“The size of his hands was exceeded only by the size of his heart,” longtime friend Luis Mayoral once said. “One of my lasting memories of Roberto is also my last. Four days before he flew off to Nicaragua with relief supplies for the earthquake victims there, he was at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan, moving bags of goods, cartons of clothes. He could have just lent his name to the relief effort or done a public-service announcement. But there was Roberto, pardon the expression, working his ass off, and he had this look of determination. The same look he wore on the field at Three Rivers Stadium.”
“Roberto was thoughtful and very quiet,” remembered photographer Ozzie Sweet. “He’d answer questions, but he wasn’t the type to initiate a conversation. He always had a serious expression, but when he held his hat over his heart, it became a special moment.”
One story in a 1992 Sports Illustrated article on Clemente in many ways typified the star. Wrote the magazine: “Toward the end of his career he went into a store in Pittsburgh to buy ceramic supplies, only to have the proprietor refuse his money. ‘Clemente, you won’t remember this,’ the man told him, ‘but when I was a kid, ten or eleven years old, I was sitting in the right-field seats at Forbes Field while you were out there. I went for a foul ball, but an older man grabbed the ball away from me. I sat there, crying. The next inning you came over and said, “Here’s a ball for the one they took away from you.” I keep that ball in a place of honor in my home. That’s why I can’t charge you.’”
“In 1970 I was hitting three twenty-five in midseason,” remembered Félix Milán, who played in Atlanta during Clemente’s era, “and at dinner one night I told Roberto, ‘I think I can hit three hundred this year.’ He got mad. ‘If you think you can hit three hundred,’ he said, ‘you will hit two eighty. If you think three twenty-five, then you will hit three hundred.’ I did as he said and ended up hitting three ten.”
Clemente was prideful and protective of the heritage of Latin ballplayers, which sometimes made him cautious, even defensive. By 1967, the Pirates had become a known commodity, and some of them, including Clemente, were asked to take small parts in a scene for the movie The Odd Couple. Clemente accepted the invitation, which came with a $100 payment. The script called for Clemente to hit into a double play. He went home and thought about it and by the next day was highly agitated about the prospect. Again, from Sports Illustrated: “The next day one of the producers came up to him and said, ‘Hiya, Roberto. How’s my old buddy?’
“‘I am not old, I am not your buddy, and I am not going to be in your ——— movie,’ Clemente said. ‘How do you like that, old buddy?’
“Clemente then turned to a teammate and said, ‘Nobody buys Roberto cheap. I have my pride. I am a hero to my people. Do they think Roberto Clemente was born yesterday? Would they ask Cary Grant to play baseball for a hundred dollars? If fans in Puerto Rico see me hit into a triple play, they won’t understand.’ And that is why, in The Odd Couple, it is Bill Mazeroski who hits into the triple play.”
This wasn’t Clemente’s ego talking. It was life experience—a life in which, while playing baseball in the United States, Clemente witnessed and experienced constant slights against the Latino player. More than slights: Clemente faced outright racism that turned a mild, kind man into a blunt and angry one. Also a confused one, since Clemente was raised to believe that the color of a person didn’t matter. “I don’t believe in color; I believe in people,” Clemente said in one of the last interviews before his death. “I always respect everyone, and thanks to God my mother and my father taught me to never hate, never to dislike someone because of their color. I didn’t even know about [racism] when I got [to Pittsburgh].”
Luisa Walker de Clemente, the mother of Roberto Clemente, who helped to instill many of Clemente’s noble values, once shared her own memory of her son. “Roberto was born,” she said, “to play baseball.”
JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: We did not grow up so poor as we are often portrayed. We were a [down-to-earth family]. None of the children were born in hospitals. We were all born in the house. We were all close.
LUIS CLEMENTE: My father didn’t cart around milk bottles to generate money. That just didn’t happen. That’s become a huge myth.
VERA CLEMENTE: Roberto’s parents worked hard. They were nice. They raised a good family.
JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: We didn’t have it as rough as our neighbors. We were the first house with a radio. Our friends would come over and listen to the shows on the radio. [He laughs.] There were no milk bottles. The thing about Roberto is that he was a leader, and he was very passionate even at a young age.
When he was twelve, there was a car crash, and Roberto pulled a man from the wreckage of a car that was on fire.
* * *
At his school, there was no fence. People wanted a fence to help protect the school. He organized people to collect money to build the fence. He was eleven years old. If he was passionate about something, no one could convince him otherwise, not even people in the family. That passion is why he had problems as a player in the U.S.
CLEMENTE USED TO joke that he got his strong throwing arm, the one that could seemingly throw people out from another star system, from his mother, Luisa. He was one of four athletic boys (seven children in total), and to keep them in line Luisa developed formidable arm strength corralling her kids. Roberto Clemente was the youngest of sons born to Don Melchor Clemente and Luisa Walker on August 18, 1934, in Carolina. It should not come as a shock that the family was athletic. His brother Justino played amateur baseball, and some who saw him play say he was as talented as, if not more than, Roberto.
While Clemente had a strong work ethic, the long-repeated story that he awoke at sunrise, delivered heavy and clunky milk cans to neighborhood homes for thirty cents a month, and then went to school never happened. The story has been repeated in articles and books for so long it’s come to be believed as fact. It fit a narrative comfortable with some who wanted to see Clemente as a poor, uneducated Puerto Rican child rescued from distinct poverty by American baseball.
In the book Roberto Clemente, written by United Press International writer Ira Miller almost immediately after Clemente’s death, Miller spoke to Maria Isabel Caceres, who taught history at Julio Vizcarrondo High School in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Clemente would sit in the back of her class and rarely raise his hand. He was painfully shy as a kid. (Clemente would later pay for a surgery Caceres needed, and after becoming a Pirate he’d visit the high school every year after the baseball season. Clemente had planned to visit again shortly after his trip to Nicaragua. This was something almost no one knew at the time. Clemente never advertised it.)
While Clemente was shy in the classroom, on the baseball field—or any other field—he was dominant. An all-star for his high school baseball team for three consecutive years, he was also the best athlete on his track team, with the ability to high-jump six feet, triple-jump forty-five feet, and throw the javelin 195 feet. Clemente would have likely made the Puerto Rican Olympic team and participated in the 1952 Olympics had it not been for baseball. The team could have used him—that year, no Puerto Rican athletes medaled in the games.
What made Clemente’s abilities even more impressive compared to many of today’s athletes was that he didn’t use steroids or sophisticated training programs. His workouts, even as a professional player, consisted of running and moderate weight lifting. The most anyone saw Clemente do was use ten-pound dumbbells or resistance bands to fine-tune his biceps.
Clemente kept a number of scrapbooks of his accomplishments before entering high school. Justino keeps them in his house in Carolina in a basement full of Clemente memorabilia. Roberto’s handwritten notes appear throughout the books of photos and newspaper clippings. It is a remarkable thing to see, like Clemente speaking across the decades. One note, loosely translated, reads: “I loved the game so much that even though our playing field was muddy and we had many trees on it, I used to play many hours every day.” Anot
her: “The fences were about 150 feet away from home plate and I used to hit many homers. One day I hit ten home runs in a game we started about 11 a.m. and finished about 6:30 p.m.”
The field where Clemente played high school baseball is now a stadium. It was renamed Roberto Clemente Stadium.
PIRATES TEAMMATE MANNY SANGUILLÉN: I don’t know if people understand how athletic he was at an early age. He could do anything. He could run as fast as anybody.
JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: Very few guys could outrun him when he was on the track team.
ROBERTO CLEMENTE JR.: Look at the pictures of him as a player. He’s built like that, and it’s all natural. He was a freak.
JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: I went to all the games when Roberto played for Santurce. Once he was in the outfield and someone hit the ball over his head. I sank into my seat, embarrassed. He went chasing it, the ball bounced in front of the outfield wall, and he grabbed it off the ground. Then he put his foot against the wall, using it as leverage, and threw the runner out at third. I raised up in my seat after that.
* * *
AT THE AGE of eighteen, Clemente went to a park where Santurce was holding tryouts. The Crabbers would become one of baseball’s hidden gems, producing dozens of major-league players. On this day, when Clemente went to the Crabbers, his battered and ripped glove in tow, the team allowed him to play shortstop. The owner of the Crabbers saw Clemente and was immediately impressed. Justino owns a copy of the contract that shows that for the 1952–1953 season, Clemente was to be paid $40 a week and a $500 bonus.
Player/manager Buster Clarkson knew that Clemente would be a great player, and it was Clarkson who kept pushing him to believe the same. Clemente told writer Ira Miller, “The fellow who helped me most of all is [Buster] Clarkson. Buck Clarkson used to tell me I am as good as anybody in the big leagues. That helped me a lot.”
Clarkson said in an interview just prior to Clemente’s death, “I could see he was going a long way. Some of the old-timers didn’t think so, but I could see great ability in Clemente. He had a few rough spots, but he never made the same mistake twice.”
This was a common description of Clemente throughout his career. Some would eventually call him one of the most studious and prepared players in baseball history, and it was this work ethic that allowed him to become almost flawless on defense and powerful on offense. Every spring training, long after his teammates would retreat to the clubhouse, Clemente would stay at the plate and swing at imaginary pitches. He practiced constantly in his mind. One afternoon, hours before the Pirates played the St. Louis Cardinals, Clemente was in the clubhouse, in a batting stance and raising his chin violently to the ceiling. Chin, ceiling. Chin, ceiling. A teammate noticed. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“We’re facing Bob Gibson today,” he said.
Gibson is one of the most talented pitchers baseball has ever seen. When he faced Clemente, he’d frequently throw several early pitches just under the chin of the Pittsburgh player.
“He had baseball savvy and listened,” continued Clarkson about Clemente. “He listened to what he was told and he did it…. The main thing I had to do was keep his spirits up. He didn’t realize how good he was. But I could see his potential. I had three good outfielders, but I had to give him a chance, and he broke into the regular lineup during the first season I managed Santurce. I always played him in right field and batted him first.”
That first season with the Crabbers, Clemente hit .234 with eighteen hits in seventy-seven at-bats. In the outfield, he demonstrated sound judgment and skill. Clarkson, who besides managing the team was also a player, put Clemente in the outfield because of something more personal. Clemente’s original position was shortstop, but that was where Clarkson played. If history had a taken an alternate course, baseball would be speaking of Clemente as one of the best shortstops of all time.
“Some of the old pros didn’t take too kindly to a kid breaking into the lineup,” Clarkson continued. “But Clemente was too good to keep out…. The big thing about Clemente was that he played hard and went all-out in every game. He did that when he was just a kid, and he did that all the way up through his last season. He always had that aggressiveness. I saw that from the first. Maybe it was the thing about him as a ballplayer that people will remember most.
“I told him,” Clarkson explained, “he’d be as good as Willie Mays someday. And he was.”
| CHAPTER FOUR |
“A MAN OF HONOR PLAYED BASEBALL HERE”
LUIS CLEMENTE: We all loved baseball. All the kids. It’s obvious why. It was in our blood. We played it from the time we were young. We tried to play with the same kind of passion and dedication my dad did. People always said that Roberto should be good because he was Roberto Clemente, or that I should be good because I was Luis Clemente. There were other things I loved to do, but it seemed like baseball was a natural.
I loved music, too. I played in a band in high school called Passage. We were pretty good. Two of the people in the band with me went to college to study music. I went to Florida to play baseball.
[Luis’s music is reminiscent of some of the great rhythm-and-blues groups from the late 1980s and early 1990s.]
I was around the Pirates’ clubhouse a lot growing up. After my dad died, all the Pirates players would look after us. We spent our summers around the Pirates. They were so good to us, and as I got older and kept playing baseball, they watched me and Roberto. When I was eighteen, the Pirates offered me a contract. I was following in my dad’s footsteps. I was proud of that. I didn’t want to be my dad. No one was that good. I wanted to honor my dad.
I didn’t get along with the manager from the beginning [minor-league manager Woody Huyke from the Bradenton Pirates]. I got to training camp and the first time I met him he says to me, “So you’re the little Clemente? While you’re here, I’m going to make a man out of you. If you don’t listen to me, you’re going back to Puerto Rico.” [Luis chuckles.] That was my welcome to the big leagues.
I tried hard. It just didn’t work out. [He attempted a comeback several years later.] I had gotten a lot better, but I was in college in Puerto Rico and began to wonder if I was wasting time. I was going to go back to Puerto Rico and college. I asked to be released but they didn’t want to do that. They thought that maybe I would get better and another club would want to sign me. They came to me and said, “Can you write a letter announcing your retirement and say thank you to us?” I said no.
I know from talking to my mom that my dad would have his battles with some of the managers and other people he played with early in his career. I think, because of that, he initially didn’t trust people easily. But he was very loyal. His old teammates always say, “Your dad was the best friend and teammate anyone could have.” He had this way with his friends. He was very dedicated to them. If they needed money he helped them. If they needed a place to stay he helped. They were loyal to him and he returned that loyalty. [Luis and Roberto Jr. would demonstrate their own loyalty to their friends. Orlando Merced grew up several houses from the Clemente family and was six when Clemente died. The sons and Merced grew up friends, and later Luis and Roberto Jr. told the Pirates about Merced. Not long after that, the Pirates signed Merced. He’d go on to play thirteen years in the majors—six for the Pirates.]
My dad never asked for anything in return, and I think this is why his friends were so dedicated to him. When he died, you saw them repay that loyalty.
* * *
ONE DAY, MANNY Sanguillén would jump into an ocean, searching rugged waters for his friend. One day, he’d come to cherish Clemente. Love Clemente like a brother. He’d love him so much that he’d dive into the Atlantic Ocean looking for his friend in 120 feet of water, diving without any equipment as waves smashed his body. Birds circled overhead, and sharks could be seen not so far away. For eleven straight days, as President Richard Nixon expressed condolences, and a Puerto Rican people remained stunned, he canvassed part of an ocean alongside United St
ates Navy divers. He looked in sand and blue water and canvassed a coral reef over fifty yards from shore. Five years earlier, in 1967, before he would honor his friend by searching for his body in the depths of an ocean, Manny Sanguillén would become one of Clemente’s confidants, and that friendship would begin with yet another act of kindness from Clemente.
The first time they truly got to know each other was in Pittsburgh. Sanguillén was on the same flight with Clemente but didn’t know it. Sanguillén was in the front portion of the plane and Clemente toward the rear. When Sanguillén disembarked, he noticed a crowd surrounding one of his fellow passengers, who had also just walked off the flight. The crowd started off with a few people asking the man for autographs. Then it grew to a few dozen, and within five minutes or so, the crowd had multiplied to more than fifty people. Sanguillén moved closer and saw that it was Clemente. He knew Clemente. Every Latin player at the very least knew of him. Heck, every baseball player did. Clemente signed autographs for more than an hour, and Sanguillén waited patiently.
Sanguillén introduced himself after the autograph seekers dispersed. “He welcomed me with open arms,” said Sanguillén.
Sanguillén was headed to Forbes Field, while Clemente was headed elsewhere. Knowing that despite signing with a major-league team, the young player would be strapped for cash, Clemente paid for Sanguillén’s taxi to the stadium.
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