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

by David Maraniss

  Donn Clendenon and other teammates would joke that there were three great left-handed pull hitters in the National League who scared the hell out of every first baseman: Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, and Roberto Clemente, who, of course, was no lefty at all.

  In repose, there was a grace and beauty to Clemente. “Compact, flawlessly sculpted, with chiseled ebony features and an air of unshakable dignity,” Roy McHugh reflected later. “He carried himself—everybody noticed this—like royalty.” At times, as Clemente posed on second after a double, McHugh thought of “Michelangelo’s statue of David—David wearing a baseball uniform.” But in action everything changed; Clemente was all fury and agitation. A writer once described Willie Mays as liquid smooth. With Clemente, there was a liquid nature to his eyes and body, but only until he ran; then it was gone. Steve Blass and his Pirates teammates took goofy joy in watching Clemente run. He ran everything out, first of all, full speed, head down, every feeble tap back to the pitcher, and he worked so hard at running. They would tell him he looked like a broken windmill, every limb rotating a different direction. Clemente didn’t actually run, they would say, he galloped. To Richard Santry, another teenager who sat in the right-field stands at Forbes Field during those years and spent the entire game watching Clemente, he ran “like he was running away from the bulls in Spain, like a crazy man.” Fineman also was struck by Clemente’s urgency. He seemed to run as though “his pants had been set on fire by the flames of hell itself”—and that is the point. He was not running, he was fleeing. When Clemente was on the go, it seemed not so much that he was trying to get to a base as to escape from some unspeakable phantasmal terror.

  • • •

  During the first two months of the 1965 season, Clemente’s first notion was to escape Pittsburgh itself. He was still weakened from his bout with malaria, and the team seemed even punier, with Willie Stargell, the only legitimate long-ball threat in the lineup, also somehow sapped of strength. After opening the season with five wins in their first seven games, the team struck out on a brutal road trip that took them to five cities, covering 7,585 miles in planes that were in the air for a total of twenty-one and a half hours, including one particularly long and discombobulating haul on a chartered prop that took six hours and twenty-five minutes to get from Los Angeles to St. Louis. Clemente was exhausted by the trip, and needed a rest. After two losses to open the series, with the team now dropping ten of its last eleven games, the new manager, Harry Walker, went on a postgame rampage in the visiting clubhouse, flinging cups, papers, and trays around his cubicle and denouncing his players with what one writer described as “the most earthy and sulphuric language at his command.” The pitching was okay, Walker said, but the hitting was horseshit, and he was especially concerned about what he feared was a “defeatist attitude.” The whole team was playing like crap, he said, from the lowest scrub to the top star. He thought Clemente’s hands were slow, and that he needed some rest and maybe lighter bats. For the Sunday doubleheader, Walker sat Clemente on the bench and sent left-handed hitting Jerry Lynch out to right. Lynch got hot immediately, banging out four hits in seven at-bats that day, though the Pirates lost both games. Before leaving town, Walker had an interview with a St. Louis radio station during which Clemente’s benching was mentioned. Yes, Roberto had malarial fatigue, Walker said, but great players—he said Stan Musial and Ted Williams came to mind—played even when they were ailing.

  Lynch stayed hot as the team reached Chicago, smashing two home runs in the first game and going two for three in the second. Now it was Clemente’s turn to erupt. His irritation at Walker’s comments, his persistent psychological soreness over being underappreciated, his passion to be the best, and perhaps some hurt pride in seeing Lynch excel in his place—all combined to send him into a sudden fit. “I want to be traded from this club and I don’t want to play for this manager anymore,” Clemente said in the visitors’ locker room on May 5. He appeared to be talking to Les Biederman of the Pittsburgh Press, who had asked him how he was feeling. But this was not a muttered aside. It was a shout that any writer or player within earshot heard. And to emphasize the point, he walked up to Al Abrams of the Post-Gazette and said, “Put what I said in your goddamned newspaper!” Abrams not only obliged, his story ran on the top of the front page under the blaring headline:

  CLEMENTE IRKED,

  SAYS, “TRADE ME”

  In what Abrams described as a “fit of temperament,” Clemente had popped off in the clubhouse in front of newspapermen and teammates, demanding a trade. The star right fielder had “appeared moody and sullen,” the story noted, and “hadn’t been very chummy with his teammates, either, the past few days.” Walker was not around to hear the tirade, and expressed surprise when reporters asked him about it. “If Clemente wants to be traded, he hasn’t said a word to me about it,” he said. “I don’t know what he has in mind.” The manager said he talked to Clemente before the St. Louis doubleheader and explained that he was resting him because he appeared tired and the team needed another lefty bat in the lineup. When Joe L. Brown was reached by telephone that night back at his home in Pittsburgh, the general manager said he knew nothing; Walker had not bothered to call him about it, so he thought it must be unimportant. Brown, after dealing with Clemente for a decade, had by then developed a deep respect for him. He considered Clemente prickly and “very, very sensitive,” Brown would say later, yet Clemente’s sensitivity was not selfish egotism, it was a “huge sense of self-worth, of social self-worth. That he was as good as anyone who ever lived. That people should recognize that he was a special person. He didn’t lord it over anybody, he just believed it.”

  The next morning, still in Chicago, Walker summoned Clemente to his room at the Knickerbocker Hotel, and they emerged with the classic sporting-tiff resolution. It had all been a misunderstanding. “We had breakfast together and we understand each other,” Walker told the press. The great right fielder would be welcomed back in the lineup whenever he was ready. Walker even posited that the air clearing could do everyone some good. “This might be the thing we just need to snap out of this damn slump,” he said. “I know Roberto will be all the better for it.” Later that day, when Clemente reached the stadium, a swarm of reporters encircled him. He was reluctant to talk at first, still in a gnarly mood, but eventually could not keep quiet. “You just blow off steam when you can’t play,” he told a reporter for the Associated Press. “I don’t want to be traded. I want to play—but not bad ball.” Then he blew off more steam. There was always steam inside him, the heat of years of feeling misunderstood. “The newsmen blow up everything bad about me and when I am good, they give me like this,” he said, pressing his hands to within an inch of each other. “I lose twenty-five pounds from malaria in Puerto Rico and maybe even should not play any spring training. I am now a hundred and seventy-eight pounds—seven pounds under my playing weight last season. I feel okay, but not up to par.”

  The notion that Clemente had been misunderstood did not sit well with Abrams, who was among those who heard him. “Denials to the contrary, Roberto Clemente did pop off Wednesday afternoon here and say that he would like the Pirates to trade him to another club. There are at least twenty-five witnesses, most of them his teammates, who heard the outburst in the visitors’ dressing room at Wrigley Field,” Abrams wrote. There was a notable ambivalence in Abrams’s response, common among the Pittsburgh writers who dealt with Clemente on a regular basis. None of the reporters hated Clemente; they didn’t launch public vendettas against him, they just lived with his unpredictable temperament, at times trying to soften it, at times irritating it. Abrams again called Clemente “moody and sullen,” but also took up part of his defense. He noted that he had publicly hailed Clemente as “the best player in the major leagues” for leading the majors in hitting over five seasons. But, he concluded, “if Clemente continues to feel that everyone is against him, myself included, for writing a story that should be printed, there’s nothing I can do abo
ut it. And I can’t care less.”

  Walker had it just about right, as it turned out. The controversy lifted the club out of its malaise. With Clemente restored in the lineup, batting third, along with a hot Maz at second and big Stargell finally clouting the ball again, the Pirates soared in late May and ran off twenty wins in twenty-four games. Day after day, Clemente strolled slowly to the plate, prepared his ground, stood deep in the box and away from the plate, and attacked the ball. Thirty-nine base hits in ninety-three times at-bat during the winning streak, a .419 pace. Johnny Pesky, one of Walker’s coaches, told Biederman of the Press that the only hitter he had ever seen get solid wood on the ball time after time as much as Clemente was his friend Ted Williams.

  The malarial funk was long forgotten and Clemente was back in the batting race. He kept hitting through July and August, distracted only by the birth of his first son, Robertito. Vera had been in Pittsburgh with him for part of the season, making their first Stateside home on the roomy second floor of Mrs. Harris’s house on Apple Street. It was a vastly different culture for her, but she started to learn the language and adjust to her husband’s idiosyncrasies. “He would have a late breakfast and stay in the room and sleep” on game mornings when the team was home, she recalled. “He closed the shades, the drapes, and put plastic over the drapes to make them darker. He tried to sleep. He would stay there until he was ready to go to the game. I used to take him, and on the way from the apartment to the stadium he didn’t talk much. I believe he was thinking, tonight so-and-so will be the pitcher, and how Pittsburgh could win. He was always thinking. Then I would go back to the apartment and get ready to go back when the game started.” In that lonesome world, it made sense for Vera to return to San Juan late in her pregnancy, and to have the baby born there, where mother and infant could be attended to by friends and family. But even beyond the practical, the place of birth was a matter of pride and emotion. Roberto Clemente wanted all of his children born in Puerto Rico. Land, blood, name, and race.

  There were no hard feelings now with Harry the Hat. Player and manager talked hitting, something they both loved. The Pirates finished eighteen games above .500, a vast improvement from the previous year, but not enough to challenge for the pennant. What they had, most of all, was Clemente, and that was something special in itself.

  During a home stand late in September, the team brought in a group of youngsters from the farm clubs. These were the best prospects, not ready for roster spots but talented enough that the club thought they should get a feel for what it looked like in the big leagues. They took part in practice before games, then dressed in street clothes and sat behind home plate. One of them was a pitcher named Henry (Gene) Garber, who later would pitch nineteen seasons in the majors. Garber, then only seventeen, had already been traumatized once in his young career, being forced to sit shotgun in the front seat of a beat-up old Cadillac as the brilliant madman scout, Howie Haak, drove him and two other prospects north from Salem, Virginia, to Rochester, New York, splashing tobacco into a mildewed spittoon and swearing a blue streak the entire way. Now came something worse. The Pirates asked Garber to pitch batting practice, without a screen to shield him. According to the pitching instructors, a screen would only encourage bad habits.

  Garber had never worn a protective cup in his young life, and here came Roberto Clemente. As part of his routine, Clemente started batting practice the same way every day—trying to line every ball back through the box. “He’s hitting shots right past me, line drives and hard ground balls right up the middle,” Garber recalled decades later, the terror of that first moment on a big league mound carved permanently into memory. He went downtown the next morning and bought two cups, one plastic, one metal, and wore the metal cup that afternoon when he threw to Clemente again and for the rest of his long career.

  When the season ended a few days later, big brother Andres was proven wrong. Momen finished with a league-leading .329 average and returned home to Puerto Rico with his third Silver Bat. He joined four all-time greats, Honus Wagner, Rogers Hornsby, Paul Waner, and Stan Musial, as the only National Leaguers with three or more batting titles. His back pockets, he would joke, were wide apart, and bulging.

  • • •

  Home now was a funky modernist house nestled into the top of a hill in Río Piedras. Vera had found it the previous spring when she and her father-in-law, Don Melchor, had been driving around the hills scouting lots. When pictures of the already-built house, designed by the engineer Libertario Avilés, were sent north to Roberto, he immediately agreed to buy it for $65,000, falling in love with its openness and curiosities—the Aztec symbols on the bricks, the bridged front walkway leading from the street over shallow moatlike ponds to the front door, wide spaces for plants everywhere, the panoramic view down the hill and off toward San Juan and the Atlantic. It had only three bedrooms, and the Clementes had plans for a large family (a second child was already on the way), but the rooms were spacious and could be subdivided if necessary. The neighbors were doctors and engineers. It was an easy ten-minute drive to see the rest of the Clementes and Zabalas in Carolina.

  Once again that winter, Momen played almost no winter league baseball. The Pirates begged him not to sap his strength, and paid him extra to serve as their scout. He was in no mood to travel anyway, and preferred fiddling around the house with his pregnant wife and baby son to riding the bus to Ponce, Arecibo, or Mayagüez. He bought a Hammond organ and taught himself how to play it; he did not read music, but could listen to a tune on the radio and hammer out the melody within five minutes. His nights were filled with banquets and appearances, and during the day he spent more time thinking about his dream of building a sports city for poor Puerto Rican kids. He started looking for land and talking to businessmen and politicians about how to make it happen. The house was always open, a steady stream of relatives and visitors from the mainland coming in and out. One visitor that winter was Myron Cope, a gifted writer who had worked for the Post-Gazette in the fifties before moving on to freelance for the Saturday Evening Post and Sports Illustrated. Clemente long had felt that he did not receive the national recognition he deserved—now here came Cope to tell his story to a vast sporting audience.

  The visit was later described in Cope’s delicious lead paragraph. “The batting champion of the major leagues lowered himself to the pea-green carpet of his forty-eight-foot living room and sprawled on his right side, flinging his left leg over his right leg,” the story began . . .

  He wore gold Oriental pajama tops, tan slacks, battered bedroom slippers—and, for purposes of the demonstration he was conducting—a tortured grimace. “Like dis!” he cried, and then dug his fingers into his flesh, just above the upraised left hip. Roberto Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates marvelous right fielder and their steadiest customer of the medical profession, was showing how he must greet each new day in his life. He has a disk in his back that insists on wandering, so when he awakens he must cross those legs, dig at that flesh and listen for the sound of the disk popping back where it belongs.

  The story line followed from there, forty-four evocative paragraphs, most of them devoted to some peculiar aspect of Clemente’s health. Interpretations of the article were in the eye of the reader; to many he came across as somewhere between lovable and a nutcase, which to Cope amounted to one and the same. Cope had dropped his contract with the Saturday Evening Post precisely because he was tired of writing stories about boring superstars. His preference for colorful subjects was so strong that Ray Cave, who started editing him at Sports Illustrated, took to calling him “The Nut Specialist.” In Clemente, Cope believed, he had the best of all writing possibilities—“a superstar and a nut.” Cope never doubted Clemente’s sincerity, yet the player’s phobias were such easy targets. “Opera companies have performed Parsifal in scarcely more time than it takes Roberto to get ready for bed,” he wrote, going on to describe how Clemente memorized everything in his hotel room to make sure where things were in case he wa
lked in his sleep or needed to escape. All in good fun, but in the end none of Cope’s thousands of words left an impression stronger than a single illustration that accompanied the article, a graphic that Cope himself did not see until he got his own copy of the magazine at the newsstand. It was a picture of No. 21 standing in his Pirates uniform, with an anatomical map of his ailments, real and imagined, from head to toe. It started with tension headaches, then: wayward disk in neck, six stitches in chin, tonsillectomy, pulled muscle in shoulder, serious chest cold, stomach disorders, bone chips in elbow, curved spine, wayward disk in lower back, meatoma in thigh, legs that don’t weigh the same, and pulled muscle in calf. In the caption below, it noted “Unchartable part of Clemente medical history includes tired blood, malaria, insomnia and fear of nightmares [which he does not have but is afraid he might have].” In fact, Clemente did have nightmares, but he didn’t tell Cope about them.

  Before submitting the article to his editors in New York, Cope showed it to Roy McHugh of the Pittsburgh Press, his close friend. “This is Clemente to the life, but he’s going to hate it,” McHugh said. “I know it,” Cope agreed. As it turned out, they were right; Clemente did not speak to Cope for a year afterward. The Sports Illustrated spread certainly gave him the wider exposure he had been seeking, though not in the way he wanted. Now not only Pittsburgh and San Juan but the entire sporting nation could consider his physiology and psyche and join the debate over whether he was a hypochondriac. But the final words in Cope’s story, overwhelmed by the pained-man motif, had nothing to do with Clemente’s body or mind, but were about his heart and passion. Clemente had driven Cope out into the countryside and showed him a piece of land where he hoped to start his sports city for Puerto Rican children. “I like to work with kids,” he said, in words that took on more resonance in retrospect. “I’d like to work with kids all the time. If I live long enough.”