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

by David Maraniss

  At ten on the second day of January, Hernández Colón was sworn in as Puerto Rico’s new governor. Less than a month earlier, Clemente had brought back a red and white hammock from Nicaragua as a gift for his political friend. Now the great ballplayer’s loss cast a dark shadow over the inaugural ceremony. All the musical festivities that were to be held that night at La Fortaleza were canceled. Before the swearing-in began, the cutter Sagebrush, on its way out to the crash site, cruised by within sight of supporters gathering at the capital grounds. At the start of the program, there was a minute of silence in memory of Clemente. In his speech, Hernández Colón said of him, “Our youth have lost an idol and an example; our people have lost one of their glories.” The governor was following the lead of Puerto Rico’s newspapers, who that morning had published their editorial eulogies. “Off the field,” the San Juan Star wrote of Clemente, “he was a complicated, intense man who felt a special burden to use his fame and prestige for noble ends . . . He was a unique man, a shining example for the rest of us. A man who thrilled and entertained us with his athletic exploits and ennobled and inspired us with his humanism.”

  In the early afternoon, another rumor buzzed through the large crowd that had gathered at the beach for a second consecutive day. Someone had seen a body floating in the water fifty yards from shore a mile west of Punta Maldonado. But a search of the area came up with nothing. It could have been a log, a scrap of debris, even a fish. The Coast Guard station in San Juan was being deluged with calls from people saying they could help, even from thousands of miles away. “It seemed like every psychic and seer all over the world was calling in, telling us they had heard from Roberto,” remembered Captain Vincent Bogucki, then commander of the Coast Guard unit in San Juan. “They might say he was on a small island and okay but needed help. We had a lot of unasked for leads . . . that to some extent we followed.”

  Captain Bogucki was feeling pressure from all sides. President Nixon was interested in Clemente, and that meant top Coast Guard officials in Washington had to know about the search and were requesting constant updates from San Juan. In Puerto Rico, the plane crash had surpassed even the inauguration as the dominant news story, and every official from the governor on down wanted to make sure that everything possible was being done to find the plane and its occupants. Deep into the second day with no results, Vera contacted Captain Bogucki and asked him to come to her house in Río Piedras. She wanted to know what he was doing, and why he wasn’t doing more. He talked about the possibility of getting another plane, but did not feel he could tell Mrs. Clemente the cold truth, which was this: The Coast Guard is in the business of search and rescue, not salvage. Bogucki and his men had already privately reached the grim conclusion that there was nothing to rescue, and probably not much in the way of human remains to recover. As one of Bogucki’s officers, Lieutenant John Parker, later explained, “If a plane breaks up badly and if bodies break loose, it is rare to recover them. Why? The sharks. They are hungry. It is a shark-infested area.” None of this could be said to the widow. Bogucki told Mrs. Clemente that he would try to add another plane to the search and invited her to visit the Coast Guard Rescue Center to see for herself how diligently his crew was working.

  As Bogucki was leaving the Clemente house, he looked across the room and noticed that Vera had brought in her own seer. “I saw the figure from the rear, and she had a robe on,” Bogucki said later. “I wasn’t invited to meet this person.” This seer was among those claiming that Clemente was still alive. Her supernatural signs were telling her that he was dazed and walking through the streets of La Perla, a poor waterfront neighborhood nestled below Old San Juan. Fernando González, the rookie Pirate infielder from Arecibo, happened to be at the Clemente house then and left with a scouting party of friends and relatives. “We went to La Perla to look for him,” González said later. “And we never found him.”

  • • •

  It was not mythmaking but pure baseball that led Jack Lang’s colleagues in the press corps to start calling his home in Huntington Station, Long Island, that night. “I’m way ahead of you. That’s the first thing I thought of,” Lang told one caller. What others wanted to suggest to him, and what he had already thought of, was that the Baseball Writers Association of America, of which he was secretary-treasurer, should take the extraordinary step of immediately inducting Clemente into the Hall of Fame, foregoing the requirement that a player be inactive for five years before being eligible for enshrinement. Certain statistical achievements virtually ensured a place in Cooperstown, and one of those was three thousand hits. Clemente died with precisely that number, along with his .317 career average and closetful of Gold Gloves as the finest right fielder of his generation. Lang had already talked to commissioner Bowie Kuhn about waiving the waiting period. It had happened only once before in baseball history, when Lou Gehrig was chosen by acclamation in 1939 while he was dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Eleven weeks after Lang started the process, the BBWAA would overwhelmingly vote Clemente into Cooperstown, making him the first Latin American player among the game’s all-time elite. Ninety-three percent of 424 writers would support him, with most of the others saying they did not want to break the five-year requirement.

  Clemente had never been an easy case for baseball writers. For eighteen seasons, he had burned with resentment about being underappreciated and called a hypochondriac and quoted in broken English. His fury had helped motivate him on the diamond, even as it confused the men in the press box. Yet he was usually willing to admit when he was wrong, and was so much more earnest and committed than most ballplayers that by the end he had earned the respect of those he fought with the most. Now, after the first news cycle of stories about the plane crash, they were all writing more personal columns praising and trying to explain this complicated man. Many of them repeated the dramatic cycle of anger, understanding, and loss.

  “I remember the first time I ever spoke to him, the day he shouted at me, the anger streaming out of those fierce black eyes and washing over me so that I could almost feel its heat,” wrote Phil Musick in the Pittsburgh Press. “ ‘You writers are all the same,’ he yelled at Byron Yake of the AP and me, the passion in his voice freezing the few people left in the Pirate clubhouse. ‘You don’t know a damn thing about me.’ I had hollered back, scared clear through at watching the fury rise in his face, afraid to back down.” Musick then went on to remember a day, much later, when he had felt comfortable enough to needle Clemente as the old man—“and he laughed, and for a moment we weren’t natural enemies. And when I heard he was dead, I wished that sometime I had told him I thought he was a hell of a guy. Because he was, and now it’s too late to tell him there were things he did on a ball field that made me wish I was Shakespeare.”

  Milton Richman of UPI, who covered Clemente’s entire career, said he had seen all sides of the complex man. “You had to be around him a while to see both sides. I’ve seen him when he’d rail up at a newsman’s perfectly innocent question, and as a guest at his home in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, as well as on other occasions, I’ve seen him when he was one of the most hospitable, helpful and cooperative individuals ever to wear a major league uniform.”

  “Roberto,” wrote David Condon in the Chicago Tribune, “was kind, generous, considerate, and humble about his own abilities . . . Yet Roberto was a man of mighty wrath. One day in the spring training camp he cut loose with language that humbled the thunder as he berated writers for overkill in their idolatry for American-born baseball players. Because he was speaking from his heart and his argument was credible, Roberto offended no one that afternoon.”

  Milton Gross of the New York Post wrote that he was indeed once offended by Clemente, but then won over again. A few years earlier, Gross had conducted a long interview with Clemente at training camp in Bradenton. After his article appeared, he received a handwritten letter from Clemente. “I give you two hours of my time, and you write horseshit story about me. I don’t want to talk to yo
u no more if you write horseshit stories. I don’t want you to write about me no more.” The letter left Gross angry and confused. His column about Clemente had been “a positive one in which I attempted to correct some of the unfair raps on Clemente, particularly the tale that he was a malingerer.” Gross wrote Clemente back demanding to know what he objected to in the piece. Weeks later, he encountered Clemente in the visitors locker room at Shea Stadium. Clemente said that he had based his first angry letter on what a friend from New York had told him about the story. Now that he had read the story himself, he said, “I find out that you did not write what my friend said. So now I apologize to you for the letter and I tell my friend he is no longer my friend because he does not tell me the truth.”

  “It was a rare moment in my years in sports; a player admitting that he may have been wrong,” Gross declared in his sports page eulogy two days after the crash. “Clemente didn’t need me but he felt it incumbent upon himself to tell me that he had done me an injustice.”

  On that night of January 2, as Jack Lang first contemplated Clemente’s place in the Hall of Fame and his colleagues were writing their newspaper requiems, President Nixon mentioned in a conversation with aide Charles Colson that the White House should work with the sports world to organize a Roberto Clemente Memorial Fund. Nixon already had released a taped statement on Clemente—calling him “one of the greatest baseball players of our time” and “a generous and kind human being”—and had written a personal $1,000 check to donate to the cause. There was a nobility to the Clemente story that seemed lacking in other matters Nixon and Colson were dealing with then, Vietnam and Watergate. Nixon that day was obsessed by suspicions that Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser, had been telling newspaper friends that he privately questioned the President’s decision to bomb Hanoi during Christmas. Get the Secret Service to check Kissinger’s telephone logs, Nixon told Colson, according to biographer Richard Reeves, and Colson came back with the delicious report that Kissinger had spent hours talking to columnist Joseph Kraft even while insisting to Colson that he would never talk to “that son-of-a-bitch.”

  The next morning, January 3, presidential aide Richard A. Moore followed up on the Clemente issue. In a memorandum to chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Moore suggested that the President meet later that day with a delegation from the Pittsburgh Pirates. Moore said that he had talked with the team president, Dan Galbreath, who told him that he liked Nixon’s idea of a memorial fund. If the President had the time, Galbreath and a few players could be in the Oval Office that very afternoon. “The visit would be in time for the television news shows and would be a superb kickoff for the project,” Moore noted. “In the course of telling the press about the memorial, Galbreath or a player could allude to the fact that the President already made a generous contribution himself.” At the end of his memo, Moore added a special note: “Colson wholeheartedly endorses meeting with the President.”

  During their discussions that day, Haldeman and Nixon had Colson on their minds, but not in the context of the death of Roberto Clemente. They were discussing the role Colson and former attorney general John Mitchell had played in the Watergate bugging. Nixon asked, “Does Mitchell know that Colson was involved, and does Colson know that Mitchell was involved?” and Haldeman answered, “I think the answer is yes to both,” On the other matter, Haldeman liked the idea of the President seeing the Pirates delegation. He initialed a box in Moore’s memo approving a ten-minute meeting at quarter to four that afternoon.

  An hour beforehand, Moore was ushered into the Oval Office to brief the President. He brought in a list of talking points for Nixon:

  A) Clemente was chosen by the President for his postwar National League All-Star Team.

  B) Apart from baseball, Clemente was known for his year-round service to good causes and his love of Puerto Rico, where he was virtually a folk hero. He was aboard the airplane because he had heard that a previous shipment [to Managua] had been diverted by profiteers and he wanted to make certain that the clothing and food reached the people in need. Clemente had been the chief organizer in raising $150,000 plus tons of clothing and foodstuffs. [In citing “profiteers,” the memo avoided saying that these were the sons and relatives of General Somoza, a great Nixon fan who had recently sent a letter supporting the President for the Nobel Peace Prize.]

  C) Members of the club and other Pittsburgh friends will fly to Puerto Rico in a chartered plane tomorrow for a special memorial service.

  D) Clemente, thirty-eight, was National League batting champion four times in eighteen seasons, named twelve times to the All-Star team, most valuable player in NL in 1966, and MVP in 1971 World Series.

  E) Daniel Galbreath’s father, John Galbreath, has met the President at All-Star games and sports dinners. He named a racehorse Roberto in honor of Clemente.

  At three forty-three, Galbreath was escorted into the Oval Office along with pitchers Steve Blass and Dave Giusti, who had slept little since they first received word of the plane crash. Television cameramen and the White House photographer were ushered in and out of the room. Nixon impressed everyone with his detailed knowledge of Clemente and the Pirates roster. They talked until a few minutes after four.

  By that hour in the choppy Atlantic waters about a mile and half off Punta Maldonado, dragging operations by the Sagebrush had brought a body to the surface. It was identified as the pilot, Jerry Hill, and transferred to Centro Médico Hospital in Río Piedras. The autopsy conducted by forensic pathologist Nestor A. Loynaz revealed the overwhelming corporal trauma occupants of the plane experienced when the plunging DC-7 hit the water, which was much like hitting a brick wall at two hundred miles an hour. Hill’s body was broken everywhere: multiple fractures of the head and face; multiple fractures of the ribs and sternum; completely broken spinal column; multiple fractures of the tailbone; complete amputation of right leg; broken left leg; cavities in the stomach and diaphragm; ruptured aorta; ruptured bladder. Manny Sanguillen had seen the body on the recovery boat before it was flown to the hospital and the devastation of it convinced Sangy that he would never find his friend Roberto alive.

  Early the next morning, a chartered jet left Pittsburgh carrying more than sixty members of the Pirates family to a memorial service for No. 21 in Puerto Rico. The contingent included manager Bill Virdon and most of the players and coaches and many wives, former managers Danny Murtaugh and Harry Walker, John and Dan Galbreath, general manager Joe L. Brown, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Marvin Miller and Richard Moss of the players association, and Preston Pearson, representing the Pittsburgh Steelers, who on the day Clemente died had lost an NFL playoff game to the Miami Dolphins. The plane was “real quiet going down,” Richie Hebner recalled, though Pearson happened to be sitting near Dock Ellis, the irrepressible pitcher, who could not stop talking. The baseball men were all dressed in black. After they filed off the plane and assembled in San Juan International’s lobby for a press conference, Joe L. Brown stepped to the microphone. Addressing the bustling throng of local writers, television crews, and onlookers, Brown showed his deep respect for Clemente, yet also sounded as though Roberto’s real family had arrived at last to tell these people about him.

  “We would like to get on with it, please. Ladies and gentlemen, when you are ready, we’ll get started,” Brown began. “I’d like to say a few words first. Gentlemen, please. I don’t want your attention as far as the camera’s concerned, we’d just like a little quiet, please. I’d like to say a few things first. This plane from Pittsburgh contains many of Roberto’s closest and dearest friends. There is one purpose in their visit: to show their love and respect for Vera and the Clemente family. We ask your cooperation in keeping this as a family affair. There perhaps might be some questions. I will try to answer them before you ask them . . . I’m sure you are going to ask about memorial services for Roberto. They will be held at three-thirty this afternoon. . . . If you want to take pictures of friends or family entering or leaving the church,
you are certainly free to do so. But no pictures inside. I think there is no way to handle a thing of this sort except to tell you that behind me are part of Roberto’s family. If you care to talk to them, if you care to take their picture, I’m sure they’ll be happy, not happy, but they will accommodate you.”

  Commissioner Kuhn followed with a brief, well-received lament: “It is a very sad event to be here in Puerto Rico for this service for Roberto. Very sad for baseball, for Puerto Rico. He was a truly great man in every way.”

  Dan Galbreath described his meeting in the Oval Office with President Nixon, just as the President’s aides had hoped. “I thought it was going to be a perfunctory meeting but we talked with the President for twenty-five minutes,” Galbreath said. “He showed a genuine concern over Clemente and displayed a remarkable knowledge of Clemente the athlete and the humanitarian. His manner was not that of a passing gesture. He said that he and Mrs. Nixon were donating a thousand-dollar check . . . on behalf of Roberto’s memorial fund.”