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

by David Maraniss

  When he thought sportswriters mistook his health obsession for hypochondria, Clemente would explode. But inside the clubhouse, he learned to go with it. Early in the 1967 season, his teammates noticed a subtle change; he could rib and be ribbed with no hard feelings. Year by year after that, he eased more to the center of the locker room fun. His nickname for Bartirome was Dago. “I’m a dago, too,” he would insist, pointing out that Clemente was also an Italian surname. “I don’t know whether it was the personalities on the team or that he had matured and felt it was all right to put his guard down and enjoy it and be silly with us, but he seemed to loosen up,” Blass observed. It was likely some of both, and also the fact that with the MVP award in 1966 he felt some measure of deserved recognition. In any case, it was a sign that he finally felt comfortable with the role of team leader.

  Bartirome once heard Clemente tell a reporter that he stayed in shape by lifting weights and working out at the gym three hours a day during the off-season. It was Roberto’s way of joking; not a word of it was true. His physique was a wonder of genetics, not an artificial creation. He was careful about what he ate. He loaded up on vegetables, was always looking for a new fruit shake concoction, and took great pride in knowing when to push away from the table. He never lifted weights and his workouts during the off-season amounted to little more than walking the beach in search of driftwood, playing some more baseball, shampooing the rugs, and mowing the lawn. Yet his body changed imperceptibly from the time he was eighteen. At five-foot-eleven, his weight barely fluctuated between 182 and 185 pounds. His biceps and calves had sinewy muscularity yet he was not muscle-bound. “He was a sculpture. He could have posed for Greek statues,” said photographer Banos. “What you saw with him was archaeology. He was a perfect model. Not an ounce of extra fat. All the right muscle. A perfect figure for a man of any age.”

  Because of his persistent aches and occasional injuries, misconceptions surrounded Clemente. Some thought he had the sort of tightly wound body that was perpetually on the verge of breaking down from a pulled hamstring. Nothing was further from reality. Clemente had the ability to go full speed without even warming up. He was notorious for lingering in the locker room until the last moment. If a game started at eight, he would scuttle out of the clubhouse at 7:58:30, and go right to work. “Twenty seconds before the game he would go out to the field,” Bartirome said. “He never did any sprints; no warming up. And there was something about him, that he did, that I could not believe any man could do without hurting himself seriously. In the first inning, he [might] chop a ball off the plate and run to first full blast and then five feet beyond first he would stop—completely. A dead stop. I never saw a ballplayer do that. He would not gradually stop. It was amazing.”

  • • •

  For Clemente, 1968 started out troubled and deteriorated. In February, after winning his fourth batting championship the previous season, he was trying to climb between two patios built into the hillside of his home in Río Piedras when a steel railing collapsed and he fell, injuring his shoulder. He reported to spring training late and hurting, without telling Pirates officials what had happened. A doctor in Puerto Rico had suggested that he rest the shoulder for several months, he told friends, but he felt compelled to play, if only to prove to doubters that he was not jaking it. “I shouldn’t have been playing in spring training,” he said later. “I should have taken care of my shoulder.”

  The injury haunted him all year, and he was also slowed by a bout with the flu, and the result was his worst season of the decade, which in his case meant that he batted only .291. Following seasons of .314, .351, .312, .320, .339, .329, .317, and .357—with four batting titles and an MVP award in the mix—an average of .291 was deemed a miserable slump. But not only was Clemente subpar physically, he was struggling during a season that became known as the Year of the Pitcher, when all hitters were having difficulty. Only five National League players batted over .300 in 1968, and Clemente’s average actually ranked as tenth best in the league. The twenty-fifth best hitter in the league was Richie Allen at .263. Meanwhile, the composite earned-run average for National League pitchers was 2.98, a record low for the modern era. Bob Gibson, only a year after having his lower right leg broken by a vicious Clemente line drive, pitched the most unhittable year in baseball history, finishing with an inhuman 1.12 earned-run average. Juan Marichal threw thirty complete games that season, and Don Drysdale pitched 58.2 consecutive scoreless innings.

  That Clemente would have an off-year in those circumstances was understandable. In every respect, with the Pirates regressing to a losing record, 80–82, it was a season he wished to forget. In conversations with Vera, for the first time he broached the idea of retiring, though he always added “in a year or two.” One nagging concern was the amount of flying a major league baseball player endured. During the long season, the airplane becomes a second home, but it was never a comfortable one for Clemente. In 1968 alone, the Pirates flew from Pittsburgh to Houston to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Pittsburgh to St. Louis to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia to Atlanta to Pittsburgh to New York to Chicago to Cincinnati to Pittsburgh to Los Angeles to Houston to San Francisco to Pittsburgh to St. Louis to Philadelphia to New York to Chicago to Pittsburgh to Atlanta to Pittsburgh to Cincinnati to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Houston to Pittsburgh to Cincinnati to St. Louis to Atlanta to Pittsburgh to New York to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh to Chicago and back to Pittsburgh. They were in the air for more than ninety hours covering 35,080 miles.

  The Pirates had a congregation of nervous flyers during that era, including Donn Clendenon, Willie Stargell, Juan Pizarro, and Clemente. Stargell would shout prayers every time their plane flew over the Grand Canyon and encountered any turbulence. Clemente and Clendenon were so shaken during one flight through a Midwestern thunderstorm that they bailed out at a stop in Cincinnati and rode a bus back to Pittsburgh. Pizarro, while playing for the Indians, once got fined by manager Alvin Dark for refusing to fly from Detroit to Cleveland. Clemente usually was too proud to show fear to strangers, but he talked about the perils of flying with his friends. “He used to tell me that he was going to die in a plane crash,” José Pagán remembered. After coming to the Pirates from the Giants in 1965, Pagán often sat next to Clemente on the team plane, and he noticed that Roberto would never sleep when they were in the air, even during a cross-country flight in the middle of the night. “Then, on one late-night flight to Los Angeles, Clemente somehow fell asleep. “When he was sleeping, he jumped, and I said, ‘What is happening to you? What are you jumping for?’” Pagán recalled. “ ‘What happened, did you eat a rabbit or something like that?’ And he said, ‘You know what happen, José, you know I seldom sleep on airplanes. I went to sleep and I was dreaming that the plane we were traveling on crashed, and the only one that got killed was me.’”

  When Juan Pizarro heard that story, in his dry style he said to Clemente, “Well, die when I’m not on the plane, okay?” Pagán took Clemente more seriously and tried to persuade him that dreams were not to be taken literally. “I would say, Clemente, you cannot think about that. That is only a dream. I dream sometimes that I am rich. That does not mean that I will be rich . . . unfortunately.”

  Vera dealt the most with Clemente’s fatalism, though she hated to hear him talk that way. From the time they got married, he had told her that he did not expect to be around too long. “He always had the idea that he would die young,” she remembered. “He would say, ‘I know that I will die young and never get old, and you will probably remarry.’ I would say, ‘Don’t talk about that. First, don’t talk about sad things. Second, God forbid, if something happens to you, I will never marry again.’ He was always talking about that. He measured his time.”

  At the end of the 1968 season, after the final game in Chicago against the Cubs, he and Vera flew to New York and stayed with their friends Carlos and Carmen Llanos in the Bronx before starting a long European vacation. He did not fear flying with Vera because i
n his premonitions she would live beyond him. While in New York, they went shopping for furniture to ship down to Puerto Rico. Roberto enjoyed shopping, and was particular in his tastes. He bought his cologne from a little shop in Montreal across the street from the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, where he could mix his own perfume (a blend of Royal Copenhagen) and keep the ingredients on file. For suits he preferred Clothes of Distinction at the Disco Mart in Chicago (size 38R). His clothes were refined but modish, the collars growing larger and stripes wider with the fashion trends of the era. Much of the furniture in the Río Piedras house was bought in Pittsburgh, known for its elegant department stores, but he thought they might find some more in New York. What started as a search for furniture ended up as a lesson in sociology that became part of the lore of his life.

  The name of the store has been lost to history; Roberto never mentioned the name, nor did Carlos Llanos, who accompanied them, and Vera cannot remember. The rest of the story was unforgettable for them all. Vera was pregnant with their third son, Roberto Enrique, who would be called Ricky. In his wallet, Clemente carried a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills and traveler’s checks, all totaling about $5,000. When a sales clerk met them at the door, Roberto said they intended to look through the showroom on the main floor. The clerk asked him to wait until a salesman was found who could take them to another floor of inexpensive furniture. “So they took us to a place where they showed me furniture that wasn’t the furniture in the showroom,” Clemente said years later in an interview with broadcaster Sam Nover. “And I said, ‘We would like to see the furniture downstairs that we saw in the showroom.’ And they said, ‘Well, you don’t have enough money to buy that . . . that’s very expensive.’ And I said, ‘Well, I would like to see it because I have the right to see it as a human being, as the public that buys from you.’”

  At Clemente’s insistence, they returned to the classiest showroom. Clemente took out his wallet, nodded toward a furniture set he liked, and snapped, “Do you think this could buy it?” Vera noticed that another clerk was staring at them, puzzled. “I know who you are,” he said finally, but couldn’t bring up the name. When Clemente reluctantly identified himself, the store clerk’s attitude changed. Now he was solicitous, taking the arm of the pregnant Vera as he showed them around. As Clemente remembered the scene later: “When they found out who I was they said they had seven floors of furniture and we’ll show it to you and don’t worry about, you know, when you walked in we thought you were like another Puerto Rican.”

  Nothing could have more infuriated Clemente, who carried his intense pride for his people, especially the poor of Puerto Rico, with him everywhere. “I said, ‘Look, your business is to sell to anybody. I don’t care if I’m Puerto Rican or Jewish or whatever you want to call me. But you see this is really what gets me mad—because I am Puerto Rican you treat me different from other people. I have the same American money that you ask people for, but I have a different treatment. Right now you are giving my wife different treatment, and my friend, because we are Puerto Rican. And I don’t want to buy your furniture!’ So I walked out.”

  Since coming to work in the United States in 1954, at the dawn of the civil rights era, Clemente had grown more assertive on questions of racial equality. Martin Luther King Jr. was at the top of the list of people he admired. They had met several times, and King once spent part of a day talking with Clemente at his farm in Puerto Rico. When King was assassinated in April 1968, Clemente led the way in insisting that the Pirates and Astros delay opening the season in Houston until after the slain civil rights leader’s funeral. The schedule called for games in Houston on April 8 and 9. King was buried April 9. The Pirates and Astros, at the players’ insistence, held off playing until April 10. Al Oliver, a black teammate who considered himself one of Clemente’s disciples, said Clemente would draw him into long discussions, more about life than baseball. “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.”

  What Clemente admired most about King was not his philosophy of nonviolence, but his ability to give voice to the voiceless. “When Martin Luther King started doing what he did, he changed the whole system of the American style,” Clemente said. “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 there as if they were white and call attention to the 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 he changed the whole world . . .”

  The Clementes spent twenty-two days in Europe. Roberto loved Spain and Italy. Every day, he went off through the streets, talking to strangers, listening to their life stories. In Rome, renewing his boast that all Clementes were part Italian, he ordered boldly from the menu without knowing the language, realizing only when his meal came what he had done. “When they brought that piece of raw meat . . . hah! We were laughing. You’re not so Italian! Raw steak,” Vera remembered. Before the trip, Clemente had talked several times with his friend Les Banos, the Pittsburgh photographer, about what it would be like. “Clemente wanted to know how people were treated in Europe,” Banos said later. “Whether there was prejudice in Europe.” Banos, who spoke with a thick Hungarian accent, had worked as a spy during World War II, infiltrating the Hungarian SS and secretly helping Jews escape. It was after listening to Banos and visiting Germany that Clemente began having nightmares about hiding under a house as the boots of a German soldier marched back and forth. At the airport arrival gate in Berlin, he and Vera were stopped and questioned by five men who did not identify themselves and vanished once the tour guide approached and said, “Mr. Clemente?” They must have been looking for someone else. When his tour group passed Checkpoint Charlie, Clemente told Vera he was afraid they would be detained. “There was a Mexican on our tour, and when we stopped to get some sodas he was asking questions of the communist guide and the guide was getting nervous,” Vera remembered. “The Mexican started shouting, ‘Viva Mexico, Libre!’ . . . and Roberto said, ‘He better stop or I will punch the Mexican!’”

  • • •

  Throughout his career, Clemente was known for making good first impressions on the field. At the start of the 1960 championship season, he drove in five runs in the first home game. In his first at-bat in the World Series, he singled in a run and knocked the starting pitcher out of the game. Even during his first year of organized baseball, when the Dodgers were trying to hide him in Montreal, he hit an inside-the-park home run in his first spring training game. All during that time, he also luxuriated in the warm embrace of the fans. The occasional volatility of his dealings with sportswriters seemed to have little effect on the people in the stands. That changed, if briefly, on the Sunday afternoon of April 13, 1969. The lost year of 1968 was behind him, but now in the first week of a new season, he was making a bad first impression, and it was not going over well with the fans. The Pirates had won their first three games on the road against the Cardinals, and then came home for a series against the Phillies. Earlier that spring, Clemente had been criticized in the press for bailing out of spring training for several days to have his sore back worked on by Arturo Garcia, a masseur in San Juan. Joe Finegold, the team doctor, had suggested in private conversations with baseball writers that this was medically unsound and one step above sorcery, an assessment that only lent more weight to the notion that Clemente, for
all his skills, was an individualist rather than team player and borderline nutcase on health issues. Now, in two uncharacteristic games, Clemente hit into three double plays and misplayed a ball hit to right into a two-base error. Roy McHugh, then sports editor of the Pittsburgh Press, watched the games from the press box, and heard something he had never heard before—the fans greeting the great Clemente with a shower of boos.

  “Love and hate, goes a folk saying, are the opposite sides of the same coin,” McHugh wrote in his column the following day. “It explains, if nothing else, the passionate booing of Roberto Clemente at Forbes Field Sunday afternoon.” Under the headline FICKLENESS IS A VERY NORMAL THING, McHugh placed Clemente in the company of other great players booed at home: Ted Williams at Fenway, Mickey Mantle in New York, even Joe DiMaggio, jeered early in his career for diffidently refusing to tip his cap. But Williams, Mantle, and DiMaggio, McHugh wrote, all became “deities in their declining years. Clemente, instead of achieving grace slowly, fell from it all at once.”

  McHugh was a sharp, subtle writer, a professional in every respect. His observation about the booing was accurate, yet there was something deeper to Clemente’s story. Clemente, at age thirty-four, was booed for a day, but in fact he was that rare athlete who was slowly achieving grace, not just as a ballplayer but as a human being. The reality of many athletes, even those who become hailed as deities, is that they diminish with time; Clemente was the opposite, becoming more sure of himself and his larger role in life. As a keen observer, McHugh picked up on some signs of this. He noted that Clemente was now able to poke fun at himself and his reputation for complaining about his aches and pains. That same week that he heard his first boos, Clemente showed up at the batting cage displaying a “horribly swollen finger” that turned out to be a slip-on practical joke. And his response to the boos also showed maturity. Rather than making any obscene gestures, like Ted Williams, or complaining about being misunderstood, Clemente waved his batting helmet, as if to say thank you. In the trainer’s room after the game, Tony Bartirome came to Clemente’s defense. “Those dirty bastards, booing you like that,” Bartirome said. “I deserved to be booed,” Clemente responded. “I stunk out there.”