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

by David Maraniss

  When an island reporter told Galbreath about Clemente’s interest in using some abandoned San Juan Naval Station property for his sports city dream, the team president promised to pass the information along to the White House.

  Bill Virdon said these were the only circumstances he could think of that would make him return to Puerto Rico without enjoying it. Danny Murtaugh, his predecessor, was nearly at a loss for words. He recalled the first time he had seen Clemente in 1955 and had said to himself then that he was watching a kid who was going to be one of the greatest ballplayers of all time. Gene Clines said Roberto was like a big brother to him. Al Oliver said Clemente was the strongest inspiration in his baseball career. Steve Blass said he would never forget Roberto as long as he lived. The room fell quiet as Willie Stargell spoke. For nearly a decade, Stargell had been the other pillar on the Pittsburgh team. He towered over Clemente physically, but always looked up to him.

  “I’ll tell you, it’s really hard to put into words all the feelings that I have for Robby,” Stargell said. “Since I’ve been with him I’ve had a chance to know a really dynamic man who walked tall in every sense you can think of. He was proud, he was dedicated. He was in every sense you can determine a man. And I think going the way he went really typifies how he lived. Helping other people without seeking any publicity or fame. Just making sure that he could lend a hand and get the job done. . . . The greatness that he is, we all know the ballplayer that he is. For those who did not know him as a man they really missed a fine treat for not knowing this gentleman. I had the opportunity to play with him, to sit down and talk about the things that friends talk about. And I am losing a great friend. But he will always remain in my heart.”

  The baseball delegation filed into two buses for the short ride from the airport to the central plaza in Carolina and the memorial mass led by Archbishop Luis Aponte Martínez at San Fernando Roman Catholic Church. Crowds lined the streets into town, and thousands of carolinenses filled the plaza, much as they had only eight years earlier when Roberto and Vera had been married in the same stone chapel. Mourners entering the church were handed programs with an artist’s rendering of Clemente and the words of his mother’s spiritual refrain: Only God makes man happy. Life is nothing. Everything ends. Only God makes man happy. Steve Blass, speaking for his teammates at the service, read a poem that Pirates press man Bill Guilfoile gave him, a slightly reconfigured version of an ode to another baseball hero who had died young, Lou Gehrig. Blass was more afraid in the pulpit than he had ever felt on the mound. All the way down on the plane, all he thought about was whether he could do this. The poem had the sentimentalism of 1930s sports journalism, when writers often expressed themselves in rhyme, but Blass infused the words with sincerity and choked up several times during his reading. Let this be a silent token/Of Lasting friendship’s gleam/And all that we’ve left unspoken/Your pals on the Pirates team. As Blass faltered, so too did many in the audience. “Blass is one of the funniest guys you’d ever want to meet,” recalled trainer Tony Bartirome. “Yet it brought tears to your eyes when a guy like that was up there crying.” Not a dry eye among the Pirates delegation, recalled Joe L. Brown.

  Manny Sanguillen skipped the service because he preferred to be in a boat off Punta Maldonado all day helping the search teams. Sangy kept churning and bobbing in the dismal sea; an expression of loss deeper than any public statement. Eight Navy scuba divers were on the scene, going deep in pairs fifteen minutes at a time. They found small, scattered pieces of aircraft in 120 feet of water and were able to recover parts of the forward cockpit. About two-hundred yards away, the cutter Sagebrush appeared to locate larger pieces of wreckage; the divers would have to wait until the next day to confirm it. There were also reports of another body floating in a coral pocket closer to shore, but turbulent waters kept divers away at first, and when they reached the area there was nothing.

  In keeping with her daily ritual, Vera had returned to Piñones Beach in the morning with friends and relatives. She was there for the commotion over the body sighting. No sign of Roberto, dead or alive, only rags and sticks. On the way back, she got trapped in a traffic jam on the clogged roads and never made it to the memorial mass in Carolina. It was not a funeral or burial mass that she missed, there was no body to bury, and there would be another memorial service a few days later, at the stadium, open to everyone. Vera did reach the house on the hill in time to host the Pittsburgh delegation early that evening. She was standing in the lush living room, surrounded by relatives, as she greeted the visitors one by one, expressing thanks to each of them.

  Les Banos, the team photographer, had worried on the plane about what he would say when he saw Vera. “I thought about it all the way,” he said later. “Then I saw her and said, ‘I’ve lost my best friend.’ And she said, ‘So have I.’” The evening was soft and calm. From the balcony of the house, visitors could see the ocean where the DC-7 had gone down. Steve Blass had felt so much already, but from a distance. This was the real thing. “Vera is there. The boys are there. The emotions are like a raw vein.” Dock Ellis, always with something to say, was now somber and shaken. Al Oliver had contained himself throughout the day. Now he thought about how Clemente had to die for people to realize what an uncommon man he was, and how Roberto reminded him of his father, who had died on the very day that Scoop, as he was known, got called up to the major leagues. Clemente and his dad were strong individualists who carried themselves with dignity and talked about life the same way. “I probably have not broke down more than once or twice in life, but I was hurt bad,” Oliver said later. “The team went over to the house and reality set in. I was just standing there thinking about it. All of a sudden tears started rolling.”

  • • •

  By the end of that weekend the search team, reinforced with more divers and sophisticated sonar and salvage equipment, had located most everything that was to be found. First they came across significant portions of the cockpit, with the pilot seat attached, instruments and electrical wiring dangling freely, along with some fuselage sections and melted medical equipment. Behind the pilot seat, divers recovered a shirt and trousers with a wallet inside that belonged to Jerry Hill. Then they found the tail section intact, from the tip to the large cargo loading doors, with the tail number N500AE clearly visible. About 150 feet away from the tail they encountered a twenty-five-foot section of one wing, with the landing gear attached and in the down position.

  Following an underwater line perpendicular to the tail section, they spotted three engines, all separated from the wings. The No. 1 engine showed nothing unusual. On the No. 2 engine, two propellers were bent and one sheared off. These remnants offered more clues to National Transportation Safety Board investigators in determining the cause of the crash. Arthur Rivera’s DC-7 was a death trap even before it rolled down Runway 7, but it appeared from the wreckage clues that there were some final errors. Trying to fly a previously damaged and untested plane that was overloaded and imbalanced, it seemed that Hill had overboosted the engines, pushing them beyond their limits. His crewmates, who were to monitor the instruments and throttles and perhaps could have prevented the overboosting, were not trained for the task.

  The seers and psychics were less effective zeroing in on Roberto Clemente. Rumors and false sightings continued. They were no closer to finding him than was his youngest son, little Ricky, who picked up the telephone and pretended that he was talking to his father. No closer than the mourners who started rowing out from the beach to spread flower petals in the sacred water. Vic Power had been convinced that his friend was alive until he saw a photograph of some more debris collected from the wreckage. There was the briefcase Clemente had bought in Nicaragua during their baseball trip, with the little alligator head he thought looked funny and wanted to cut off. Ohhh, baby, Power said, he’s gone. That was January 6, Three Kings Day. Later that day, Power joined his fellow ballplayers at the annual Puerto Rico winter league All-Star game at Hiram Bithorn Stadium. The g
ame was conducted in honor of Clemente, the greatest Latino player of them all.

  The long, bleak week was closing, and at the end, after his people by the thousands lined the Atlantic shore in expectation that Clemente would walk out of the sea, and thousands more made pilgrimages up the hillside to shuffle past his house like a shrine, and the seers said that he was alive but dazed, and President Nixon got involved at the White House, and Pittsburgh comrades arrived in Puerto Rico to show their grief and solidarity, and the U.S. Coast Guard, with all its boats and planes and divers and equipment, slowly dragged up the wreckage and debris, searching in a Probability of Detection Area stretching for miles—at the end, finally, on a coral reef a mile east of Punta Maldonado, they found one sock, and Vera knew it was Roberto’s. One sock, that’s all, the rest to sharks and gods.

  Myth and Memory

  Three decades after Clemente’s death, an official at San Juan’s leading art museum suggested that he would be an interesting subject for an exhibition. After some grumbling from the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico’s board of directors—what does baseball have to do with art? they asked—the project moved forward and two avant-garde designers, Nestor Barretto and Jorge Carbonell, were brought in to create the exhibition. Barretto and Carbonell were interested in art and culture, politics and sociology, but had little knowledge of baseball and less of Clemente. They were, in fact, the perfect team for the assignment. Clemente represents more than baseball, and though he was a singular person, he also represents more than himself. In life he was a work of art; in death he has become a cultural icon. During the early stages of the project, Barretto and Carbonell spread the word that they were looking for any art related to Clemente. Soon enough they were overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of material. Thousands of people from Puerto Rico and all corners of the United States came forward with thousands of objects: paintings, murals, cards, gloves, shrines, carvings, statues, gadgets, photographs, songs. The stories that accompanied each collection were spiritual, poetic, and the stuff of myth.

  The mythic aspects of baseball usually draw on clichés of the innocent past, the nostalgia for how things were. Fields of green. Fathers and sons. But Clemente’s myth arcs the other way, to the future, not the past, to what people hope they can become. His memory is kept alive as a symbol of action and passion, not of reflection and longing. He broke racial and language barriers and achieved greatness and died a hero. That word can be used indiscriminately in the world of sports, but the classic definition is of someone who gives his life in the service of others, and that is exactly what Clemente did. He was also the greatest of the early Latino players in a game that is increasingly dominated by Spanish-speaking athletes. Ramirez, Martinez, Rodriguez, Pujols, Rivera, Ortiz, Beltran, Tejada, Guerrero—these are the names of baseball today, among the 204 Latinos who opened the 2005 season on major league rosters, about one-quarter of all players. Puerto Rico itself has mostly moved on to basketball and other faster-paced sports, leaving the baseball obsession more to the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, but the story of how Clemente was the best among them is passed along from generation to generation, country to country.

  At Clemente’s sweetest moment of glory, in the dugout after his Pittsburgh Pirates won the 1971 World Series, he brought pride to all of Latin America by choosing to speak in Spanish to honor his parents back home. Thirty-four years later, when another Latino, Ozzie Guillen, the Venezuelan manager of the champion Chicago White Sox, stood atop the baseball world, he too paid homage, revealing that in the study of his house he kept a shrine to the one baseball figure he honored above all others, Roberto Clemente. For many years after Clemente’s death, Tony Taylor, the Cuban infielder, made a point of walking young Latino teammates out to the right field wall whenever they visited Pittsburgh to give them a history lesson about the great Clemente. He is your heritage, Taylor would tell them, but more than that he is what you can become.

  (1) What burned in the eyes of Roberto Clemente was the fire of dignity.

  (2) While still in high school, Clemente signed with the Santurce Cangrejeros, where he became teammates with many major leaguers, including Junior Gilliam of the Dodgers (left), known in Puerto Rico as “the Black Sea.” Later, Clemente played in the same outfield as Willie Mays.

  (3) Clemente’s early baseball patron was Pedrin Zorrilla, owner of the Cangrejeros, whose nickname was the Big Crab. Zorrilla was the son of the Puerto Rican poet Enrique Zorrilla, whose most famous poem was “Dream of Deeds.”

  (4) When Clemente ran, it seemed not so much that he was trying to reach a base as to escape from some unspeakable terror. He had an unusual ability to stop on a dime after racing full speed to first.

  (5) The 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, with Clemente (bottom row, second from left) starring in right field, defeated the New York Yankees in seven games to win the World Series. It was a bold and extraordinary upset (they won despite losing three games by the scores of 16–3, 12-0, and 10–0), an act of rebellion at the dawn of the sixties’ decade.

  (6) Wedding Day, November 14, 1964. All through the slow, sweet Saturday afternoon, the people of Carolina, Puerto Rico, celebrated as if it were the festival for a local saint. Clemente looked as princely in his black tuxedo as he did in the cool white and black of his Pittsburgh uniform.

  (7) Roberto and Vera on their honeymoon in Curaçao. “I can walk down to the corner and probably get ten girls,” Clemente had told Vera’s father, Flor Zabala, while he was courting her. “But I don’t care. The one I love is here.”

  (8) Clemente spent his career alternately worrying about his health and complaining about being called a hypochondriac. Before leaving home for spring training in 1965, he was hospitalized with malaria and lost nearly twenty-five pounds. Here he is visited by his mother, Luisa.

  (9) Vera visited Roberto at spring training, but never spent an entire preseason with him. Nothing in Puerto Rico was as overtly racist as the Jim Crow segregation Clemente experienced during his early years with the Pirates in Fort Myers.

  (10) Clemente in the living room of his modernist home atop the hill in Río Piedras. He had just won his third batting title, but still felt overlooked, misunderstood, and underappreciated. Any conversation with a sports reporter was likely to open with a loud complaint.

  (11) Roberto and Vera cross the sidewalk bridge out the front door of their house with Robertito and Luisito. Clemente insisted that Vera come home to Puerto Rico for the births of their sons.

  (12)

  (13) Clemente ran out every ground ball, hustled on the bases, and thought he could catch any ball hit to the outfield and throw out any runner on the bases. His batting prowess, with 3,000 hits and four batting titles, was equaled by his skill in the field. He had one of the most fearsome throwing arms in baseball history and won twelve Gold Gloves. Critics noticed his less than sterling on-base percentage and home run totals; his fans said his game could not be reduced to statistics.

  (14) Victor Pellot (left), known in the majors as Vic Power, came up before Clemente and helped pave the way for him as one of the Three Kings, along with Hiram Bithorn and Luis Olmo. Power and Clemente were close friends off the field and were together in Nicaragua coaching an amateur baseball team shortly before Clemente’s death.

  (15) In the late 1960s, Clemente wore the uniform of the San Juan Senadores, the favorite team of his childhood. Writers in Pittsburgh often questioned why Clemente would tire himself by playing winter ball, but he felt an obligation to his homeland and connected his personal history to the struggle of his people.

  (16) Clemente was like a big brother to dozens of Latino players who followed him to the majors, including Orlando Cepeda (left), the slugging first baseman from Puerto Rico. Here they pose with fans during the 1967 season, when Cepeda was the National League MVP. Clemente had won the honor a year earlier.

  (17) Planeloads of Puerto Ricans flew to Pittsburgh for Roberto Clemente night on July 24, 1970. Clemente choked with emotion as he began to speak.
At a moment like that, he said afterward, “You can see a lot of years in a few minutes. You can see everything firm and you can see everything clear.”

  (18) The entire family came to Pittsburgh when Clemente was honored, including his father, Melchor (far left), who had never left Puerto Rico before and needed help to overcome his fear of flying. “I have achieved this honor for us the Latinos,” Clemente said.

  (19) Clemente routinely visited sick children in National League cities. The hospital visits were rarely publicized, but ailing kids seemed to know about them everywhere. Before each road trip Clemente sorted out his large pile of mail in the clubhouse and made a special stack for children in cities where the Pirates were headed next.

  (20) The Pirates trainer, Tony Bartirome (left), thought Roberto Clemente was a lot like his wife. Ask Clemente how he felt and he would tell you, “Well, I’ve got this thing with my neck.” A pregame stop at the training table was a daily appointment, another of his rituals, like not sleeping at night and complaining about sportswriters.

  (21) At age thirty-eight, Clemente’s body still evoked that of a world-class ballet dancer, with muscled shoulders rippling down to a narrow waist, thirty inches—the same measurement he had as a teenager—and powerful wrists, and hands so magical they were said to have eyes at their fingertips.