Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (26 page)

“No, no, don’t leave,” Clemente said. “The owner will be back in a few minutes.”

Vera kept silent, pretending she was searching for something on the shelves.

“Are you from Carolina?” Clemente asked. “Because I never saw you before. Never!”

“Yes, sir,” Vera answered.

Clemente pressed forward with his interrogation. “I cannot believe you are from Carolina because I never saw you before. What is your last name?”

“Zabala,” she said.

“Zabala.” Clemente paused. “Are you related to Rafael Zabala?” Rafael Zabala was a baseball player for the Caguas Criollos. He was Vera’s distant cousin.

“Yes, we’re related, but we don’t know each other,” she said.

Oscar Landau, the pharmacist, finally returned, and Vera was able to buy what she needed and leave. As soon as she was gone, Clemente pumped Landau for more information. Who was this striking young woman? Could Landau help set up a date? That would be difficult, Landau said. Her father was very strict. You never see her around town. She is working at a bank, and when she comes home you don’t see her at the movies, at the plaza, anywhere. If you want to see her, you have to go to her house.

That made Clemente more determined. He contacted a friend from Carolina, Natin Vizcarrando, son of the poet Fortunato Vizcarrando, who lived near the Zabalas. Any chance for an introduction? That would be difficult, Natin said. Her family protected her like a jewel. Clemente next called Mercedes Velasquez, who lived two houses from the Zabalas and taught at the high school. Everyone in town respected the Velasquez family. After work one evening, Mrs. Velasquez summoned Vera, her former student, to her house and said, “Vera, Roberto Clemente is driving me crazy. He is calling me twenty times a day. He wants to meet you.”

“One of these days,” Vera said. She had a sense already that Roberto Clemente would be the love of her life, but she was afraid to rush it. He was the famous one; better to see how much this mattered to him.

A week or so later, Mrs. Velasquez came to the Zabala house with an invitation. Some friends were going with Clemente to watch him play
a baseball game for the San Juan Senadores at Hiram Bithorn Stadium, and they were wondering if Vera and her older sister, Ana Maria, would like to come. (The new Bithorn stadium, named in honor of the first Puerto Rican major leaguer, had opened in Hato Rey in 1962, replacing Sixto Escobar.) Ana Maria, who never married, was even stricter than their parents, and immediately suspicious. The teacher had never asked them to a baseball game before, why now? Ana Maria said she didn’t want to go, but since it was with a group, and the outing seemed harmless, it was decided that Vera could attend. On the day of the game, Clemente came to pick her up in his white Cadillac. Vera wanted to sit in back, but Roberto insisted that she ride in front. She kept quiet as they drove toward the stadium.

“Don’t you talk?” asked Clemente.

“No,” she said. “I don’t talk much.”

The intricate courtship had only just begun.

At the stadium, Clemente excused himself and went to the locker room while Mrs. Velasquez led the group to reserved seats below the grandstands. Clemente’s teenage nephew, Paco, was there, and it was obvious that Clemente had assigned him to look after Vera. Every few minutes, he would ask, “Do you want something to eat or drink?” Once, Clemente emerged from the dugout with a teammate, looked into the stands, and pointed out Vera. That was all he did on the field; the game was rained out.

When Clemente and the others started making plans to go to a restaurant, Vera said she had to return home. It was three in the afternoon, Clemente argued. They could go and still get her home in plenty of time. “No, no, no,” she said. “My parents will be listening on the radio and know that it was postponed.” Her father, Flor Zabala, was a big Senadores fan, though the rest of the family rooted for the Santurce Cangrejeros. Vera herself knew little about baseball; she had not followed winter ball or Clemente’s career in Pittsburgh. But she knew she had to go home. They drove back to Carolina, where she told her parents that the game was rained out and that the group was gathering at Mrs. Velasquez’s house, where she would like to join them. When she got there, everyone was circled around Roberto Clemente in the living room, listening as he went on and on about his bad back and stiff neck.

Orlando Zabala, the Army sergeant, came home at about this time looking for his sister. “Where’s Verín?” he asked, using her diminutive nickname. Sister Ana said she had gone to the Senadores game but it got rained out and now she was at her old teacher’s house with the ballplayer Roberto Clemente. Orlando drove around the block and parked his car on the street outside Mrs. Velasquez’s front window. Vera noticed him, excused herself, and quietly stepped outside. “I’ll give you five minutes to get back home,” he told her.

At the bank the next day, Vera picked up the ringing telephone and it was Clemente on the other end, asking whether she would like to go to lunch. The sound of his voice made her anxious. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m busy. Maybe some other time.” And she hung up on him.

A few days later, the persistent Clemente turned to his niece Rafaela to make the call. Fafa, as she was known, was so nice that Vera could not think up an excuse and accepted the invitation to lunch. Somehow, word spread through the bank about the date with the famous ballplayer and coworkers teased her all the next morning.
Vera, it’s ten-thirty! Vera, it’s eleven!
At noon, they left their desks to get a look. Vera persuaded one woman to stay back and walk to the lobby with her. “And there he was, all dressed up. A nice suit,” she recalled. “And then he sent for his car. He had the white Cadillac. I was so nervous. He opened the car door for me. The Cadillacs in those days were very wide, and I pushed against the door to be as far away from him as possible.”

Lunch was at the San Juan Hilton, on the terrace, and Clemente did most of the talking, spending an hour to say in various ways that he wanted to visit Vera at her home and meet her parents. She kept saying that she wasn’t sure; they were very strict, very mean. When talking to him, she used the formal pronoun
usted,
rather than
tú.

A bouquet of flowers came for her at the bank the next day. They went to lunch again, and a third time, and then Clemente had to leave with the Senadores for the 1964 InterAmerican baseball winter league World Series, which was being played in Managua. This was Clemente’s first visit to Nicaragua, the trip where a fan in the right-field stands threw a garrabo lizard onto the grass and made him jump in fright.

When he returned home to Puerto Rico, he took Vera to the Hilton terrace again, and this time brought out a surprise box.

“I don’t even know you,” Vera said when she opened the box and saw a ring.

He just wanted to make certain that the ring fit, Clemente said. And now he had to meet her parents. She relented, and the meeting was arranged.

As it turned out, the fathers knew each other, Flor Zabala and Melchor Clemente. They had both worked in the sugarcane industry, and it had been Flor, long ago, who had been sent from the hospital in Carolina to Central Victoria to tell Melchor that his daughter Anairis had died of burns. Melchor was known as something of a character in Carolina, and Roberto tried to break the tension with Vera’s father by telling a few jokes at his old man’s expense. There was a joke about Don Melchor in the bathtub, and another about him watching a ball game. Vera eavesdropped nervously from the next room. Roberto had stationed his niece Fafa in a car down the street in case he had to run. Finally, after Clemente had exhausted his routine of lame father jokes, Mr. Zabala reproached him.

“I don’t know what you’re doing here,” he said. “You are a famous person, a famous baseball player. And I’m sure you know girls more beautiful than Vera and with more money. We are a very humble family.”

“You are right,” Clemente answered. “I can walk down to the corner and probably get ten girls. But I don’t care. The one I love is here.”

The conversation then turned to practical negotiation, with the strict father and earnest suitor now bargaining over visiting arrangements like two owners trying to work out a season’s schedule. Mr. Zabala set precise times when Clemente could visit his daughter. Twice a week, before sundown. Clemente pleaded for more, noting that he had to leave to play ball in the States in a few weeks. No way, said the old man. Clemente brought up the wedding and all the plans that had to be made. No reason to rush, said Vera’s father. No hurry for weddings here.

There were more lunches and visits twice a week, and once Clemente overstayed his allotted time on a Sunday morning and Mr.
Zabala expressed his displeasure by loudly thumping his Bible down on a table when he got back from church. Soon enough, the ballplayer was gone, off to Fort Myers and spring training. He wrote Vera every night from his room at Pirate City, the dormitory the team bought so that all the players, black and white, could stay together. There was so much work to do to plan a wedding, Clemente wrote. Come to the States so that we can talk more about it.

•   •   •

Time was of the essence to Roberto Clemente. In those first months of courtship, when Vera thought she hardly knew him, he told her that he felt an internal clock for everything in his life—playing baseball, starting a family, fulfilling his nascent dream of a sports city for poor Puerto Rican children. Life was a fever; no time to waste.

Ten years had passed since he had autographed his first Louisville Slugger at the 1954 training camp with the Montreal Royals. Where was he now in his baseball rise? Further along as a player than leader. He was only twenty-nine, yet a nine-year veteran of the major leagues, and though it had been slow in coming his status as a first-class talent was now firmly established. He was the right fielder with the golden arm, and the only question about his batting was how many points over .300 he would finish each season. He fell to .312 in 1962, then went up to .320 in 1963. The Pirates were still in transition from the team that had won the World Series only four seasons earlier. Groat and Hoak were gone, and Law, Friend, and Face were pitching in the late shadows of their careers. Maz was an anchor at second, and young Wilver Stargell, playing left field, was about to blossom, but Clemente was the undisputed star of the team. His influence in the clubhouse was still evolving.

To Steve Blass, a rookie pitcher from the hamlet of Falls Village, Connecticut, the 1964 Pirates were like “a wonderful baseball school—if you wanted to learn something, keep your mouth shut.” Law, Friend, Face, Maz, Stargell, Clemente—but Clemente stood apart from the rest. Even more than Danny Murtaugh, the manager, he was the person to whom you had to prove yourself, but he also seemed more intimidating. “I didn’t dare go near Clemente,” Blass
recalled. “He was this rather stern, imposing, all-work, very professional figure. I said to myself, ‘If I’m going to validate myself here I better make sure he knows I’m capable and not just some asshole kid coming up.’”

Blass knew about Clemente’s skills, especially his fearsome throwing arm, long before he ever saw him play. As pitchers moved up the Pirates’ minor league system on their way to the majors, they were given special tutoring on what to do if there was a base hit to right field with nobody out. In that situation, they were instructed to run toward the first-base dugout and plant themselves about twenty-five feet behind the first baseman on a line with the right fielder. Why back up first on a single to the outfield? The coaches pounded in the answer: Because when you get to the big leagues, Clemente’s out there in right. With that gun of his, he’s likely to throw behind the runner.

First base that year was manned mostly by another young Pirate, Donn Clendenon, a lanky athlete who played basketball at Morehouse College and considered baseball his third best sport, even behind football. Clendenon’s father had helped teach Roy Campanella how to catch and had “pushed baseball down the throat” of his son so much that he played the game more out of obligation than love. In the field for the Pirates, Clendenon had to remain constantly on guard for those rifle throws behind the runner, and he was both awed and annoyed by Clemente’s tremendous arm. The ball would come in low and screaming, and if it took a short hop, Clendenon said, “it would just eat me alive.” In a different way from Blass, he also felt that Clemente in the early years was somewhat apart from the team. The six-foot-four first sacker had been reporting to spring training with the Pirates since 1960, though he didn’t make the final roster that year and only began getting significant playing time in 1962 before becoming a starter in 1963. But during that period he thought that Clemente, as the team’s black star, could have been more nurturing of him and other young black players. “When I got there, initially, he didn’t come to my assistance,” Clendenon said in retrospect. “I just thought he could have done more. He kept kind of a low profile.”

Clendenon was only a year younger than Clemente, born in the summer of 1935, yet if baseball lifetimes are measured in seven-year
cycles, it had taken him a full baseball lifetime longer than Clemente to make the majors. He got a late start for the best of reasons, he was a college graduate, but after signing with Pittsburgh in 1958, he felt that his rise was slowed for the worst reason—a racial quota. “After two or three years, I found that the Pirates had a two-person quota [of minority players]—Roberto Clemente and a Spanish-speaking roommate. It was evident,” Clendenon insisted later. The second black Pirate would be either Roman Mejias, a Cuban, or Joe Christopher, from the Virgin Islands, Clendenon said. If this was not precisely true, the statistics were close enough to explain why Clendenon could have felt that way. At various times during the seasons, the Pirates had five black players in 1958, six in 1959, six in 1960, and eight in 1961—but in each of those years only Clemente and one other position player, either Mejias or Christopher, were on the squad all season or played in sixty or more games. The others, for the most part, were up for little more than baseball’s proverbial cup of coffee in September.