a double by his former teammate, Dick Groat, who was now playing shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals. As it turned out, Clemente’s late-inning replacement in right, Johnny Callison of the front-running Phillies, cracked a three-run home run with two out in the bottom of the ninth to give the National League a 7–4 win, a victory that at long last evened the all-time match between the two leagues at seventeen wins apiece. Here, it seemed, was the culmination of a sociological as well as sporting trend. At the close of the 1940s, the American League had to that point dominated the mid-season exhibition, winning twelve of the first sixteen contests. Since then, the National stars shone brighter, in large part because of the league’s tradition of aggressively recruiting black and Latin players.
In his ellipses-dotted “Sidelights on Sports” column the next day, Abrams took special note of the Pittsburgh contingent: “There were stars in Wilver Stargell’s eyes as he took the field with his National League teammates for batting practice. ‘I’m excited,’ the husky Pirate youngster admitted. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about anything as I am today’ . . . Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski, and Smoky Burgess, old hands at this sort of thing, took things in stride . . . Clemente’s mother watched her talented son play. It was her first All-Star game. She saw Roberto perform in the 1960 World Series . . .”
Clemente and his women guests caught a flight to Pittsburgh immediately after the game; he had to get right back to work. The Pirates were not afforded the traditional extra day off after the All-Star break, but instead a makeup game was scheduled the next night against the Cincinnati Reds, an odd one-game series to open a nine-game home stand. Baseball officials were still adjusting to the complications of fitting the expanded ten-team leagues into 162-game schedules. With great care, Clemente had already worked out his own schedule. He needed Vera around to continue their discussions about an off-season wedding, and nothing could go wrong beforehand. He had rented an apartment in Pittsburgh for the week, where he would sleep, while the women would stay at his normal lodging with Stanley and Mamie Garland. The Garlands showed great kindness to Vera, and the obvious regard they had for Roberto helped persuade sister Ana Maria of his worthiness. Vera was touched by his courtesies and graciousness. She realized for the first time how big a star he was in the S
tates, yet celebrity didn’t seem to change his manner. The trip was a success: Vera knew that she wanted to marry him, and she returned to San Juan with two more engagement presents, a watch and a collar of pearls, and a wedding date in November.
The remainder of the 1964 season offered much excitement, but not for the Pirates. From five games above the .500 mark at the All-Star break, they sputtered slowly downhill, finishing with two fewer wins than losses. Since the World Series glory of 1960, they had come in sixth in 1961, eighteen games in back of the Reds; fourth in 1962, eight games behind the Giants; eighth in 1963, twenty-five games behind the Dodgers (shades of the pathetic early fifties); and now sixth again, trailing St. Louis by thirteen games. The closest sniff the Pirates got to the pennant race this time was during four days in September, between the twenty-fourth and twenty-seventh, when they dropped five straight home games to the charging Cardinals, helping lift St. Louis over the free-falling Phils. It was, all in all, another year of mediocrity at Forbes Field, except when a ball was hit to right—baseball ecstasy, Clemente charging, scooping, unwinding overhead, the arm!—or when he made his way to the plate, his reluctant, creaky, slow-motion advance evoking the delicious contradiction of a rapacious hitter who nonetheless resembled, as Pittsburgh writers joked to one another in the press box, a condemned man heading toward the electric chair. “Roberto has been a dominant force in the Pirates’ attack,” Abrams wrote during the dog days of summer. “We shudder to think where the club would be without him.”
Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero Page 21
