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

by David Maraniss

  The boys were asleep. Robertito fussed before going to bed. “Abuela, why is Daddy leaving?” he had said to his grandmother. “That plane will crash.” Robertito had been anxious for days. One of the last things he had done before they took him away from his parents’ house the day before was to sneak into the dressing area behind their bedroom and look in the little dresser drawer divider where his dad usually kept plane tickets. Robertito never liked it when his father flew away, and often tried to hide the tickets in a futile effort to keep him at home. This time there had been no tickets. He had warned his father not to leave, and now his premonition was stronger. Mrs. Zabala told him not to be foolish, everything would be fine. But later, before Vera and her friends arrived, she was overcome by an odd sensation. It felt like her heart was going around in a circle of sadness. She went into the kitchen and cried. Something bad is happening, she thought, but she didn’t say anything. Nearby, at his house on Calle Nicolas Aguayo, Melchor Clemente was also haunted by dark feelings. He had had a dream about Momen.

  The radio was on at the Zabala house, but it was only background noise, no one was listening. The room was full of people talking. Vera, her mother, her brother Orlando, and his wife. Neighbors. Nevin and Carolyn Rauch and the daughters. A few times Vera thought she heard an announcer say the name Roberto Clemente, but that was nothing out of the ordinary; he was in the news every day for his relief work. The telephone rang constantly. Carol, now fluent in Spanish, answered it once. There was music blaring in the background, and the connection was bad, but she thought she heard something about a plane crash. By the time she handed the phone to Orlando, the caller had hung up. One of Vera’s close friends, the godmother to her youngest son, Ricky, called three times. She seemed tentative, evasive, asking how Vera was, then hanging up. The Navarros, Roberto’s friends from Carolina, rang the doorbell and paid a visit. They took seats in the living room and didn’t talk. It was as though everyone was expecting Vera to know something.

  Then Roberto’s niece Fafa called. She was coughing, crying. “Are you listening to the news?” she asked Vera. Something about a crash of the airplane going to Nicaragua. At first, Vera was disbelieving, but then Carol took the phone. When word spread through the room the reaction was the same. It couldn’t be true. Roberto’s plane would have been arriving in Managua by now. “We all said, ‘This can’t be true! This can’t be true!’” Carolyn Rauch remembered. Vera’s sister-in-law called the airport and got the first sketchy confirmation. It was a cargo plane with five people bound for Nicaragua. In the far bedroom, Robertito heard his mother’s cry and feared the worst.

  Vera grabbed her car keys and rushed out the door, followed by Nevin, Carolyn, and Carol. They didn’t want her to drive, but she insisted. She knew the way to Roberto’s parents’ house in El Comandante.

  Matino Clemente, Roberto’s brother, had been at his father-in-law’s house when he heard the news on the radio. He looked outside toward Isla Verde and saw lights flaring in the night sky. He and his brother Osvaldo reached their parents’ house before Vera got there. Melchor and Luisa were asleep. Matino woke his father and took him outside to break the news. The old man was devastated, but not surprised. He had dreamed this, he said. Luisa eventually came out of bed and noticed all the people in her house. What’s going on? Matino told her it was a Parranda, a spontaneous house call during the holiday season. Then where is the music? Matino huddled with Osvaldo and they decided they had to tell her. She listened without saying a word, then collapsed in deep, sorrowful sobs. December 31. The final day of the year. On that same day eighteen years earlier, Luisa had lost her firstborn son, Luis Oquendo.

  By the time Vera and the Rauches arrived, the street was buzzing with people. Soon a caravan of cars left for Isla Verde. They drove to the airport. Mass confusion. Sirens wailing, policemen everywhere. Had the plane crashed in Nicaragua? No, on takeoff, here in San Juan. They drove toward the ocean near where the plane might have gone down. In the rain, a crowd was already gathering on Piñones Beach near Punta Maldonado. Police cars were shining headlights into the ocean. Vera knew the area well; it was Roberto’s favorite spot to collect driftwood.

  Sitting in a car nearby was George Mattern, the FAA inspector. He had been at home in Río Piedras, taking a shower, when his pager went off at about ten that night. He had no phone at his place, so he went out looking for help. Up and down his street, no one was home, they were all out celebrating. Finally, a block away, he found a neighbor who let him use the phone. He called the office and heard about a plane crash. A “newsworthy person” had been aboard. It went down in the Piñones area. Get there as soon as you can. Driving through the back roads along the beach, he ran into his boss, Leonard Davis. Stories were already spreading at the beach. José Ayala of Punta Maldonado had been in bed when he heard a plane flying overhead and the motors sputter and go dead. Gregorio Rivera had seen wreckage floating on the water about a mile out to sea, but a few minutes later it had disappeared.

  Vera felt faint; Melchor was getting weak. A nephew took Vera’s car keys and drove them home long past two in the morning.

  • • •

  In Puerto Rico, New Year’s Eve is one of the biggest nights of the year, celebrated with fireworks, traditional street dancing, and vibrant Latin music. But Orlando Cepeda felt something eerie in the air long before he heard about the crash. “It was quiet and sad. The night felt different. There weren’t many people celebrating. No stars were out. Man, nothing happening.” Cepeda, who had revered Roberto since he was a bowlegged batboy for the Santurce Cangrejeros in 1954, was with his wife at a brother’s house when he got the news. Roberto Clemente cannot die, he thought. And he remembered how Clemente had wanted him to come along on the flight to Nicaragua.

  Osvaldo Gil, who had persuaded Clemente to make that first trip to Nicaragua to manage, and who would have accompanied Roberto on the mercy flight had his wife not talked him out of it, was celebrating with his family when word of the crash reached him. In Spanish, Gil is pronounced “heel,” and it sounds quite similar to the Spanish pronunciation of the English name Hill. With the first reports listing the names of the five people aboard the DC-7, friends and associates heard the name Hill and feared that Osvaldo was among the dead. He remembered a saying that Clemente had uttered only a few days earlier as they discussed the flight: Nobody dies the day before. You die the day you’re supposed to.

  Caguitas Colón was at a family reunion in his hometown of Caguas at two that morning when a relative told him the news. He had tried to warn Clemente that the plane looked unsafe, to no avail. Now he remembered how Clemente had scoffed at danger with one of his colloquial sayings: You even die riding a horse. Colón felt so blue he retreated to his bedroom and would not come out.

  Juan Pizarro was on the roof of his house in Castellana Gardens in Carolina, fiddling with his malfunctioning television antenna, when the plane went down. He happened to be looking toward the ocean at the time, and thought he saw an explosion. A few hours later, when he heard that Clemente’s plane had crashed, two thoughts rushed into his mind. He remembered when they were teammates on the Pirates and Clemente had told him that he was going to die in a plane crash. But he also thought Clemente absolutely could not die. He had to still be alive.

  José Pagán was asleep at the family house in Barceloneta when his father came in and told him the news. The Pirate teammate remembered when Roberto had uncharacteristically fallen asleep on the team plane but jolted awake from a dream saying that a plane had crashed and he had been the only one killed, and how Pagán had tried to soothe him by saying that he often dreamed that he was rich but that didn’t make it so. When Pagán’s wife, Delia, heard the news, she insisted that they leave immediately for Río Piedras to be with her dear friend, Vera Clemente.

  Pedrin Zorrilla, who had signed Clemente to his first contract with Santurce, heard the bulletins on the radio that night at his house in Manatí. The news left him gasping for air. Clemente, he thoug
ht, had become more than a baseball player; he was now a symbol, a representation of the Dream of Deeds, the burning pride for Puerto Rico expressed by Zorrilla’s poet father: Land, blood, name, and race.

  Eduardo Valero, a veteran Puerto Rican sports writer, was asleep that night when he received a call from a friend in Virginia. You know who died? Roberto Clemente. “It was like a cold water shower,” Valero said. But he could never figure it out. “Who in the hell in Latin American culture leaves a family on New Year’s Eve? If you find two, let me know the other one. He left his family to go there on New Year’s Eve.”

  Luis Olmo, one of the Three Kings of Puerto Rican baseball, paving the way for Clemente in the major leagues, was with his son’s wife’s family in Naguabo when he heard the news on the radio. Olmo thought of Clemente as a man of passion for everything in life, and he had a different take on the question raised by Valero. “I don’t see any reason for him to be on that plane that night to go to Nicaragua,” Olmo said later. “That’s the night to be with family. The reason he went, I don’t know. That is the night to keep your heart at home.”

  Vic Power, another of the Three Kings, heard about the plane crash a few minutes before midnight after he had finished dinner with his wife and son at a restaurant in Condado. The last time he had seen Clemente was on the plane returning from Managua after the amateur baseball championships three weeks earlier. Clemente had been quiet during that uneventful flight home, sleeping. Power had been restless, still bothered by that fishbone in his throat. Then Clemente had gone off to run his youth baseball clinics, and Power had returned to manage Caguas. Power could not believe that his friend was gone.

  The Pirates had a working relationship with the San Juan Senadores that year, and the team was stocked with young Pittsburgh players. Many of them had gathered on New Year’s Eve at a waterfront condo. Chuck Goggin, who had slapped his first major league hit in the same game that Clemente got his three-thousandth, was sitting on the patio deck with Richie Zisk and Bob Johnson shortly after midnight and noticed “a bunch of commotion going on over the ocean, it looked like helicopters and planes” and lights. There were no radios, no phone calls, no one at the party had a clue. They speculated that there must have been a plane crash, or maybe a boat was missing.

  Steve Blass and his wife were hosting a party at their house in Upper St. Clair Township, a Pittsburgh suburb. There were eight couples there from the neighborhood, including Dave Giusti and his wife. By two in the morning, everyone had left but the Giustis, who were going to stay and party all night. Then a call came from Bill Guilfoile, the Pirates public relations man. There is an unsubstantiated report that a plane has gone down near Puerto Rico and Clemente was on it, Guilfoile said. My God, Blass thought. Clemente! He’s invincible. He doesn’t die. He plays as long as he wants to and then becomes governor of Puerto Rico. With the stunning news, Blass and Giusti sobered up quickly. Not knowing what else to do, but wanting to do something, they drove to general manager Joe L. Brown’s house in Mount Lebanon, the adjacent township in the South Hills area. Brown let them in and they sat around drinking coffee. As Brown later recalled the scene, the three men “talked about Roberto and cried” as they recalled “the depth of the man and the intelligence of the man and the humor of the man.” Clemente never held anything back from the people, Brown thought. He gave them more than they had any right to expect from him. He reminded Brown of a panther, the grace and power of a panther. He would always think of footage from the 1971 World Series of Clemente rounding second and sliding into third, so graceful and strong, such spectacular passion. What a good man.

  From there, Blass and Giusti drove across town to Willie Stargell’s house, and the three Pirates consoled one another until the sun came up, eventually making their way over to the annual New Year’s Day party at the home of Bob Prince. The Gunner had thought about canceling his party after he heard the news, but decided that Roberto would want the party to go on. It did, as a wake.

  The fans of Pittsburgh were in shock. On New Year’s morning, Ann Ranalli’s mother was in the kitchen when she heard a radio report. She ran upstairs to tell her daughter, who three months earlier had taken the streetcar to Three Rivers Stadium and thrown confetti over the right-field railing after Roberto Clemente got his three-thousandth hit. Ann started sobbing. She spent the rest of the day praying that he would be found. “It was really hard,” she said later. “He was the Pope to me.”

  “Adios, Amigo Roberto” read the lights atop Mount Washington. The mayor declared a week of mourning. Richard Santry was home for the holidays during his freshman year at Notre Dame. All through his childhood, Santry had watched Clemente from the Knothole Gang seats in the right-field bleachers. He and his father would stand at the screen and wave and sometimes Clemente would come over to talk to them or throw a ball their way. There are days you remember your whole life, Santry would say decades later. Where you were when JFK was shot. Where you were on 9/11. He would always remember New Year’s morning, 1973. “The sound I remember is the bedroom door opening, the creaking of rusty hinges. My mother sat on an empty twin bed and started to poke me a bit. I glanced over at the clock. It was eleven-twenty or so; I had slept pretty good. My mom’s first words to me were ‘I have some very bad news.’ I sat up, and Mom said that Clemente had died in a plane crash. I looked at her, groggy, not quite sure what I heard, waiting for a punch line. What are you talking about? He was on a plane delivering supplies to people in Nicaragua and the plane dropped into the ocean, she said. I was eighteen years old. I went into the bathroom . . . and just sat there and had a cry like a family member or my best friend just died.”

  Nancy Golding had gone to bed on New Year’s Eve with her radio on. Things always seemed louder in the morning, and when she awoke the radio was blaring the news. She was just an average kid in Pittsburgh, and yet she happened to live near Roberto’s accountant and the Clementes had been so kind in letting her into their lives. She had been to their house in Río Piedras and had eaten in their kitchen and had played with their little boys. Roberto Clemente is missing and presumed dead in a plane crash, the radio announcer was saying, and she started screaming. “Clemente died! Clemente died!”

  In Miami that morning, William Couric, the FAA official who had battled with Arthur Rivera almost daily during his tenure in San Juan, exploded in uncharacteristic fury when he heard the news. How could they let the tramp aircraft from Cockroach Corner ever roll down a runway? “They wouldn’t listen to me! They wouldn’t listen to me!” he cried. “I tried! I tried so hard to put those people out of business!”

  The three Clemente boys, Robertito, Luisito, and Ricky, were brought back to the house in Río Piedras late the next morning. Everything was a blur, but there were a few images they would never forget. Parked cars line both sides of the street all the way up the hill. They are led across the little bridge from the sidewalk to the front gate. A big black bow is on the door. Military police stand at attention at the entry-way. The flags of Puerto Rico and the United States frame the doorway. The door opens into a sea of faces. Oh, there are the kids! And people rush up to hug and squeeze them. Finally they are taken into a bedroom with their mother and grandparents and their mom starts crying and holds them tight and searches for the words.

  16

  Out of the Sea

  SECONDS AFTER N500AE DISAPPEARED FROM THE RADAR screen, San Juan’s air traffic control tower activated the emergency accident notification system, a sequence of twenty telephone calls. The second call went to the U.S. Coast Guard Rescue Center located near the cruise ship piers in Old San Juan, nine miles west of the airport. Since the plane went down in the water, there was little the airport’s fire rescue team could do beyond rush to the beachfront and beam spotlights into the dark Atlantic. The search required boats, planes, helicopters, divers—the realm of the Coast Guard and Navy. One Coast Guard vessel and two aircraft went out on the first call after ten that night, but search officers had not yet plotted the Pr
obability of Detection Area so the rescuers were operating on guesswork, literally in the dark, and found nothing.

  Not long after sunrise on New Year’s Day it became obvious that this was not just a routine search. From Isla Verde to Punta Maldonado, the shore was lined with people who had come to bear witness. The two-lane roads leading to the water became more congested as the day progressed until by afternoon there was a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of pilgrims flocking toward the place where their hero had fallen.

  “That night on which Roberto Clemente left us physically, his immortality began,” the Puerto Rican writer Elliott Castro later observed, and here, on Piñones Beach, was the first manifestation of the transformation from man to myth. Although Governor Luis A. Ferré, in his final day in office, had declared a three-day mourning period, in effect acknowledging that Clemente was dead, many Puerto Ricans refused to believe it. The vast crowds at the beach were quiet, expectant. They waited for Roberto to come walking out of the sea. Men carried portable radios, women brought infants; a shout, a sighting of color or shape, and suddenly a line of people were holding hands wading out to take a look. A Coast Guard helicopter landed at the beach and was swarmed by citizens as the false report spread of a body aboard. Vera and her father-in-law, Melchor, returned to the beach and were treated as royalty as they sat in stoic silence, holding hands. Vera wavered between not wanting to believe the accident had happened, desperately holding on to the miracle that her husband was still alive, and more realistically hoping the searchers would find his body or some tangible evidence of his loss. Osvaldo Gil, the family friend who was among those joining Vera at the beach, remembered her saying softly two or three times, “If they could find at least a hand.”

  Manny Sanguillen, the Pirate catcher from Panama who adored Clemente like an older brother, showed up ready to do anything he could to help the search. He stripped down to his swimming suit and went out with a group of volunteer local divers who focused on the underwater caverns of the coral reef a hundred yards offshore, a likely place for a body to snag. The official Coast Guard and Navy search party included three helicopters, two fixed-wing aircraft, two smaller rescue vessels, and the cutter Sagebrush, a 180-foot buoy tender outfitted with a cranelike boom. The effort that day was slowed by rough waters, four- to six-foot swells. While finding no people or bodies, the rescue team recovered the first swath of debris, including seat cushions, life vests, a deflated raft, papers, a nose wheel and strut, two other wheels, and the wallet of Angel Lozano, who had been riding in the cabin near Clemente. They also came across an oil slick under which they suspected they might find the fuselage, but it was growing dark by then so they marked the position of the oil slick to return to it the next day.