Clemente

by The Clemente Family

  LUIS MAYORAL ON CLEMENTE AND KING: They became friends. I do remember that around 1970 there was an All-Star game—it could have been sixty-nine—in Los Angeles at Dodgers Stadium, where blacks and Latinos played to raise funds for the Martin Luther King foundation. And one of the most prized possessions or awards that Roberto got was a Martin Luther King medallion for playing in that game.

  ROBERTO CLEMENTE, 1970: When Martin Luther King started doing what he did, he changed the whole system of the American style. He put the people, the ghetto people, the people who didn’t have nothing to say in those days, they started saying what they would have liked to say for many years that nobody listened to. Now, with this man, these people come down to the place where they were supposed to be, but people didn’t want them, and sit down as if they were white and call attention to whole world. Now, that wasn’t only the black people, but the minority people. The people who didn’t have anything, and they had nothing to say in those days because they didn’t have any power; they started saying things and they started picketing, and that’s the reason I say [King] changed the world….

  HEAD PIRATES TRAINER TONY BARTIROME: I met Roberto in spring training. It was 1955. That was my first year with the Pirates as a player [he later became the Pirates’ trainer from 1967 to 1985]. I clicked with him immediately. He had this sense of social justice. He was genuinely confused by the bigotry he saw in America.

  TEAMMATE STEVE BLASS: What Roberto did, especially toward the latter part of his career, was help to unify a locker room that had become increasingly diverse, and it became increasingly diverse because of Roberto.

  TEAMMATE AL OLIVER: Our conversations always stemmed around people from all walks of life being able to get along well, no excuse why it shouldn’t be…. He had a problem with people who treated you differently because of where you were from, your nationality, your color, also poor people, how they were treated…. That’s the thing I really respected about him most, was his character, the things he believed in.

  TONY BARTIROME: He talked about change a lot. Changing baseball to make it better for the Latin and black player. He saw that as his small way of changing the country for the better.

  LUIS CLEMENTE: I remember watching my father on a documentary and he was saying how he wanted the kids to grow up not spoiled and he wanted us to suffer. I remember watching that and going, “Why would he want his sons to suffer? I don’t want my kids to suffer.” But later I understood what he meant. He didn’t want us to literally suffer. He didn’t want us to live off the Clemente name. Dad didn’t want us to be these rich kids. He wanted us to be humble, to never forget where we came from. He wanted us to work as hard as he did, and when you watch him play baseball, and read about his work ethic, he worked really hard. He lived the life of a humble man.

  RICKY CLEMENTE: Being his son was not difficult. It was great. People don’t really know who I am unless I say my name; then they ask about my dad. The biggest thing I think Dad wanted us to do was work hard and follow our own path. Treat people well, the way he did.

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: When he was young, in Puerto Rico, Roberto was left off one of the All-Star teams. [Former Dodgers executive] Al Campanis was in Puerto Rico and heard about it. Campanis said, “That had to be a great team, because they left the greatest player in all of Puerto Rico off of it.” Roberto used not being named to that All-Star team as motivation. It made him work even harder.

  VERA CLEMENTE: He taught our sons by example. They learned about work ethic from watching Roberto. He was tough. He was hard to keep down. I think he really started to feel comfortable after a few years with the Pirates. I think around 1956 he started to really adjust to being in Pittsburgh.

  ROBERTO CLEMENTE JR.: At one point, Dad was hitting everything. That year was really the beginning of what kind of player he’d become.

  * * *

  EARLY DURING THE 1956 season—only his second in the big leagues—Clemente hit one home run a day for eight consecutive days. By early June, the Pirates had crawled to first place, and Clemente was third in baseball with a .357 average. The Pirates would eventually slide out of first, but Clemente was beginning to smash major-league pitching. Yet he was still dealing with portions of a press corps that portrayed him as a malingerer. Some of the writers that covered the team didn’t understand that many of Clemente’s ailments were real—aches and pains forged in a frightening car accident leading to serious back trauma.

  Clemente pushed through his injuries because he believed he had a higher purpose: He wanted to use baseball to energize Puerto Rican children, to teach them to believe they could become great as well—either in sports or in everyday life.

  He expressed this once, saying, in part, “To me, I don’t want to accomplish something so I can be able to say, ‘Hey, look at me; look at what I did.’ I want to accomplish something for life.”

  Mantle would also suffer from a number of injuries, but he was hailed as a hero by the press for pushing through them. Said Clemente, “Mickey Mantle is God, but if a Latin or black is sick, they say it is in his head.”

  Though Clemente’s battles with the press would become intense, something became clear to many of the writers who covered him. “One thing stood out,” Pirates beat writer Ira Miller was quoted as saying in 1972; “through all of the outbursts and the arguments and controversies, it was almost impossible not to like the guy. I can remember the first time as a rookie that I had to interview him. He was polite and pleasant, as though he sensed my anxiety and was trying to make it easier for me. If the question was particularly penetrating, he might sit there for a moment with that quizzical, little-boy look on his face. But always there was an answer, and always it came from the heart.”

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: People used to say he was a [hypochondriac]. But he was tough. He played through a lot of painful things. The American press didn’t understand that. He played with so much pain. Once, when I saw him and said hi, I lightly tapped his elbow. He winced and pulled his elbow away. There was a lot of calcification. In 1965, he traveled to the Dominican Republic. He got really sick, and it took doctors two weeks to figure out that he had malaria. He got so sick, we all wondered if he’d ever play baseball again.

  VERA CLEMENTE: His temperature was 105 degrees. He lost twenty pounds. His doctor told him he should sit out [the 1965 season] because he had been so sick.

  TONY BARTIROME: I don’t think I’ve ever met a tougher guy. He was arthritic in his neck. He was constantly in pain. I was always working on him to ease the pain, and he pushed through it. He wasn’t a hypochondriac. He was a fighter.

  ROBERTO CLEMENTE JR.: With all the injuries he had, I don’t know how he was such a good player. He was genuinely hurt. A lot of his physical issues came from the car accident.

  LUIS CLEMENTE: The car accident was the huge source of his back problems.

  VERA CLEMENTE: His back was always hurting. I was always massaging it and working the pressure points. After games, his back would get really sore. But he always tried to play.

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: I was in the car with Roberto when the accident happened. It was 1954. We were coming from Ponce to go visit our brother, who was very ill. The light turned green and we started to drive. Car went through a red light and came straight at us. [The driver was drunk and slammed into Clemente’s car at sixty miles per hour. The impact damaged three of Clemente’s spinal disks, causing him back pain for the rest of his career.] Roberto saw the car coming and tensed up. His back was really hurt. The accident happened on December thirtieth. Our brother died on December thirty-first.

  * * *

  THE 1960 SEASON. It would change everything for Clemente. Pittsburgh would become one of the more unlikely champions in the history of baseball, beating the storied and heavily favored New York Yankees in the World Series. The Pirates would win twenty-one of their games that season in the ninth inning, twelve when the team faced two outs.

  Roberto Clemente was the catalyst. His 1960 c
ampaign marked the beginning of stunning performances in huge moments—the true definition of greatness. By May, he led the National League with a .353 batting average and had already thrown out nineteen base runners. There was a pivotal moment that occurred during the season that perfectly illustrated Clemente’s abilities and mental sturdiness. It came in a game at Forbes Field against the San Francisco Giants. Willie Mays hit one pitch down the right-field line, the baseball sailing away from Clemente at an impossible speed, as he trailed in a flurry of speed and aggression. As Clemente caught the ball he smashed into a concrete obstruction. The crash led to a cut across Clemente’s jaw, and as he raised his glove to show the catch was made, the crowd and blood from his chin both erupted.

  Clemente would later exhibit other combinations of footwork and courage that were equally amazing. One came inside the Houston Astrodome in 1971. The Pirates were leading 1–0 in the bottom of the eighth inning, with two outs. Joe Morgan was on first base, and Bob Watson was at the plate. Watson hit a pitch not so dissimilar from the one Mays crushed. The ball started to severely slice toward the right-field corner, and Clemente was in hard pursuit. It seemed a matter of certainty that Clemente would slow to avoid running into the outfield fence. He didn’t. His body fully extended and his back to home plate, Clemente snagged the ball just as it was about to clear for a home run, then crashed into the fence and hit the ground. It was such an impressive play that the more than sixteen thousand Houston fans gave Clemente a standing ovation. The result of the collision with the fence was Clemente slicing his left knee, bruising his left elbow, and injuring his left ankle. Since the game wasn’t on television, it was never recorded, and thus never widely seen.

  Clemente went into the hospital to get the wound stitched. The Pirates had a seven-game lead over Milwaukee. When he emerged after five days of medical treatment, the team’s lead had shrunk to two games.

  On September 25, the Pirates won the pennant, and the city of Pittsburgh won its first championship in more than three decades.

  * * *

  PEOPLE WERE CATCHING on, albeit slowly, about just how good Clemente was. One of the first glaring aspects of his game was his stance. His bat, thirty-six ounces and almost cartoonish in its massive size, took huge swings. Clemente’s footwork wasn’t traditional; instead of stepping inward to attack the pitch, he would move his left foot inside or out, depending on the ball’s location. This would allow him great power and maneuverability. “Pitch me outside,” Clemente once explained, “and I will hit four hundred. Pitch me inside, and you will not find the ball.”

  Asked how to pitch to Clemente, Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax said, “Roll the ball.”

  Clemente entered the 1960 World Series against the Yankees a confident but particularly agitated man. He had hoped to win the Most Valuable Player award of the National League. He had earned it: His bat powered the Pirates to a postseason spot not many had predicted, and, in just 132 games, Clemente finished the regular season at .341 with eighty-six RBIs. Yet it was becoming clear that Pirates teammate Dick Groat was going to win the award.

  Not only did Clemente fail to win the MVP, he finished eighth behind Groat. Clemente received one first-place vote. Thus the baseball writers regarded Clemente as the eighth most vital player in all of baseball and the fourth most valuable Pirate.

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: He always resented being voted eighth. It always bothered him, years after it happened. He never forgot it. It motivated him for the rest of his career. If you doubted Roberto, he always proved you wrong.

  VERA CLEMENTE: It really hurt him. He was shocked. He was not upset with [Groat]. He was upset with where he was voted. It was motivation for him.

  LUIS CLEMENTE: It seems like there was always someone doubting my dad, and then he’d just get better and better.

  VERA CLEMENTE: What made Roberto so good at baseball was that he was the same all the time. After a [regular season] game, we’d come home, and I’d cook dinner for him. He’d relax and we would eat and talk. After the World Series games, it was the same. He was very level. This helped him be a great player, because he never changed his personality.

  I remember when he got his three thousandth hit. He was very excited about it. We had a group of friends from Puerto Rico who had been following him from game to game when he got close to three thousand. We went back to the apartment and the parking lot was full of cars. I know he wanted to just have some time alone with the family but wanted to be gracious to everyone.

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: When Roberto was younger, he was a very strong hitter, but pitchers would jam him. When he was with [the Puerto Rican minor-league team] Santurce, [the coaches] tried to restrict his foot movement and change his stance. They put an obstacle near his left foot that kept it from moving. Roberto hurt his ankle knocking it against the obstacle. Thankfully they never changed his stance. He wouldn’t let them. He knew it worked for him. That was Roberto. If he knew he was right, you couldn’t change his mind. Not even his family could change it. He was strong mentally.

  I remember 1960. Roberto was so determined to win a championship. He thought it was the [Pirates’] time. He wanted to prove to people he wasn’t some of the things they were saying about him. Roberto wanted to show that the Puerto Rican player could win big games. I think some people thought the Puerto Rican player wasn’t as good as other players.

  LUIS CLEMENTE: I think he also wanted to show he was as good as Willie Mays.

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: He was proud of that catch [on Mays’s hit], but it hurt a lot. [She laughs.] He needed a lot of stitches.

  When he came home [to Puerto Rico] after beating the Yankees, he came to the airport, and there were thousands of fans waiting for him. He hugged all of us [family members]. Then the crowd picked him up and carried him on their shoulders.

  * * *

  CLEMENTE WOULD OVERCOME the sting of his eighth-place finish and, more than a decade later, emerge victorious from a dramatic chase to three thousand hits, something he accomplished on the last weekend of the 1972 season. It was actually the last baseball game he’d ever play. The first Latino to reach that mark, he was also only the eleventh player in history to do so. Along the way came two World Series titles, a World Series Most Valuable Player award, a regular-season MVP in 1966, four batting titles, and twelve Gold Glove awards (the latter coming in each of his last twelve seasons). By the time Clemente’s career had ended he’d played in more games, had more RBIs, more at-bats, more hits, singles, and total bases than any player in Pirates history. Clemente achieved all of this by the age of thirty-eight.

  Clemente was a key component in one of baseball’s great ages, with names like Mays, Aaron, and Mantle, and was as physically gifted as any of them. In fact, his .317 lifetime batting average was higher than the batting averages of all three of those legends. The Pirates won both of their seven-game World Series in large part because of Clemente hitting safely in all fourteen of those games.

  In 1971, Clemente was one of the game’s most fearsome players. He hit .341 for the year as Pittsburgh won the pennant. Yet he was still largely overlooked by the national media, something that would change in the World Series against Baltimore. Decades earlier, as a player in the premier amateur league in Puerto Rico, Clemente had demonstrated an impressive ability to throw out base runners from deep center field. Now his arm was again on display as he engaged in one of the more stunning performances in championship history. What’s more, he hit .414 and was voted the series MVP.

  In the clubhouse after Game 7, he was asked to speak a few words. He said that before speaking in English, he wanted to say something in Spanish: “En el dia mas grande de mi vida a los nenes la bendición mía, y que mis padres me echen la bendición en Puerto Rico.” The English translation is “In the greatest day of my life, my blessings go to the kids, and my parents bless me in Puerto Rico.” These were the first words ever spoken in Spanish live via satellite.

  Clemente attracted the attention of essayist
Roger Angell, one of the elite sportswriters of the period, who penned numerous baseball pieces in The New Yorker magazine. There wasn’t a greater symbol of Clemente’s arrival into America’s living room than the Harvard-educated Angell chronicling Clemente’s World Series exploits. Before Game 7, Clemente told Angell: “I want everybody in the world to know that this is the way I play all the time. All season, every season, I gave everything I had to this game.”

  Angell wrote in his 1972 book The Summer Game: “There was…Clemente playing a kind of baseball that none of us had seen before—throwing and running and hitting at something close to the level of absolute perfection, playing to win but also playing the game almost as if it were a form of punishment for everyone else on the field.”

  * * *

  STORIES LIKE ANGELL’S were important, because they weren’t just an acknowledgment of Clemente; they were an endorsement. Angell provided a permission slip for fans to be enthralled. But despite his reaching such heights, in some ways there remained a lack of appreciation for Clemente. Sports Illustrated informed Clemente that he would be on the cover of the magazine when he reached three thousand hits. It wasn’t Clemente who appeared on the cover, however, but Joe Namath. Even in Pittsburgh, which has always celebrated the achievements of its local stars with as much fervor as any city, the main local newspaper didn’t lead with Clemente’s three thousandth hit. It led the sports section with a loss by the Pittsburgh Panthers college football team.