Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (14 page)

Clemente’s first friend in Pittsburgh was Phil Dorsey, who worked at the Post Office and had served in an Army Reserve unit with Bob Friend, the starting pitcher whose name matched his personality. After Friend introduced him to Clemente in the clubhouse after a game, Dorsey gave the right fielder a ride back to his stuffy little room at the old Webster Hall Hotel. Soon they developed a routine, with Dorsey, when he was off work, driving the carless Clemente to and from games and out to eat. The life of a ballplayer comes with oceans of free time, and Dorsey helped Clemente fill them. They played pool and penny-ante poker and ate Chinese food and went to the movies. Clemente loved westerns, and would memorize lines from them as a way to learn more English. (Years later, in the clubhouse several hours before a game, a teammate saw Clemente standing in front of a mirror with a young Latin player, helping the newcomer with English by having him repeat a phrase from
The Lone Ranger:
“You go into town, I’ll meet you at the canyon.”)

Realizing that Clemente was miserable at the hotel, a setting so depressingly different from his home life in Puerto Rico, Dorsey found an apartment that Clemente could share with Roman Mejias, the other
Latin on the club. But Mejias stayed up late and made a lot of noise with the hangers when he put away his clothes, and part of the building turned out to be a brothel. Finally, Dorsey set up Clemente with his friends Stanley and Mamie Garland, a childless black couple who had an extra room available at their trim red-brick house at 3038 Iowa Street in Schenley Heights, a middle-class black neighborhood up the hill from the University of Pittsburgh. Mr. Garland worked at the Post Office with Dorsey, and his wife held a supervisory job at Allegheny General Hospital.

The Garlands had let rooms to college students before, but never to a major league ballplayer. Mamie Garland had qualms about the idea. Roberto was young, single, and gorgeous. Women jostled to get near him before and after every game, and one of Dorsey’s roles became that of the gatekeeper for Clemente’s women. Mrs. Garland, before taking in Clemente, wanted to get it straight that there would be no women in the house. Clemente assured her that he did not like to party at home and that he was quiet and always trying to get his rest. He was a very peaceful person, he said. She would have no problems with him. It was just a room at first, nothing more. He went out for meals. But Mamie Garland was a good cook, and the aromas drifting up to his room from her kitchen were too much for him. One day he stocked her freezer with steaks and other cuts of beef that he had brought home from the butcher shop. They are for you, he told Mrs. Garland, as she recalled the story. Do what you want with them. But I’d like to eat at the table if it’s okay with you because I smell those steaks that you prepare. I would appreciate it if you would fix one for me. Please, one of these days, fix one for me. From then on, he ate at the table with the Garlands, and the bond deepened so that he would call them his parents in America and they thought of him as their son.

Looking south and downhill from the rear window of the Garland house, beyond the treetops, Clemente could see the Pitt skyscraper, the Cathedral of Learning, and to its right his baseball cathedral, Forbes Field, which was only a short if steep walk down the curving streets. Around the block on Adelaide was the house of singer Billy Eckstine’s sister. Bill Nunn Jr., the sports editor of the
Courier,
lived four blocks away on Finland, across from the Williams Park reservoir,
and nearby on Anaheim, Dakota, Bryn Mawr, and Cherokee were many of the city’s leading black judges, ministers, and nightclub owners. A quarter-mile down the slope to the north ran Centre Avenue, with the
Courier
offices and presses taking up a half-block at the corner of Francis Street, across from the YMCA, whose pool tables served as a social hub for the Hill, and beyond that came Wylie Avenue and an undulating three-block stretch of nightclubs surrounding the Crawford Grill No. 2, where Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Junior Gilliam, and Don Newcombe would go when the Dodgers came to town, and where the musicians entertaining on weekends included John Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, and Art Blakey. The Crawford Grill had been founded by Gus Greenlee, who also owned the Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball club in the Negro National League and made his money running the local numbers racket along with Boogie Harris, the brother of Charles (Teenie) Harris, the talented photographer for the
Courier.

The black Pittsburgh that Clemente entered was a small, tight world. He became a familiar figure on Wylie Avenue, according to Nunn, who ran with the ballplayers when he was not at the office putting out the paper, but as a black Puerto Rican who spoke another language Clemente was somewhat apart from the crowd. The Latino population in Pittsburgh then was minimal, less than 1 percent. “I think it was always tough for Clemente,” Nunn remembered. “For years in the black community there was a little tension with blacks from other countries. There were no Puerto Ricans in Pittsburgh to speak of, not like New York. The thing here was steel mills, which didn’t draw workers from the Caribbean.” Nunn noticed that when Clemente went out his female companions were as often white as black. “Some of the black women just didn’t understand him,” Nunn said.

•   •   •

In 1955,
with no help from the baseball team, not yet, the city of steel was undertaking what civic leaders called the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Mayor David Lawrence, with the cooperation of the corporate elite, had already pushed through smoke ordinances to clean the air, which
had grown so thick during the industrial frenzy of World War II that a photograph showed cars driving through town at noon with headlights on. Now they were cleaning the rivers, clearing land, razing buildings, and remaking downtown and nearby neighborhoods, for better and for worse; better for some businessmen and merchants, largely worse for displaced residents. Pittsburgh was a city of neighborhoods, with a rich ethnic mix. Every immigrant group was said to have its own hill, and newspaper. Along with the three dailies and the black-owned
Courier,
there was also the Jewish
Criterion,
the
Sokol Polski
weekly, the Italian
Unione,
the
Nardoni Slovu
for Ukrainians, and the Serbian
Daily.

It was only at the top that everyone appeared the same. Margaret Bourke-White, the great
Time-Life
photographer, came to Pittsburgh and took a picture of the manufacturers and financiers who ran the city in the mid-fifties. They posed inside the Duquesne Club on Sixth Avenue, some standing, others settled comfortably in plush leather chairs, with portraits of successive generations of Mellon men looking down from the back wall. Gray and black suits, dark ties, crossed legs, manicured fingers, scrubbed faces, hair combed back—here was the power of Pittsburgh assembled for an executive session of what was known as the Allegheny Conference: United States Steel, Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Mellon National Bank, Mine Safety Appliances Company, Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation, Aluminum Company of America, Consolidation Coal Company, Gulf Oil Corporation, H. J. Heinz Company, Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, Fisher Scientific Company, Duquesne Light Company, Oliver Tyrone Corporation, Carnegie Institute, Mellon Institute. World-class fortunes were made in Pittsburgh, most from the days when it was called “hell with the lid off.”

A losing baseball team played a minuscule role in the economy of Pittsburgh, but it was one of the few institutions that everyone in the city could get behind. Old Forbes Field, built in 1909 and named for a general in the French and Indian War, was easily accessible by bus and trolley. It was located in the Oakland neighborhood, at the edge of the University of Pittsburgh, two miles east of downtown along Forbes Avenue. Across the street, visible over the left-field fence, were the
trees of Schenley Park, where the city had just unveiled a new eighteen-foot-high statue of Honus Wagner, shortstop for the first seventeen years of the century, the first and then the greatest of all great Pittsburgh Pirates. Most of the 34,361 seats inside Forbes were affordable for steelworkers as well as executives. Bleacher seats along the left-field line went for a buck. General admission seating in the lower and upper decks of right field cost $1.40. The most expensive season ticket package, known as Plan E, which included field level box seats for seventy-seven games plus a throw-in of sixty-six general admission tickets, went for $143. It was almost enough to draw crowds, but that was something only a better team could make happen. Attendance in 1954 had been the worst since the war years, and 1955 was showing little improvement, under a half-million for the entire home season.

For those who did attend, the rookie stationed in right field offered full entertainment value, whether he was hitting or in a slump. Opposing teams kept trying to run on him, and consistently ran themselves out of innings as he compiled eighteen outfield assists. Deep in the summer, Monte Irvin, Momen’s childhood hero, was sold by the Giants to their minor league club in Minneapolis, his career nearing an end. At about the same time, Clemente—beset by nagging injuries: the wrenched spine and neck from the car accident, a sore ankle, a banged-up shin—fell into a slump that would find him struggling at the plate for the rest of the season, with his average eventually dipping to .255 (with five home runs and forty-seven runs batted in). The Pirates would slip with him, finding solace only in the fact that they avoided losing a hundred games. But there was something about Clemente that went beyond results. His little underhanded flips and basket catches, the way he ran hard and threw harder and swung hardest, even the élan with which he wore the traditional cut of the white Pirates uniform with black sleeves, all of this was absorbed and appreciated by patrons who sat down the right-field line, and by the knothole gang youngsters and families who gazed down on him from the stands above the high right-field wall.

From the beginning, there was a bond between Clemente and many baseball fans, especially kids. If they were not bound by prejudice, if they could appreciate Clemente for what he was, they were his.
As Branch Rickey said, the law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Sportswriters would almost always frustrate Clemente; either they couldn’t see his perspective or he didn’t think they could. The system, whatever it was, whatever was holding him back—that ticked him off. Seeing other people get more recognition upset him. The stereotypes of Puerto Ricans made him mad. Being told where he couldn’t sit or eat or sleep infuriated him. All of that angered him so much he once called himself a double nigger, resorting to a word that also irritated him. But the fans were something else. As a young ballplayer, lonely and burning, he found relief with the fans, and after games, with no wife or children to go home to, Momen loved nothing more than to stand surrounded by admiring strangers—
momentito, momentito
—and sign his autograph in a sweet-flowing cursive scrawl on their scorecards and baseballs for as long as they wished.

BOB PRINCE, THE PLAY-BY-PLAY ANNOUNCER ON PIRATES
radio and television broadcasts, had a nickname for everyone. That included Prince himself, who was known in Pittsburgh as “the Gunner.” Where that nickname came from is a matter of dispute; either it was descriptive of his announcing style or—an equally likely story—his friends started calling him the Gunner after an unhappy husband pulled a gun on him for talking to the man’s wife. With his deep, raspy voice, goofy, bespectacled face, skinny legs, ugly plaid sport coats, unbridled home-club shilling, keen sense of humor and intelligence, and bottomless
supply of nicknames, metaphors, jinxes, good-luck charms, and idiomatic sayings, Prince was not just the voice of the Pirates, he was in many ways their creator. Baseball teams live in the public imagination, and the Pirates came to life as imagined first by Bob Prince.

At his side in the broadcast booth was Jim Woods, who in Prince’s world was called Possum. For those who grew up listening to Prince, there were phrases that transcended cliché because they were embedded so deeply in the cultural fabric of Pittsburgh during that era.
We had ’em all the way.
Said only after a tense game when it seemed that the Pirates would lose.
You can kiss it good-bye.
Prince’s defining call for a home run.
How sweet it is!
Proclaimed after a particularly satisfying victory or winning streak. The bases were not loaded but
F.O.B.,
full of Bucs. A ball was not barely foul but
foul by a gnat’s eyelash.
He also had colorful names for the players. Bill Virdon, who roamed center field in wire-rimmed glasses, was
Quail.
Smoky Burgess, the rotund catcher, was
Shake, rattle, and roll.
Vernon Law, the clean-living Mormon pitching ace, was
Deacon.
Third baseman Don Hoak, aggressive and fearless, was
Tiger.
Bob Skinner, the lanky, sweet-swinging lefty who played left field, was
Dog,
or
Doggie.
Little Elroy Face, the forkball artist who had an unhittable season in 1959, going 18–1, was
The Baron of the Bullpen.
He tried calling Dick Groat, the captain and shortstop, No. 24,
Double Dozen,
but that name never caught on. Dick Schofield, the utility infielder, was
Ducky.
And then there was Roberto Clemente.