Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (2 page)
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Authors: David Maraniss
Tags: #Baseball, #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail
In memory of Elliott Maraniss,
my wonderful dad,
the sweet-swinging left hander
from Abraham Lincoln High
Good actions ennoble us, we are the sons of our own deeds.
—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
PHOTO BY LINDA MARANISS
THE FAMILIAR SOUNDS OF MODERN BASEBALL, PINGS OF
aluminum bats punctuating the steady drone of a crowd, can be heard from the street a half-block away. It is late on a Sunday afternoon in February, overcast and drizzly in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Inside the stadium, there is a game going on, the Escuela de Deportiva against Bayamón. Nothing special, just teenage boys playing ball, the way they do every afternoon, and then the right fielder from Deportiva scoops up a base hit and fires to second, his throw a bullet—low, hard, right on the bag. Groups of men huddle in the stands, talking, laughing, playing cards, barely paying attention, or so it seems until the throw. It elicits a murmur of recognition, and suddenly they come alive, stirred by communal memory. All fires are one fire, the novelist Julio Cortázar once wrote. And all arms are one arm. The throw from right field reminds them of the original, the unsurpassable arm of the man for whom the stadium is named, Roberto Clemente.
Beyond the stadium, closer to the street, stands a cenotaph thirty feet long and seven and a half feet high. It is the nearest thing to a headstone for Carolina’s favorite son. On its three panels the sculptor José Buscaglia has etched the stations of the cross of Roberto Clemente’s thirty-eight years on this earth. In the far left panel, Roberto is a babe, held in the arms of his mother in the barrio of San Antón, and his father is seen working in the nearby cane fields. In the far right panel, Clemente passes from greatness into legend; first he is being honored for his three-thousandth hit, then his spirit is received by a figure of death in the Atlantic’s watery grave, and finally his widow holds the plaque for his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. But the center panel is the most telling. There, between scenes of Clemente batting, running, fielding, throwing, visiting hospitals, and consoling the sick and the poor, he is depicted standing regal and alone, holding a lamb.
Memory and myth are entwined in the Clemente story. He has been dead for more than three decades, yet he remains vivid in the sporting consciousness while other athletes come and go, and this despite the fact that he played his entire career in relative obscurity, away from the mythmakers of New York and Los Angeles. Forty public schools, two hospitals, and more than two hundred parks and ballfields bear his name, from Carolina, Puerto Rico, where he was born, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he played, to far-off Mannheim, Germany. In the world of memorabilia, the demand for anything Clemente is second only to Mickey Mantle, and far greater than Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Juan Marichal, or any other black or Latin players. Extraordinary as he was, Clemente was not the greatest who ever played the game, yet there was something about him that elevated him into his own realm. Much of it had to do with the way he died. He was young. He went down in a plane crash. His body was lost to the sea, never found. He was on a mission of mercy, leaving his family on New Year’s Eve to come to the aid of strangers. In Spanish, Clemente means merciful. Some of it had to do with the way he looked and played on the ball field, No. 21, perfectly cut in his Pirates uniform, a portrait of solemn beauty, with his defiant jaw and soulful eyes. And much of it had to do with the way he lived. In sainthood, his people put a lamb in his arms, but he was no saint, and certainly not docile. He was agitated, beautiful, sentimental, unsettled, sweet, serious, selfless, haunted, sensitive, contradictory, and intensely proud of everything about his native land, including himself. To borrow the words of the Puerto Rican poet Enrique Zorrilla, what burned in the cheeks of Roberto Clemente was “the fire of dignity.”
Something That Never Ends
IT WAS LONG PAST MIDNIGHT IN MANAGUA, NICARAGUA,
and Roberto Clemente could not sleep. Not sleeping at night was part of his routine, the same wherever he went. At his apartment at Chatham West in Pittsburgh, at his house atop the hill in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, on the team plane during late-night cross-country flights, at road-trip hotels in Chicago, St. Louis, or Cincinnati—at each of them equally he could not sleep. He might find rest after sunrise, under the covers, with the air conditioner turned full blast and the drapes shut and taped tight to the wall so no light could penetrate a blackened room. Or he might doze off at work after lunch, in some subterranean chamber of a stadium, dark and cool. In the old days at Forbes Field, he often slipped away from his teammates before a game and took a nap inside the vacant clubhouse of the football Steelers. Left-handed pitcher Juan Pizarro, his countryman and occasional teammate, found him there once and started calling him Old Sleepy Head.
The hours from one to five in the morning were another matter. Sleep rarely came to him then, and if by chance he did drift off, he might be startled back into consciousness by a nightmare.
In one bad dream that had haunted him recently, he was hiding under a house, feeling grave danger. In another, he was on a crashing plane. His wife, Vera, knew all about these recurring nightmares. She knew that he looked for omens and that he believed he would die young.
On this night, November 15, 1972, Vera was home in Puerto Rico with their three young boys. She would join Roberto in Managua in a few days. Until then he was on his own at the Hotel Inter-Continental.
His friend, Osvaldo Gil, had the adjacent room, and at Clemente’s insistence they kept the doors open between the two so they could come and go like family. Deep into the night, they stayed up talking, Roberto down to his boxer shorts. That was all he would wear in the hotel room, his sculpted mahogany torso at age thirty-eight still evoking 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.
The two men would be defined by race in the United States, one black and one white, but thought of themselves only as fellow Puerto Ricans. They talked about baseball and their hopes for their team at the twentieth amateur world championships that were to begin in Nicaragua at noon that same day. A lawyer and Korean War veteran, Gil (pronounced “heel”) was president of the Puerto Rican amateur baseball federation and had persuaded Clemente to come along and manage the team. Puerto Rico had finished third last time, and Gil thought all they needed was a push to get past the favored teams from Cuba and the United States and perhaps win gold. Clemente might make the difference.
So much had happened since Gil had first caught sight of Clemente more than twenty years earlier. Roberto was still in high school then, starring for the Juncos Mules in the top amateur baseball league in Puerto Rico. Most people who had seen him play carried some deeply ingrained memory, and Gil’s went back to the beginning: He sat in the bleachers of the park in Carolina and watched this kid hum a throw from deep center field, the ball seeming to defy physics by picking up speed as it buzzed toward the infield and sailed over the third baseman’s head into the stands. Even a wild throw by Roberto Clemente was a memorable work of art.
From there followed eighteen seasons in the big leagues, all with the Pittsburgh Pirates, two World Series championships, four batting titles, an MVP award, twelve Gold Gloves as a right fielder, leading the league in assists five times, and—with a line double into the gap at Three Rivers Stadium in his final at-bat of the 1972 season—exactly three thousand hits. The beautiful fury of Clemente’s game had
enthralled all of baseball. More than simply another talented athlete, he was an incandescent figure who had willed himself to become a symbol of Puerto Rico and all of Latin America, leading the way for the waves of Spanish-speaking baseball players coming North to the majors. And he was not done yet. At the end of each of the previous two seasons, he had talked of retiring, but he had at least two good years left.
Clemente would not be playing right field for this team. He was in Nicaragua only to manage. During practice sessions in Puerto Rico, he had underscored the distinction by showing up in civilian clothes. The job was not new to him, he had managed the San Juan Senadores in winter ball, but his players then had been professionals, including many major leaguers, and these were young amateurs. It was apparent to Gil that Clemente understood the potential problem. He was so skilled and brought such determination to the game that he might expect the same of everyone, which was unrealistic. Still, he was Roberto Clemente, and who wouldn’t want him leading the Puerto Ricans against the rest of the world?
The simple life of a ballplayer is eat, sleep, fool around, play. Many athletes wander through their days unaware of anything else, but Clemente was more than that. He had a restless intelligence and was always thinking about life. He had an answer for everything, his own blend of logic and superstition.
If you want to stay thin, he told Gil, don’t drink water until two hours after you eat rice so the food won’t expand in your stomach. If you want to keep your hair, don’t shower with hot water; why do you think they scald chickens in boiling tubs before plucking feathers at the poultry plant? If you want to break out of a slump, make sure you get at least three swings at the ball every time up. With a total of at least twelve swings in four at-bats a game, all you need is one good one to get a hit. So simple: to break a slump you have to swing at the ball. And it wasn’t all body and baseball. Clemente could also talk politics. His sentiments were populist, with the poor. His heroes were Martin Luther King Jr. and Luis Muñoz Marín, the FDR of his island. He lamented the inequitable distribution of wealth and said he did not understand how people could stash millions in banks while others
went hungry. The team president had to beg off, exhausted, or the manager would have yakked until dawn.
The next morning before breakfast, there was Clemente in the lobby, enacting his own modest wealth redistribution plan. He had instructed the cafeteria to give him a bagful of coins in exchange for a $20 bill and now was searching out poor people. A short old man carrying a machete reminded him of Don Melchor, his father. A boy without shoes reminded him of Martín el Loco, a character in his hometown of Carolina. When he was home, Clemente looked out for Martín and gave him rides in his Cadillac and tried to buy him shoes, but El Loco was so accustomed to going barefoot that he could not stand to have anything on his feet.
Martín the Crazy is not that crazy, Puerto Ricans would sing. Of the needy strangers Clemente now encountered in Managua, he asked,
What’s your name? Who do you work for? How many in your family?
Then he handed them coins, two or three or four, until his bag was empty. It became another routine, every morning, like not sleeping at night.
The Inter-Continental, a soulless modern pyramid that rose on a slope above the old Central American city, was enlivened by an unlikely alignment of visitors that week.
Not only Clemente and his ballplayers were there but also squads from China and Japan, West Germany and Italy, Brazil and El Salvador, Honduras and Panama, Cuba and Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, the United States and Canada. Then there was Miss Universe, Kerry Anne Wells of Australia, who won her crown days before at the pageant in Puerto Rico and had been flown across the Caribbean to Nicaragua at the same time as Clemente, creating a stir at Las Mercedes International Airport when the “two people who are news in any part of the world,” as a report in
La Prensa
put it, arrived and posed for pictures in the VIP lounge. The photographs showed Clemente wearing a shirt collar the size of pterodactyl wings, while the beauty of Miss Wells, said to “exceed all words,” thrilled fans who were “looking at her from head to toe and complimenting her in the most flowery manner”—such a polite description of catcalls. Also in the same hotel then was Howard Hughes, the billionaire recluse who had chosen Managua as his latest obscure hideaway.
Hughes occupied the entire seventh floor
in a luxury suite, but might as well have been in another solar system. The baseball folks heard that he was around but never caught sight of him. The story was that he sequestered himself in his spooky aerie, drapes drawn, ordering vegetable soup from room service and watching James Bond movies in the nude. No coins for the people from Mr. Hughes.