Clemente

by The Clemente Family

  * * *

  “WE BECAME FRIENDS very quickly,” Sanguillén says today. While telling the story, speaking of how he went to look for Clemente’s body in the Atlantic Ocean after the plane crash, Sanguillén becomes emotional. People who speak about Clemente often do this. That’s the effect he had on the lives of people who knew him well, and even some who did not.

  After Clemente’s death, Sanguillén, though a catcher, was asked to replace his close friend in right field. What’s more, he was assigned to Clemente’s old locker. The emotional strangeness of it all was too surreal for Sanguillén—his friend was gone, and here he was, playing his position and using his old locker. “I missed him so badly,” Sanguillén said. “I still miss him.”

  Sanguillén and teammate Willie Stargell were at the Clemente home in Puerto Rico almost immediately after news of the accident broke. Sanguillén pulled Roberto Jr. aside and told him everything would be okay. “Your father is lost,” Sanguillén told him, “and I’m going to try and find him.”

  The crash happened at a place called Punta Maldonado. It’s a sliver of rock that juts out into the Atlantic from Piñones Beach (a visit there now shows there is no type of Clemente memorial at the scene). After the accident, the area was packed with hundreds of Puerto Rican people who waited for news as divers from the coast guard searched the waters for survivors and wreckage. On the first of eleven days, a rainbow hovered over the beach, and each day of those almost two weeks, hundreds came to the area, some hoping Clemente’s body would be found. Others came to offer prayers and well-wishes.

  Another Clemente teammate came to the beach in the aftermath of the accident besides Sanguillén. Blass went to San Juan almost immediately after news of the crash became public. He was stunned by what he saw. It was those hundreds of people, initially waiting for Clemente to return, then realizing he wouldn’t, and then, paralyzed by this knowledge, waiting on the beach out of respect for as long as they could. “Those people didn’t know what to do, so they went to the beach,” he said. “Roberto was out there somewhere, so they went to the beach and waited.”

  Vera waited with them.

  * * *

  VERA CLEMENTE: For three months after the crash, I would receive a large package containing hundreds of letters from people around the world, expressing their sorrow over my husband’s death, and their well-wishes to me. The letters would keep coming, years later, especially at Christmas. I tried to answer as many as I could but there were too many.

  Each afternoon, for weeks, I would go to that beach. I watched like everyone else. Once, there were fifty boats in the ocean, circling outside of the area where coast guard boats were searching. People in the boat tossed bouquets of flowers and wreaths into the water.

  Then, one day, I stopped going.

  I opened my home to well-wishers. That is part of Puerto Rican custom. Hundreds of people, in those days after the crash, paid their respects. The governor’s office provided around-the-clock protection for the family but it wasn’t truly needed. People were there to pay their respects, not harm us.

  * * *

  IF BABE RUTH or Hank Aaron or Branch Rickey or Rube Foster were nominees for the patriarch of baseball, Vera Clemente might be its matriarch. For decades Vera has presented the Roberto Clemente Award, given by Major League Baseball to the player who “best exemplifies the game of baseball, sportsmanship, community involvement, and the individual’s contribution to his team.” Vera is known throughout the sport. She can walk into almost any facility—from New York to Los Angeles—and people will know who she is and welcome her. Commissioner Bud Selig cherishes her, and in Puerto Rico she is considered a national treasure. The steady undercurrent of that respect is that Vera has dedicated her life to carrying out her husband’s wishes of being selfless. It was a mission started on that beach forty years ago.

  * * *

  IN THE 1974 biography of Clemente Who Was Roberto? writer Phil Musick described perfectly the immediate reaction to the loss of Clemente across the United States, Puerto Rico, and other parts of the world as news of the tragedy spread: “A resolution was introduced in the lower house of the legislature to rename the San Juan airport in honor of Clemente. A memorial fund was established to build Ciudad Deportiva [Sports City]. Children from a Brooklyn grade school pasted pennies to a sheet to form Clemente’s uniform number, 21; the Pirates and a Pittsburgh foundation each donated a hundred thousand dollars to the Clemente fund. In a week the fund swelled to half a million dollars. After eulogizing the ballplayer, Richard Nixon called upon all Americans to donate. Throughout the island ecumenical masses were said…one day five little girls dressed in white released five white balloons that floated in the air above the flowers. A Pittsburgh congressman petitioned for a medallion to be struck in Clemente’s memory, and a city park was renamed in his honor. The Washington Post editorialized: ‘In Pittsburgh, at the empty Three Rivers Stadium yesterday, the scoreboard bore the legend, “Roberto Clemente, 1934–1972.” It might have also read, “A man of honor played baseball here.”’”

  Said then governor-elect Rafael Hernández Colón: “Our people have lost one of their great glories.”

  Sanguillén remembers that time well, four decades later. When he is asked about it, his voice slows. “What everyone who knew Roberto will always remember first about him,” says Sanguillén, “is that he had the biggest heart. He was a hero to me. I loved Roberto. He would do anything for you, and when he died, I had to go look for him, because I know he would have done the same for me.”

  * * *

  “ONE OF THE things people ask me the most is ‘How do I think my dad became such a great baseball player?’” says Roberto Jr. “When you talk to the guys he played with, they all say he worked hard. That was the thing. I can’t tell you how many of his old teammates still say to me, ‘Your father practiced and practiced and practiced.’ He was like that from the time he was a kid. He was obsessed with the little things. He wanted to get things right, because he respected the game of baseball. He’d get to the ballpark very early and have guys hit the baseball to the corners of the stadium and practice how it bounced off the walls in the corners. He’d have all these ailments and fight through them. If he had a bad back, he’d fight through it. He didn’t want to let his teammates down, but he also had high standards for himself. You look at some of the players today with steroids and things.” Roberto Jr. chuckles. “They didn’t use steroids then. My father got strong just by being so active with baseball and trying to be a perfectionist.”

  * * *

  IN A LATER era, the name Al Campanis would have different meaning. Campanis would go on television, speaking casually, as if he were sitting on his couch at home, and talk of how blacks didn’t have the necessities to become managers. Decades earlier, on a small baseball field in Puerto Rico, there had been no talk of prejudice regarding Campanis, no talk of bigotry, only talk of discovery.

  In 1948, then working for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Campanis went to Santurce’s Sixto Escobar Stadium. He wasn’t optimistic. He watched some seventy young men hitting and throwing, and none captured his attention until Clemente threw a ball toward home plate from deep center field. Campanis’s eyes suddenly widened. He knew his time wasn’t being wasted after all.

  Campanis went into immediate scout mode. He tested Clemente in the sixty-yard dash, and the handheld stopwatch showed a blazing 6.4 seconds. It was one of the fastest times Campanis had ever seen. They moved to the batting cage, where Campanis would be even more impressed.

  Campanis sent the other prospects home as Clemente began to hit. “Clemente got into the cage, and I noticed he stood far from the plate,” Campanis was quoted as saying. “I had a minor-league pitcher there and I told him to keep the ball outside.” That pitcher threw toward the edge of the plate, and Clemente hit every one.

  “He hit line drives all over the place while I’m behind the cage telling myself we got to sign him if he can just hold that bat in his hands,” Campanis ad
ded. “How could I miss him? He was the greatest natural athlete I ever saw as a free agent.”

  When Clemente signed with the Santurce Crabbers he was just seventeen years old. Years later, Campanis, despite the racist views he expressed in his television interview, kept three large photos on the wall of his Dodgers office of three men in particular whom he’d scouted and recruited: Sandy Koufax, Jackie Robinson, and Clemente. A Jewish man, a black man, and a Latino one.

  * * *

  CLEMENTE COULD BE temperamental, a trait that would last through much of his career. It was not unusual for him to threaten to quit if he didn’t play more. What people from that time remember is a player far more mature than his age who was able to handle instruction and the competition from older players on the team. There was also Clemente’s notorious work ethic. It was with Santurce that he truly began to hone it. “Roberto could always handle pressure,” says Sanguillén. “He had confidence. He wasn’t intimidated by the older guys on the team.”

  As Clemente would reiterate throughout his life, it was Buster Clarkson who helped him the most in those days, and in typical Clemente form, he would never forget Clarkson’s help. Later, as a Pittsburgh Pirate, he would speak highly of Clarkson to almost anyone who would listen. This was Clemente’s way of paying Clarkson back. One of the things Clarkson did was stop Clemente from dragging his foot excessively as he activated his swing. Clemente remembered: “Clarkson put a bat behind my left foot to make sure I didn’t drag it. He helped me as much as anyone. I was just a kid, but he insisted the older players let me take batting practice.”

  Clarkson said, “All he ever needed from me was encouragement. He had a few rough spots the first year, but he never made the same mistake twice, and he was always willing to listen.”

  Clarkson’s words emphasize a critical point that needs to be remembered. Though born with great physical gifts, Clemente worked furiously to hone them. That trait is what distinguishes the good athlete from the eternal one.

  On February 19, 1954, Clemente signed with the Dodgers and entered their minor-league system. One of the most important figures in baseball history was paid $5,000 for the season.

  | CHAPTER FIVE |

  HOMBRE INVISIBLE

  LUIS CLEMENTE: All of the Clemente kids—Roberto, Ricky, and myself—have obviously spent so much of our lives in Puerto Rico. When you grow up in Puerto Rico, it’s a very comfortable place. It’s beautiful. There’s lots of sun. There are beaches. Roberto Jr. has spent more time on the mainland than Ricky and me, but this is where he spent a good part of his life, too. You just get used to being here—the culture, the language, the pace of living. I can’t imagine what it was like for my dad when he played in Canada. He didn’t speak French. It was a very different place than where he grew up. It had to be tough because of the language, and he didn’t know anyone. He was all alone in this foreign place.

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: The thing a lot of people don’t know is that Tommy Lasorda played on that Montreal team. Lasorda really helped Roberto. He helped Roberto the most with the language. Roberto was very grateful to him.

  TOMMY LASORDA: He didn’t know five words of English. I talked him out of quitting and going home to Puerto Rico three times. He was upset because he wasn’t getting any playing time…the Dodgers tried to hide him. Scouts would show up and he was taken out of the game right away. I saw it happen in the first inning once.

  VERA CLEMENTE: He was very, very lonely in Montreal.

  MANNY SANGUILLÉN: [Laughs.] A Puerto Rican man in that cold weather is tough.

  JUSTINO CLEMENTE WALKER: [The Dodgers] were hiding him. He did everything in Montreal—hit home runs, throw people out, run fast. He still didn’t play. We talked one day and I asked him, “Why aren’t they playing you?” He said, “I don’t know. I feel uncomfortable here. I’m thinking about leaving here and never coming back.”

  * * *

  JACKIE ROBINSON’S ENTRANCE into baseball was simultaneously historic, wonderful, and brutal. Clemente’s entrance was not so dissimilar, but was also more complicated. In addition to racial differences, Clemente had the added burden of a language barrier, and not just English. A man who spent his life soaked in sun and Spanish went to the cold and French of Canada.

  Montreal in the 1950s was a place of electric streetcars, modern architecture, and hockey riots. When a famous Montreal Canadiens hockey player was suspended over a controversial play, fans of the team rioted, leading to $100,000 in property damage, more than a hundred arrests, and some thirty-five people injured. Yet Montreal welcomed Clemente. He lived with a white family in a French part of the city. Teammate Joe Black remembers the circumstances: “Montreal made blacks welcome then,” he once said. “The white family [Clemente] lived with had two teenage daughters. That shows you how people treated us. Like we were human beings.”

  Clemente’s brother Justino said that Clemente “wouldn’t go out at night because of the racism when he first got to Montreal.” A photo of Clemente’s Montreal team shows three players of color.

  “We had a lot of nuts on that team,” Black also remembers. “They didn’t appreciate a black guy who was a star. They only wanted you to go so far. But the guys on the team wondered why he wasn’t playing. We had to scuffle, and when he played the second games of doubleheaders, he seemed to make the difference. But we’d lose and they still wouldn’t play him.”

  What happened in Montreal was immensely complicated and has been the subject of fervent historical debate by some baseball historians. In the end, there is little doubt that Clemente was hidden in the Dodgers’ minor-league system so another club could not draft him in the off-season. The key was Clemente’s salary and bonus, which totaled $15,000. At that time MLB teams, including Branch Rickey’s Dodgers, started the practice of stockpiling talent in their minor-league systems as a way of preventing other teams from making a play for them. It was both a brilliant and a diabolical practice. One year before Clemente signed his deal, baseball enacted a policy to counter that tactic. If a player signed for monies totaling more than $4,000 (that included salary and bonus), teams had to keep the player on the roster for two years or risk losing that player in the off-season draft.

  The Dodgers attempted to hide Clemente in the baseball outpost that was the Montreal Royals, and play him so little that other teams wouldn’t notice him. “This was a fact my dad really believed,” says Roberto Jr.

  It would seem impossible for a brown-skinned man who didn’t speak French to be invisible in 1950s Canada, but that was almost the case with Clemente. His abilities were on display immediately, as he’d impress with his bat and glove despite sparse opportunities in Montreal, only to be sent back to the bench. In Clemente’s first week there, he hit a home run four hundred feet, sending it over a wall no Montreal hitter had ever cleared. In the next game, he was still benched. Clemente would get benched for a pinch hitter even with the bases loaded. In another game, he leaped so high over a left-field fence, snatching a ball out of the sky, his belt became stuck to the fence. While the Montreal team wouldn’t play Clemente, he had nonetheless become a fan favorite. Canadians were fierce fans—of hockey—but still knew a star when they saw one. Spectators unclipped Clemente from the fence and applauded him.

  Clemente hit a triple in another game and in the next was again benched. “The idea was to make me look bad,” Clemente later said. “If I struck out, I stayed in there [the game]. If I played well, I was benched. Most of the season they used me as a pinch hitter or in second games of doubleheaders.”

  Dodgers general manager Buzzie Bavasi, in a first-person, rarely referenced story he wrote for the June 1967 Sports Illustrated, recalled: “We once owned Clemente. We signed him for a $10,000 bonus and sent him to Montreal for seasoning. He was a 19-year-old kid, right out of the winter leagues, and there wasn’t any room for him on the roster of the big club. We ordered Montreal to keep him under wraps any way they could. Up there he was eligible for the baseball draft, and we didn’t
want to lose anybody as promising as this kid. On the other hand, we didn’t realize how great he was or we’d have put him on the big club right away and protected him from the draft regardless of who we’d have to unload.

  “At Montreal, to keep Clemente from looking too good, our manager, Max Macon, kept moving him in and out of the lineup. Poor Roberto! He’d strike out and Max would let him play the whole game. If he hit a home run, Max would get him out of there quick. He was benched one game because he had hit three triples the day before. He was taken out for a pinch hitter with the bases loaded in the first inning of another game. You can imagine how this must have puzzled the kid. The net effect was to hold his batting average down to .257, and we figured he was safe from the draft. But Clyde Sukeforth, who had come out of our own organization and now was scouting for the Pirates, had his eye on Roberto. He told Macon, ‘Take good care of Clemente. We want him in good shape when we draft him.’”

  Clemente learned a harsh lesson in Montreal that would stick with him throughout his career. Baseball was no longer just a sport he loved. It was a cold, nasty business. “I never thought I would reach such heights,” Clemente said then. “Then I did…and they wouldn’t let me play.”

  * * *

  CLEMENTE WAS EXTREMELY intelligent, passionate, and friendly, but the early days of his career also made him cautious, as he progressed through baseball’s maze of protocol and double standards. He began to evolve into a man who defended himself vigorously, after tiring of hearing what he couldn’t do, when everyone who saw him play knew he was a multidimensional talent. The narrative of Clemente as a quiet and sort of strange hotdogging hypochondriac began appearing in the local and national press. This, from an October 1960 Sports Illustrated article on the Pirates called “Seven Bold Bucs,” about Clemente: “One of the most exciting of ballplayers, this trim, beautifully built athlete from Puerto Rico goes on batting rampages when no one can get him out. He swings viciously at any pitch within reach, loses his cap, runs through stop signs at third base, slides like an avalanche. Opposing ballplayers call him a hot-dog, say he can be intimidated by fast balls buzzing around his head—but pitchers have been throwing at him all year and he has hit .314, driven in almost 100 runs. Off the field Roberto is quiet, friendly, intelligent. Attended college briefly in Puerto Rico, where he threw the javelin. Something of a hypochondriac, Clemente once threatened to quit baseball because of an aching back, but has had few ailments this year. Only 26, he has been a big leaguer for six seasons, supports his father, mother, six other relatives.”