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

by David Maraniss

  “He’s going pretty good, eh?” Sanguillen said. “Everything he is saying is true, you know. It’s strange that he would have to remind people. Everyone should know it.”

  At the White House, President Nixon placed a call to Danny Murtaugh, the winning manager, and said he thought it was a team victory even though Roberto Clemente and Steve Blass were so outstanding. In a classic Nixon-the-sports-expert moment, he also said he was impressed with how the Pirates second baseman, Dave Cash, had played all year. Murtaugh thanked the President for taking time out from his serious duties to call. Nixon then phoned Earl Weaver in the other locker room. “Hey, Pop, I just spoke to your boss!” the Baltimore manager called out to his father, a retired parking meter collector and longtime rank-and-file Republican in St. Louis. Weaver was also visited by Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who attended the game. A short time later, Nixon and Rogers had a brief telephone conversation, recorded by the White House taping system.

  NIXON: You saw a good game, didn’t you?

  ROGERS: Great game. I went into the locker room the way you did . . . we were so pleased you called . . .

  NIXON: Two great teams and could have gone either way, but boy . . .

  ROGERS: Well, I’m sort of glad to see Pittsburgh win because that Clemente is so great.

  NIXON: Oh, my God. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Really . . .

  The Pirates by then were on the charter flight back to Pittsburgh. The pitching star, Blass, and his wife, Karen, were in seats near the wing. Clemente and Vera were seated farther back. Blass was staring out the window, still trying to process what had happened, when he heard a familiar voice. Clemente was standing in the aisle. “Blass, come out here,” he said. “Let me embrace you.”

  That joyous hug, Blass said later, was his deepest validation.

  • • •

  Three days later, on the afternoon of October 20, Clemente was at Mamma Leone’s restaurant in New York to accept the Sport magazine award as outstanding player of the series. The award was a new car, a Dodge Charger. Among the many guests and writers at the event inside the dimly lit restaurant was Stu Speiser, a plaintiffs attorney who specialized in airplane crashes. Viewing the Clementes for the first time, Speiser thought they “seemed to be unreal people, sculptured out of bronze instead of ordinary flesh and blood like those surrounding them.” Even in a business suit, Clemente “conveyed power and intensity.” He had a charisma that Speiser had seen only once before in an athlete, in Pelé, the great Brazilian soccer player. Like others in the crowd, Speiser was expecting very little beyond a few jokes and drinks and slaps on the back, all the normal sporting world pleasantries. But Clemente had a deeper purpose. He spoke with a “huge, bursting beautiful heart,” recalled Roger Kahn, the sensitive chronicler of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who might have featured Clemente in his renowned book The Boys of Summer had the Dodgers not failed to protect the young player.

  Over the past year, Clemente’s speeches, even in his second language, had become sharper and more powerful. He had a specific goal, the creation of a sports city in Puerto Rico, but also a more urgent sensibility, one that he had first articulated at a speech in Houston back in February 1971, before the start of his championship season, when he received the Tris Speaker award. “If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on this earth,” he had said then, and the line had become his mantra. Now, at Mamma Leone’s, he said that he was gratified by the attention he had received because he could divert it to better use, turning his sports city idea into a reality.

  “The World Series is the greatest thing that ever happened to me in baseball,” he said. “Mentally it has done for me more than anything before. It give me a chance to talk to writers more than before. I don’t want anything for myself, but through me I can help lots of people. They spend millions of dollars for dope control in Puerto Rico. But they attack the problem after the problem is there. Why don’t they attack it before it starts? You try to get kids so they don’t become addicts, and it would help to get them interested in sports and give them somewhere to learn to play them. I want to have three baseball fields, a swimming pool, basketball, tennis, a lake where fathers and sons can get together . . . one of the biggest problems we have today is the father doesn’t have time for the kids and they lose control over the children . . .”

  In the audience, Speiser noticed that Clemente was choking with tears as he talked about the poor kids of Puerto Rico and the need to treat all people with dignity. He did not intend to waste his time on this earth. “If I get the money to start this, if they tell me they’ll give us the money this year and I have to be there, I’ll quit right now,” Clemente continued. “It’s not enough to go to summer camp and have one or two instructors for a little time and then you go home and forget everything. You go to a sports city and have people like Mays and Mantle and Williams and kids would never forget it. I feel the United States should have something like this all over. If I was the President of the United States I would build a sports city and take in kids of all ways of life. What we want to do is exchange kids with every city in the United States and show all the kids how to live and play with other kids. I been going out to different towns, different neighborhoods. I get kids together and talk about the importance of sports, the importance of being a good citizen, the importance of respecting their mother and father. I like to get together with the fathers and sons and talk to them. Then we go to the ball field and I show them some techniques of playing baseball.”

  12

  Tip of the Cap

  WHEN CLEMENTE CAME HOME TO PUERTO RICO THAT winter, he sought comfort in the rituals of his island life. He drove the family out to la finca, their rural retreat in the shadows of the El Yunque rainforest, and on the way home after a long weekend stopped to buy crabs from his favorite roadside vendor, Don Palito. Momen was a fanatic about crabs, he seemed to have an insatiable appetite, and bought them by the dozens and dozens. The stop at Don Palito’s was a great adventure for Robertito, Luisito, and Ricky. They stared with fascination as the vibrating jumble of live critters scrambled around in the big caged containers. But this time, once the family returned to the house on the hill, Roberto and Vera were distracted for a few minutes, the cage opened, and the soon-to-be-boiled crabs made a mass jail break, scuttling for freedom. Most of the escapees were rounded up by the hungry ballplayer, but for a week or more afterward the boys would suddenly come across a vagrant crab as they played in the far reaches of the house.

  Everyone wanted to hang around the Clemente house that winter, crustacean and human alike. His place in Río Piedras became “like a museum,” he said, with “people from town and even tourists” stopping by night and day, “walking through our rooms” or just stopping outside on the street until they sighted El Magnífico. The governor sent for him, the parks administrator wanted help, every civic club in San Juan had to honor him, every banquet hoped he would speak. The demands were so relentless that Clemente made it back to la finca only one more time. Finally, in late November, he and Vera escaped by embarking on a month-long tour of South America. They visited Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, São Paolo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and arrived in Lima, Peru, on an Avianca flight on the morning of December 17. When they reached the front desk of the old Gran Bolívar Hotel downtown on the historic Plaza San Martin, there was a message to call the family in Puerto Rico. Word came that Don Melchor had collapsed and was in the hospital. Without unpacking their suitcases, the Clementes returned to the airport and caught the next flight home. In his moment of triumph after the World Series, Momen had asked for the blessings of his father, but now it seemed that the baseball triumph and all the celebrations that followed were a bit much for the old man, who was approaching his eighty-seventh birthday.

  As soon as Clemente returned to San Juan, he visited his father at the hospital. Deep into old age, Melchor still seemed indestructible,
his body toughened by decades in the canebrake and miles of walking the dusty country roads every day. His organs were weakening, but doctors said it was not life-threatening; all he needed was medication and bed rest. On one visit, Clemente started talking to the patient in the next bed who shared a room with Melchor. The man said he was in great pain and was in the hospital to undergo a back operation. The words back and pain caught Clemente’s attention, and soon he had spread a blanket on the bathroom floor and was stretching the man’s legs and kneading his back with his magical fingers as Vera guarded the door to make sure no doctors or nurses came by. The next day, the man reported that his pain was gone and that he felt like he was walking on air. “God bless you,” he said to Clemente, and broke into tears.

  The word about Roberto Clemente’s healing powers had spread throughout the San Juan area. Sick and sore friends of friends would make pilgrimages to the house on the hill at all hours of the day and night seeking his magic, and if Clemente was available he would treat them. If only he could ease his own aches and troubles so effectively. He was sleepless again, staying up through the night, every night, until four or five in the morning. Robertito, now almost seven years old, also had insomnia, and sometimes slipped downstairs to find his dad playing pool. Vera was a sound sleeper, but she stayed up many nights keeping Roberto company as he worked on his decorative arts. He had two specialties now: tables and furniture pieces crafted from driftwood he collected on the Atlantic beach; and ceramic lamps, brightened by marbles that he heated in the oven until they exploded. But the hectic schedule and lack of sleep were taking a toll. He had lost ten pounds, down to 175, and his stomach was hurting. Vera developed sympathetic stomach pains. The requests kept coming, and Clemente had a hard time saying no.

  “Since I’ve been back to Puerto Rico, I’ve been having my problems,” Clemente said one night in January 1972 at a banquet of fathers and sons in San Juan. The speech was recorded by his friend, the broadcaster Ramiro Martínez, who tailed him wherever he went that winter.

  “I think the World Series was too much for my father,” Clemente continued. He spoke of his deep love for his parents—“the most wonderful mother and father who ever lived” as an introduction to the themes of sports, competition, country, teamwork, and parenthood. Though his extemporaneous speeches had the rhythm of stream-of-consciousness, they integrated the disparate threads of his life—as a Puerto Rican and an American citizen, as a ballplayer who loved his game, as a black and Latino, as a former Marine, as a believer in the underdog, and as someone who refused to be undervalued or dismissed. “All my life I have to thank God to make me a sports figure because I love competition and I think competition is part of the way that we are living today,” he said. “I love competition because when we compete, we compete to be proud of our country. I see myself sometimes wondering why some people still have to fight for their rights. As you people know, I have been fighting for my rights all my life. I believe every human being is equal. At the same time, we also have problems because we are a great nation.” For all of Clemente’s struggles adjusting to the culture and language of his baseball life on the mainland, he felt very much a part of the United States. “I am from Puerto Rico, but I am also an American citizen,” he continued. “We have an opportunity to travel. I just came from South America. I’ve been in Europe . . . I can tell you one thing, I won’t trade this country for no one country. We, no matter what, we have the best country in the world and you can believe it.”

  The World Series victory was still on his mind. “I always say to myself that we athletes should pay the public to come and see us play. Because if you see what we saw in the World Series, what we see when we play ball, I guess I don’t have any money to buy the feelings inside the clubhouse. This year to have the opportunity to see Willie Stargell have the greatest season I’ve ever seen a player have . . .” He meant this as a gesture of goodwill to his friend and teammate who had been overshadowed in the series after carrying the Pirates much of the year. He would never forget the sight of Stargell and Jackie Hernández bounding into the locker room arm-in-arm after the seventh game, a picture of solidarity.

  Life is nothing. Life is fleeting. Only God makes man happy—so went his mother’s favorite spiritual verse. But Clemente looked for the lasting meaning in fleeting life. “As you know, time goes so fast,” he told the San Juan audience. “And we are living in a really fast life. You want to have the opportunity to have sons . . . We come home from work, sometimes our kids are in bed already. We go back to work, our kids are already in school. So sometimes we hear how bad our kids are, and how bad our American schools are. This is a big world and we are going to have our problems, but I think that we can help our difficult youth. We can give them the love and more attention to our home, our kids, our family, and our neighbors. We are brothers. And don’t say, ‘Well, I don’t want to do it. Somebody else will.’ Because you are somebody . . .” His closing message took on more urgency every time he said it. If you have a chance to help others, and don’t, you are wasting your time on this earth.

  • • •

  In his eighteenth spring with the Pirates, after all he had accomplished, Clemente chose to live like a rookie. Many veterans rented houses on the beaches or golf courses around Bradenton, the Gulf Coast town that had been the team’s Grapefruit League headquarters for four years, but Clemente stayed in Room 231 at the four-story dorm at Pirate City on Twenty-seventh Street East. In late afternoons after practice, he was surrounded by young players and hangers-on who wanted to soak up his advice. “A lot of us young guys would just sit there and listen to him,” said Fernando González, a rookie infielder from Arecibo, Puerto Rico, who had admired Clemente since he was a ten-year-old collecting autographs when winter league teams stopped at El Gran Café in his hometown on bus trips between San Juan and Mayagüez. “Clemente would talk about the way that baseball was going to be . . . situations in games . . . almost everything.”

  Also hanging around was Roy Blount Jr., who came down to Bradenton to do a feature story on the hero of the 1971 World Series for the New York Times Magazine. Writing under the felicitous pseudonym C. R. Ways, which he later told Pittsburgh writers was the name of his dog, Blount took note of how Clemente “strolled the team’s Pirate City complex in his long-collar tab shirts and brilliant slacks, as vivid a major leaguer as there is . . .” While dutifully visiting the stations of Clemente’s cross—his maladies and complaints, his sore feelings going back to the 1960 MVP vote, his distaste for being quoted in broken English—Blount found a humorist’s delight in Clemente’s eccentric style, which he considered representative of Latin players who “in the 20 years since they began to enter American baseball in numbers from Cuba, Mexico and South America, have added more color and unexpected personal drama to the game than any other ethnic group.” The headline on the piece was “NOBODY DOES ANYTHING BETTER THAN ME IN BASEBALL,” SAYS ROBERTO CLEMENTE . . . WELL, HE’S RIGHT. Full recognition from New York, at last, just what Clemente had always wanted. The article had Blount’s sweet touch and was mostly accurate, yet reflected an attitude that could upset Clemente. The quirks of his personality were irresistible, but Clemente more than anything else wanted to be treated seriously, not as a stereotype, even when the stereotypes were true.

  There had been another changing of the guard with the Pirates. Murtaugh was gone, again, his career capped by a second championship, and Bill Virdon, who had prepped for the job in San Juan, was now Pittsburgh’s manager. Perhaps the only situation as thankless as managing an abysmal team is taking over World Series winners. Virdon inherited a talented squad, yet had nowhere to go but down. His best player, Clemente, was nearly as old as he was and slowed that spring by stomach pains. “The other day I went out to buy an Osterizer [blender] when you called me,” Clemente wrote Vera one early March evening. “It is the only time I’ve left here since I arrived. I’ve tried to control my nerves to see if that helps my stomach.” Even if the accounting of his ti
me sounded like an absent husband’s fib, the stomach trouble was real.

  Clemente’s life was far more than baseball at that point in his career. In his letter to Vera he wrote about plans to open a chiropractic clinic. “God willing, we can move forward this clinic proposal,” he said. He had already bought a one-story house at the bottom of his hill in Río Piedras to treat neighbors, a modest beginning to his larger idea of someday running a chiropractic resort. He was also preoccupied with his plans for a sports city for underprivileged youths in San Juan. And Jim Fanning, then the general manager of the Montreal Expos, said that Clemente called him four or five times that spring hoping to persuade the Expos to move their spring training headquarters to San Juan. Yet when it came to baseball, Clemente kept looking for new methods of enhancing his powers of concentration. Late one afternoon after practice, when the major and minor league players had retreated into the clubhouse, Harding Peterson, the farm and scouting director, walked out to the fields and was surprised to see a lone figure in the distance, near the batting cage. “It is Clemente, and there is no one there but him, and he is standing at home plate,” Peterson remembered. “And he makes a stride but doesn’t swing, then makes a stride and swings, and runs three quarters of the way to first. I don’t want to bother him, but I go up to the batting cage and say, ‘Hey, Roberto, don’t want to interrupt, but what are you doing?’ And he says, ‘Well, I know we’re opening against the Mets. I’m making believe I see the same pitches I see on opening day.’” In Clemente’s mind, Peterson realized, Tom Seaver was on the mound, throwing sliders low and away.