Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (25 page)

But for those who stuck around his locker afterward, Clemente had more to say. In the AP story, it all came out, the combustible mix of pride and anger that had been churning inside him for months, in words that out of context seemed to walk a fine line between righteous plea and egotistical rant. At least the quotes this time were not presented in condescending phonetics. “I am hitting for higher average than last year and have more home runs than last year at the time of the All-Star game,” Clemente said. “I had best year in majors last year and I was the league’s most valuable player but I didn’t get one first place vote [Not so, he did receive exactly one first-place vote]. The papers gave it to Groat, but I drive in more runs, and I hit more balls and I helped win more games. I know Groat is a Pittsburgh boy, but the writers made me feel bad . . . I talked to other players in the league and they all told me I was most valuable. This year, the players voted me on the All-Star team and I am feeling very good that I did not let them down.”

The next morning in the
Post-Gazette,
sports editor Al Abrams took note of Clemente’s explosion and came to his defense. The column reflected one of the curious aspects of Clemente’s relationship with
Pittsburgh sportswriters. He was often madder at them than they were at him. Even those reporters who had the toughest time with him could be seen trying, in perhaps limited ways, to consider his perspective. Abrams had always been more sympathetic than most. “Clemente happens to be an outspoken lad, a trait that I admire in him,” Abrams wrote. “This goes for Jimmy Piersall, too. The colorful and at times zany Cleveland Indians star told off Paul Richards because the American League’s All-Star manager did not name him to the squad this year. More Clementes and Piersalls would liven up baseball, a sport that needs livening up in more ways than one.”

There was one other aspect to that midsummer classic in Candlestick Park that went unmentioned at the time but sticks out in retrospect. With one out in the ninth inning, National League manager Danny Murtaugh called in Dodger lefthander Sandy Koufax, who gave up a single to Roger Maris before being yanked for Miller. The only thing notable about Koufax’s cameo role was that this marked his first All-Star appearance. Clemente and Koufax had been equally slow to mature, each taking six long years after making the majors in the 1955 season. Koufax’s progression actually had been the more gradual of the two; he went 2–2, 2–4, 5–4, 11–11, 8–6, and 8–13 before breaking loose in 1961 with eighteen wins and a league-leading 269 strikeouts. And now here they were, reaching their primes together at the dawn of the sixties decade, and there was a magic to these two radiant athletes, the twenty-six-year-old black Latin hitter and the twenty-five-year-old Jewish pitcher, that would set them apart from the crowd. And if, back in 1954, the Dodgers had not tried to hide Clemente in Montreal, but kept him on the twenty-five-man roster as they did Koufax, the two would now be playing on the same team.

A trivial manifestation of the everything-bigger movement of the early sixties was that the major leagues experimented with holding two All-Star games every summer. The second game of 1961, played at Fenway Park in Boston on July 31, was a dud, a 1–1 tie called because of rain after nine innings. But the event was not an entire waste. It brought the player representatives to Boston, and the next day they met and discussed the
Chicago’s American
campaign against segregation at Florida spring training sites. Bill White of the Cardinals and Bill
Bruton of the Tigers presented the issue to their fellow players, with support from the association’s attorney, Robert Cannon. White was insistent that the players not “pussyfoot over this thing.” Most white major leaguers, he told Wendell Smith before the meeting, probably “don’t realize how bad things are for us in Florida. After all, the only time they come in contact with us is at the ball parks. We want them to know exactly what the situation is. We are sure they will sympathize with us.” At the meeting, the players adopted a resolution demanding an end to training camp segregation and calling on all major league owners to take steps to deal with the problem before the World Series in October. Clemente was not the Pirates player representative, but he made his strong views known to his teammate, Bob Friend, who supported the resolution.

•   •   •

The Pirates were a mess the second half of the season. After a disastrous stretch in July when they lost eleven of thirteen games, they fell below .500 and never recovered, eventually finishing the season with a 75–79 record—eighteen games behind the Cincinnati Reds of Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson. Things got so bad during the second-half slide that Jack Hernon wrote a game story with the most honest and reader-defying lead of all time—“Philadelphia, August 7—It was a dull game.” Period, paragraph. And that was a rare game that the Pirates actually won. Not that the sporting world was paying much attention to Pittsburgh—or any team in the National League, including the Reds. The media focus every day that August and September was on Maris and Mantle and their relentless pursuit of Ruth’s magic sixty.

The virtuosity of Roberto Clemente went virtually unnoticed outside Pittsburgh, but those scorching line drives he thwacked during the first day of spring training just kept flying off his Frenchy Uhalt bat month after month. After he won a game in San Francisco with a grand slam, Danny Murtaugh, for the first time, started comparing his right fielder with the best in the game. “Clemente’s quite a player, isn’t he?” Murtaugh told the press. “He’s as good an outfielder in right field as . . . Willie Mays is in center. There isn’t anything he can’t do.” With a
month and a half to go, Clemente picked up the one-thousandth hit of his career. A few days later, Al Abrams was speculating that he might even challenge Arky Vaughan’s record, set in 1935, for the best single season batting average for a Pirate, .385. The only thing holding Roberto back, Abrams wrote, was that he tended to tire out in the final month. The Pittsburgh writer attributed that late-season tendency to the fact that Clemente played winter ball every year and never got sufficient rest. “Why a brilliant performer such as Clemente is permitted to take part in outside baseball action is beyond our thinking.”

One night that August on a road-game flight, Clemente sat on the armrest and talked for forty-five minutes with Hernon, the beat writer with whom he had an uneasy relationship. In his “Roamin’ Around” column, Hernon quoted verbatim the right fielder’s stream-of-consciousness monologue. Clemente told stories about how he almost quit in 1957 when he was hurting, and how his father, Don Melchor, lost thousands of dollars once when someone stole a money box from his house in Carolina, and how he had invested some of his own money in real estate back home. When Clemente was on a roll speaking in his second language, there was a bit of Casey Stengel to him, the poetry of run-on thoughts. “Sometimes I get mad at people,” he said. “But only once here in Pittsburgh. That when I was hurt and everyone call me Jake [to Jake is a verb used by athletes to connote someone who is not trying and making excuses]. I don’t like that. I want to play but my back hurt lots of times and I can’t play. Then that year in St. Paul when I threw the ball in exhibition game the elbow started to puff up. That when some people write that I was in a fight with Face [the relief pitcher, who never got along with Clemente] in St. Louis. You know that not right. You can still feel the bone chip in my elbow,” he continued . . .

That’s why I throw the ball underhanded sometimes. That way it don’t hurt my arm. If I throw real hard lots of times overhand in game, the elbow hurts and swells up.

The back is okay too. Sometime it hurt me when I run. But I find out it is bad disc. If it goes out on the right side I can push it back in easy. But if it hurts on
the other side sometimes I have to work long time to get it back in place.

I have friend in Puerto Rica [the way Hernon spelled it, apparently implying that Clemente pronounced it that way, or at least that Hernon thought he did] who studied to be a doctor but not finish. He has lots of money now and just likes to work as doctor sometimes. He has helped lots of fellows playing winter ball in my home. He fixed me up . . .

I think my friend in Puerto Rica can help Vernon [Law, out with the torn rotator cuff]. He can tell when it hurts without touching the spot. He do that with me just in exercise he asked me to do. I make face once and he said, “You have a bad disc.” And he right. I think he can help Vernon, but no one listen to me and do anything.

The bone chip in his elbow finally did what National League pitchers could not, shutting Clemente down for the last five games of the season. By then, his statistics for the season included 201 hits and a league-leading .351 average. Along with the Silver Bat for being the league’s best hitter, he also was voted a Gold Glove as the best right fielder.

This was not just Clemente’s rise, but all of Puerto Rico’s. It had been exactly twenty seasons since Hiram Bithorn took the mound for the Chicago Cubs and became the first Puerto Rican to play in the major leagues. Within two decades, the island had reached a point of baseball excellence. Not only had Clemente captured the batting title but Orlando Cepeda ended the season as the National League leader in home runs, with forty-six, and runs batted in, with 142. Never before had a player from Puerto Rico led the league in any hitting category, and now they had won all three. Back home, people were calling it the Puerto Rican triple crown. And there was more—Tite Arroyo, the left-handed reliever on the unbeatable Yanks, had had the lowest earned-run average in the majors and led the American League in saves with twenty-nine, and Juan Pizarro was excelling, too, going
14–7 with the White Sox. San Juan was ready to celebrate. Even Cantalicio, the impish cartoon character for Corona Beer, got into the act, with Spanish-language ads that ran in
El Imparcial
and other newspapers:
Corona Beer joins the joy of our island in the triumph of our Puerto Rican baseball stars, leaders in the recent big league season: ROBERTO CLEMENTE and ORLANDO CEPEDA, winners of the triple crown; TITE ARROYO, leader in ERA in both leagues, and TERRIN PIZARRO, who had his best year in the big leagues. Congratulations from Corona . . . to our most outstanding ballplayers.

On his way out of Pittsburgh, Clemente paid special tribute to George Sisler and another Pirates instructor, Bill Burwell, for their encouragement. “They helped me all season by giving me confidence,” he said. “They kept telling me I could hit for high average—even .400—and that made me feel good.” He also talked again about how his hurt feelings had motivated him. “I was mad [from] last year. I played as well as anyone on our team and I didn’t receive one MVP vote. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t say I was the best last year or that I should have won the MVP award. But nobody seemed to care about me. But you win the batting title yourself. They can’t take that away from you.”

The Sportswriters Fraternity of Puerto Rico cared enough about Clemente to send a delegation of scribes, Juan Maldonado, Tito Morales, and Martinez Rousset, to New York to meet him and Orlando Cepeda and escort them back to the island for a festive homecoming. The triple crown kings arrived in San Juan on Pan Am Flight 211 at 2:35 on the afternoon of Monday, October 9 and looked out at a swarming sea of fans. Packs of schoolchildren were there, along with businessmen, families, airport employees. People sat on every available ledge, legs dangling, and stood shoulder to shoulder on the roof of the terminal. It took nearly an hour for Clemente and Cepeda to make their way from the plane through the joyous crowd. Clemente, who had undergone minor surgery on his elbow, kept his right arm at his side and waved with his left. He seemed “almost puzzled by the hugeness of the thing,” reported the
San Juan Star.
“But even this shy young man loosened up after being kissed by three pretty young things representing a beer company.” The streets of Santurce and San Juan
resounded with cheers as Roberto and Orlando, Momen and Pedruchin, rode in open convertibles along a circuitous route to Sixto Escobar stadium, where they were met by a roster of public officials and another boisterous crowd of several thousand fans. The mayor declared the ballplayers honored citizens, and Martiniano Garcia, owner of the Ponce baseball team, made the formal introductions, calling it “a day of glory for Puerto Rico.” Cepeda spoke first, and was brief. He said that he loved Puerto Rico now more than ever.

Then Clemente took the microphone. If it was beyond the thinking of Pittsburgh sportswriters why the great Pirates right fielder would play winter baseball in Puerto Rico, here was the answer. He was home again. His parents and brothers were standing nearby, and off to the side were Pedrin Zorrilla, the Big Crab, who had signed him to his first contract, and Roberto Marín, the first coach to believe in him, and Pancho Coimbre, one of his heroes, a great black Puerto Rican hitter who had played too soon, before major league baseball integrated. Clemente often connected his own history to the struggle of his people, and here was a moment of triumph for them all. He was speaking in his own language, and his words were eloquent. “In the name of my family, in the name of Puerto Rico, in the name of all the players who didn’t have a chance to play for Puerto Rico in the big leagues, I thank you,” he said. “You can be sure that all the Puerto Rican players who go to the States do their best.”

ON A DECEMBER DAY IN 1963, TWO CARS CROSSED PATHS
on the streets of San Juan. In one, Orlando Zabala, on leave from the U.S. Army, was driving his younger sister Vera back to their parents’ house in Carolina. In the other, Roberto Clemente was cruising into town in his big white Cadillac. As the cars passed, Vera caught a brief glimpse of the great baseball star and felt a nervous flutter in her chest. She said nothing, and tried to remain expressionless, knowing that her protective brother would not approve.

A month later, after the New Year and Three Kings Day, Vera Zabala left the house to go to Landau’s drugstore on the far end of the central plaza in Carolina. She was twenty-two, a business administration graduate of the University of Puerto Rico, and an administrative assistant at GDV, the government bank. Her appearance was entrancing: statuesque, with radiant black hair, smooth coffee skin, high cheekbones, and dark, dancing eyes. On her way to the pharmacy, she noticed a car slowing and the driver looking at her. It was Clemente. Always careful to convey an all-business demeanor as she walked, Vera tried to appear even more serious, aware that she was being observed. To her surprise, when she entered the drugstore, Clemente was already there. How he had parked his car so fast and slipped inside, she would never know, but he was sitting near the counter, reading the paper with his legs crossed, a study in nonchalance. For some reason, no one seemed to be working at the pharmacy, and Vera, feeling a bit afraid, wanted to leave.