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

by David Maraniss

  • • •

  Nicaragua is the largest country in Central America, about the size of Iowa, but the least populated. In 1972 it had about 2 million citizens, a quarter of them in metropolitan Managua. The people were known for their beauty, the nation for its poverty. More than half the populace was illiterate. Like other Central American countries, Nicaragua had its own difficult and peculiar history with the United States. It was long coveted by American interests as a pathway to the Pacific and the gold of California, and was the first proposed route of a canal that eventually was built in Panama. In 1855 an American freebooter from Tennessee, William Walker, invaded the country with the idea of transforming it into a slave-holding colony, and for a brief time, before he was driven out, he established English as the official language and called himself emperor. U.S. Marines arrived in Nicaragua in 1909 and were there much of the time until 1933. Three years after they left, the reign of the Somoza family began. Describing the singular hold the Somozas had over Nicaragua for nearly fifty years, University of Denver professor Tom J. Farer once wrote, “If El Salvador was the country of the fourteen families, Nicaragua was the country of only one.” The first Anastasio Somoza ruled for twenty years until he was assassinated in 1956, but power was passed along to his sons.

  Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who would be the last in the Somoza line, took power in 1967. He spoke fluent English, went to prep school on Long Island and in Washington, D.C., and was a member of the U.S. Military Academy class of 1946. He graduated 752nd out of 875 cadets but excelled in marksmanship and military tactics. At home in Nicaragua, Somoza also came to excel at using power for financial gain. By 1972 it was estimated that he and his family controlled 25 percent of the gross national product. The Somozas controlled cattle ranches, coffee and sugar plantations, sugar mills, distilleries, auto dealerships, textiles, hotels, airlines, and a newspaper, Novedades, while also owning vast stretches of real estate on the outskirts of Managua. Looking back on the years of Somoza’s rule, a commission on Central America chaired by Henry A. Kissinger declared that the general’s “galloping greed discouraged foreign investment, distorted the economy and progressively concentrated in his hands capital assets and investment opportunities.” The Somoza family’s selfishness, the commission report stated, reached its fulfillment in the person of Anastasio, “whose achievements gave new meaning to the term kleptocracy, that is government as theft.”

  By December 27, on the fifth day after the earthquake, the greed of Somoza and his cronies was becoming apparent. Red Cross volunteers wondered where all the aid was going. Money seemed to disappear. Raul Pelligrina returned to San Juan that night after a round-trip to Managua with the first delivery from Puerto Rico. He went directly from the airport to the relief committee headquarters outside Hiram Bithorn and could barely contain his disappointment. It was awful, he told Clemente. The moment they landed, Somoza’s soldiers surrounded the plane and tried to take everything. Nicaragua was in chaos. No one knew whether aid was getting to the right people. Pelligrina, calling the military’s bluff, said that if they didn’t let him through he would reload his aircraft and fly back to San Juan and tell the great Roberto Clemente what was happening. Finally, Somoza’s son Tachito came to see who was giving his soldiers trouble. Upon hearing the invocation of Clemente’s name, Tachito relented and let them go on to Masaya. But it was a hassle from beginning to end, and it seemed to Pelligrina that most supplies were being diverted. Osvaldo Gil stood nearby as Pelligrina told this story. Clemente was silent, but it was apparent how angry he was, Gil said. They could see it in his eyes. When Pelligrina finished, Clemente, his voice reaching a high pitch, said they had to do something to get the aid to the people who needed it. If he had to travel to Managua himself to make sure Somoza and his guards weren’t stealing it, he said, then that is what he would do.

  Special missions had been reaching Managua every day during that week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. On the same day that the Super Snoopy flew in from Puerto Rico with the first shipment from Clemente’s relief committee, a small chartered plane arrived from Jamaica carrying Bianca Jagger, her husband, Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, and some medical supplies. Bianca, then only twenty-two, had grown up in Managua and was worried about her divorced parents, neither of whom she had been able to reach since the earthquake struck. Her mother, Doris Macias, ran a shop in the old section of Managua, where everything was rubble. Mother and daughter shared a love of politics and an intense dislike of Somoza; during a student protest when she was a teenager, Bianca had been tear-gassed by Somoza’s National Guard. What she saw as soon as they landed at the airport in the aftermath of the earthquake only intensified her feelings. Soldiers were everywhere, she recalled in an interview with journalist Kurt Jacobsen, but they were just seizing supplies and taking them to government warehouses. Nearby, on the other side of the fences, hungry people were shouting for food and water, their pleas ignored. With the help of a British journalist, the Jaggers roamed the city in search of Bianca’s parents. As it turned out, her mother and father had made it out of Managua safely and were staying in Leon, where they were reunited two days later. But her experiences during those few days in her hometown affected Bianca Jagger so much that she persuaded her husband and the Rolling Stones to perform a benefit concert for the Nicaraguan people. She would never forget the arrogance of the Somoza regime, she said, nor the “stench of burned flesh” that overwhelmed her as they drove through the ruins.

  From the North, arriving within hours of the Jaggers, came a thirty-three-member medical team organized by health officials in Rockland County, New York. At the end of a long flight, as the Pan Am jetliner was descending, Dr. Hart Achenbach noticed a jagged trench running parallel to the shores of Lake Managua that stretched for miles and was so deep he couldn’t see the bottom. He was stunned to realize that earthquakes really did open the ground and swallow people and buildings into the great maw. Once the plane touched down, the doctors were met by one of Somoza’s sons, who asked them whether they brought any barbed wire so he and his troops could put it around the cargo. This was the same demand that had been made of Major Pelligrina when the Clemente aid came in from Puerto Rico. The Americans ignored young Somoza and loaded four hundred cartons of a mobile hospital into trucks that they had arranged to have waiting for them.

  Once they set up their hospital tents on the edge of downtown, the doctors were overcome by the stench. “The smell was incredible. There were lots of dead, though we didn’t see them, we could smell them,” Achenbach recalled. “It was sickening. We would take handkerchiefs and wet them and put them over our faces.” His colleague, Dr. Frederick Zugibe, chief medical examiner for Rockland County, anticipated that the doctors and nurses would be overwhelmed with patients, but there were more dead than injured. They did treat 250 Managuans and deliver twenty-five babies, but what Zugibe remembered most was that some of his patients had been wounded by soldiers, not injured from falling debris. “I had more individuals that I treated who were shot,” he recalled. “They were shot for looting. It was amazing. Young kids. I remember operating on young kids to remove bullets.”

  At about the time that Dr. Zugibe was removing bullets from a young patient on the afternoon of December 28, President Nixon placed a call to Maurice J. Williams at his holiday retreat in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Williams was the deputy administrator of the Agency for International Development, and the President had just picked him to be his representative at the earthquake scene. “I want you to go to Managua and take charge of the relief effort,” Nixon said. “I’m concerned that the Communists may take over the country. Somoza is a personal friend of mine; I will have a letter for you to carry to him.”

  Williams caught a flight from Washington to Panama and then reached Managua by military helicopter. His first impressions were like all the others: desolation, smoldering rubble, ungodly stench. He visited the field hospitals and noticed that many casualties had resulted from gunshot wo
unds. Maybe, he thought, there had been an attempted revolt, as Nixon had feared. Then he went up the hill to visit Somoza, carrying with him the President’s letter. The first thing he noticed was a platoon of U.S. infantry soldiers armed and camped on the site—there, he assumed, by order of President Nixon. “Quite a character,” Williams said later of the Nicaraguan general. “Somoza impressed me as an entrepreneurial type. Certainly he had extensive business monopoly interests and apparently was milking the country economically.” Williams tried to set up rigid accounting practices for the U.S. aid. “However, I found that relief supplies from other countries and private agencies were being received by Somoza’s son, a young man in the uniform of an Army lieutenant, who stored them in a locked warehouse outside the city. One had a sense of inefficiency and corruption.”

  • • •

  Clemente was determined that his own efforts would not fall victim to corruption. To several friends in those final few days of 1972, he made the same request: I’m going to Nicaragua. Come with me. He called his friend Les Banos, the Pittsburgh photographer, explained his distress over the corruption in Managua, and said, “Why don’t you come down and take pictures?” If not for the Immaculate Reception, Banos replied, he would be there no questions asked, but because the Steelers won he would be covering their next playoff game against the Miami Dolphins on New Year’s Eve. Clemente turned to Orlando Cepeda, who was home in Puerto Rico after the most difficult season of his career. Cepeda had been traded from the Atlanta Braves to Oakland the previous June, but underwent knee surgery after only three at-bats with the A’s and never got back on the field. After fifteen productive seasons in the big leagues and a total of 358 home runs and 1,261 runs batted in, Cepeda found himself struggling to keep his career alive. Oakland had placed him on waivers at season’s end, and not a single club had put in a claim for him. Now, after Christmas, came the deflating news that the A’s had given him his unconditional release. That often meant a career was over, but Cepeda, at age thirty-five, was not ready to give up. He wanted to exercise his troublesome legs back into shape, and in any case he loved being in Puerto Rico during the holiday season, and that is why he said, no, sorry, when his friend asked him to come along to Nicaragua. No was not an easy thing to say to Roberto Clemente. “He was angry with me for not going,” Cepeda remembered.

  The earthquake relief collection site was moved after a few days from the Hiram Bithorn parking lot to a larger lot across the street at Plaza Las Americas because San Juan and Santurce were back playing at the stadium. The Senadores team was a virtual Pirates South, stocked with Clemente’s Pittsburgh teammates, including Richie Zisk, Rennie Stennett, Milt May, and Manny Sanguillen. Before a game one night that week, Clemente took a break from his volunteer work and visited the clubhouse, where he immediately fell into the comfortable routine of razzing in a mix of Spanish and English, mostly with Sanguillen, his cheery little brother from Panama.

  “Sangy, what position do you play in the winter league?” Clemente asked, fixing a serious stare on Sanguillen. He knew the answer. The sports sections that week had featured stories about how the hot-hitting catcher was learning to play outfield.

  “Right field,” Sanguillen said. “I play twenty games in right, one in left.”

  The first crack of a smile showed on Clemente’s face. “Sangy, you play left field or go back to catching. You have no chance to take my job.”

  “I play right field real good now,” Sanguillen responded. “Not as good as you, but real close. I may be the best right fielder in the league when you quit.”

  Now Clemente was laughing. “You never come close, Sangy. Besides, I think I’m a better catcher than you.”

  When Clemente said something like that, no one could be certain whether he was kidding. He thought he could do anything. He always insisted that he could throw a curveball better than the pitcher Steve Blass. He couldn’t, of course, nor could he catch nearly as well as Sanguillen, but that was Clemente. At least he wouldn’t feel slighted for not being universally regarded as the best pitcher or catcher in the world. But the very idea of Sangy out there in right challenging his position, that wasn’t quite a laughing matter, no more now than it was a month earlier when Edgard Tijerino, the Nicaraguan sportswriter, suggested that a young Cuban outfielder had an arm that could match El Magnífico’s. But the beauty of Sanguillen was that he could ease whatever tension Clemente was feeling at the moment. Now Clemente was joking with him again about the monkey that he brought back from Nicaragua after the amateur baseball tournament. At home, he called the monkey Teófilo, but when Sanguillen was around he always joked that the monkey’s name was Sangy. Sangy was acting up, he said. Sangy bit one of the kids and went wild at Don Melchor’s house and made a mess of all the fruit, fake and real. Had to give him to the zoo. Then Clemente said: I’m going back to Nicaragua, Sangy. Come with me. But Sanguillen couldn’t go, either. He had some more baseball games to play in right field.

  And there was Osvaldo Gil, his compatriot on the baseball trip to Nicaragua. “Valdy, will you go with me?” Clemente asked, and Gil, without giving it a second thought, said sure. But that night, when he told his wife that he intended to go back to Managua with Roberto Clemente, she fled to the bedroom without saying a word. When Osvaldo came in, she was crying. She was feeling sad, she told him, because they had just been married a few months when he left for Nicaragua the first time, and now he was leaving again. Gil realized that she was right. The next morning, at Plaza Las Americas, he told Clemente, “I talked to my wife, and I’m not going.”

  “And you’re the one who says we shouldn’t listen to the women?” Clemente answered, recalling with a touch of sarcasm how Gil, during their earlier trip to Managua, had teased him so much for reflexively consulting with Vera before making a decision.

  “But you’re right,” Clemente now said to Gil. “You shouldn’t go. I’ll go by myself.”

  14

  Cockroach Corner

  IN THE WIDE WORLD OF AVIATION THERE ARE DARK little corners of desperation. One of them during the early 1970s was a back lot of Miami International Airport known as Cockroach Corner. It was said that you could buy anything for a song at Cockroach Corner, occasionally even planes that had a decent chance of taking flight. The place looked like a mechanical graveyard, creaking with rickety old surplus DC-3s, DC-6s, Lockheed Constellations, and DC-7s, but in fact it was more of a winged bazaar. What were known in the industry as tramp operators did business there, buying, selling, and leasing planes to anyone looking for a cut-rate deal. It was at Cockroach Corner that a twenty-six-year-old operator named Arthur S. Rivera bought another old plane on July 12, 1972. This DC-7, powered by four Curtiss Wright 988 engines with Hamilton Standard propellers, would double Rivera’s cargo fleet, supplementing his twin-engine DC-3 in hauling goods between San Juan, his home base, and other Caribbean islands.

  Rivera had obtained a commercial pilot rating four years earlier, but knew nothing about DC-7s, which were more than five times heavier than DC-3s, so he could not fly his plane back to Puerto Rico. It remained at Cockroach Corner until sometime in September, when he finally found a pilot. When they ferried it from Florida to the island, Rivera rode along in the right seat as copilot. They parked the aircraft at a cargo ramp at San Juan International Airport on Isla Verde, and there it remained throughout the fall. Word soon spread about Rivera’s folly, the only DC-7 at the airfield. The plane had a registration number, N500AE, but seemed anything but airworthy. Among other deficiencies, its No. 3 propeller was said to be feathered, indicating engine malfunction. “It was never seen to fly, and everybody wondered what Mr. Rivera was going to do with the plane. That probably included Mr. Rivera,” Michael Pangia, a Justice Department aviation lawyer, observed later. What Rivera did was spruce up the exterior. He gave the fuselage a new paint job of silvery white and added the bravado touch of a lightning bolt, orange with black trim, that ran horizontally along both sides above the windows and zigzagged b
elow the cockpit. The same color scheme was applied to the tips of the propellers, creating the effect of tiger stripes. With that superficial remodeling, Rivera placed advertisements in the local newspapers, announcing that his outfit—he called himself the American Air Express Company—had a DC-7 available for lease. The phone in his home office on Loiza Street in Santurce did not ring off the hook.

  On the Saturday morning of December 2, Rivera and a relative, who knew even less about DC-7s than he did, took the plane out for what was called a run-up, meaning they would taxi around the airstrip, warming up the engines, but not try to fly. As practice runs go, this one was a fiasco. Rivera, in the pilot’s seat, forgot to close the hydraulic pump bypass, which caused him to lose steering control. He shut down all four engines in an effort to slow the plane’s momentum, but it ended up rolling into a drainage ditch. When it came to a stop, the nose of the plane was leaning down and the wings were so low that two propellers touched the ground. It is not every day that a DC-7 plunges into a ditch. Everyone who worked at the airport knew about the “incident” (as it was called, rather than an accident), especially since it blocked the taxiway for several hours and forced air traffic controllers to reroute traffic until heavy equipment was brought in to hoist the plane out of the ditch and tow it ignominiously back to the east ramp. If Federal Aviation Administration officials in San Juan needed a reminder to keep close watch on the comings and goings of Arthur Rivera, this was it, but with his aviation history, one might assume that no further warnings would have been needed.

  From the moment he came down from Atlanta and began transporting cargo out of San Juan International in November 1969, Rivera had been a constant irritant to inspectors at the FAA’s Flight Standards District Office. Day after day, he offered his DC-3 out for hire as he made island hops from Puerto Rico to St. Thomas to St. Croix and back to San Juan, hauling leisurewear, rugs, dry goods, and luggage. But despite repeated warnings from federal aviation officials, Rivera refused to obtain the proper certification for a commercial operator, acting instead as though he were merely flying the plane for his own personal recreation. This allowed him to avoid more frequent inspections and the far stricter flight standards of commercial aviation. Acting on a complaint from a licensed competitor, the FAA finally launched a formal investigation, compiled a list of sixty-six illegal trips that Rivera had made, and issued an emergency order in August 1970 revoking his pilot’s license. In taking that step, the FAA said Rivera’s “aviation knowledge and experience was relatively limited” and that he was an “extremely independent and headstrong person who would not take advice.”