Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (33 page)

When the MVP votes were counted, it turned out to be a two-man contest between Koufax and Clemente. In his darkest visions, Clemente thought there was no way he could win this contest—the darling of L.A. and New York versus the forgotten man of Pittsburgh and Carolina—the American hero, pitching through pain, versus the Puerto Rican hypochondriac and goldbricker. But now, six years after he had spiraled into bitterness over finishing eighth in the 1960 balloting, a lingering hurt that was so deep he refused thereafter to wear his 1960 World Series ring, here was redemption. Koufax received 208 votes, Clemente 218. At last, he was recognized by the North American sportswriters as the Most Valuable Player in the National League.

•   •   •

You have to visit me in Puerto Rico after the season, Clemente had told his American sisters, Carolyn and Carol, or Carolina the mother and
Carolina the daughter. The mother could not get free from her job with the regional office of HUD, the federal housing agency where she worked, and was spending time with her new boyfriend, Nevin Rauch, who would soon become her husband. They decided that the daughter should go. Carol, in her senior year of high school, arrived in San Juan in mid-December 1966, during the long and joyous Christmas season, and stayed with the Clementes in the guest room at their house on the hill. She was treated like part of the family. There were two little sons now, Robertito and Luisito. The house was warm, always busy, with visitors popping in day and night. Roberto’s status on the island was higher than ever now that the mainland had recognized him as the very best, and he was constantly in demand. “He explained to me that he would be very busy, he was into so many things in the community and business,” Carol recalled. She spent most of her days with Vera, whose knowledge of English was about as limited as Carol’s rudimentary Spanish. She carried a little dictionary at her side. They spent hours in the kitchen during the day. Vera was a superb cook, but had to limit some of her recipes for her husband, who was on a protein kick. That winter he was into liver and eggs. At night, Carol and Vera would sit on a big bed in the bedroom with the two little boys and play cards and sing songs in English and Spanish.

Carol felt as though she had been reincarnated with a Spanish soul. Clemente was always talking about how much his back hurt. He would try to teach her new words in Spanish, and learn English from her, and she would want to laugh at his English because his pronunciation was awful. “But I had to be real careful because he was real sensitive to criticism. I would say, ‘Well, you’re getting there.’” He was always getting somewhere, she thought. When he had free time, Roberto piled the family and Carol into his Cadillac and drove around the island, treating it like a Jeep. They went to the beach near the bay of crabs, where he loved to collect driftwood. Then they drove to
la finca
—the farm he owned outside the village of El Verde near the exotic rainforest, El Yunque. Clemente seemed like a different person at
la finca,
totally at ease among his pigs, horses, and goats, and walking through his fields of plantain and coffee. He proudly showed Carol how he had built the farmhouse himself and had decorated the interior with bamboo.
Wherever they went, Roberto had a presence about him that amazed her, but she could see it most strongly out here in the countryside hills, the heart of his homeland. “I came back being in awe of what a humble man he was. What a regular man he was. But just so connected to the people. If children recognized him, or the most humble-looking person somewhere on a mountain hill where we were driving approached him, wherever we were, it ended in a long conversation. I never remember a moment when Roberto didn’t take the time to talk to somebody who came up to him. There never was a time when he didn’t stop. I never remember him walking away or cutting someone off. And especially if it was someone young.” Clemente among the people was an image that burned into her mind. In that setting, far from the major league stadiums, she said, “you could see him like a prophet.”

THE PIRATES TRAINER, TONY BARTIROME, THOUGHT
Roberto Clemente was a lot like his wife.
Ask him how he felt and he would tell you.
Well, I’ve got this thing with my neck.
Clemente would not dismiss the question with an evasive
fine.
He took his body seriously, and regarded questions about it with earnestness. A pregame stop at the training table was a daily appointment, another of his rituals, like not sleeping at night and complaining about sportswriters. It was his way to relax, or to avoid people he didn’t want to see, but there was always fine-tuning to be done. This mostly involved rubbing. Bartirome would massage his neck for five or six minutes, kneading out the kinks. X rays showed that some stiffness in his neck was arthritis, brought on by the injuries from the auto accident in Caguas when he was driving home to see his dying brother in 1954. After the neck work, Clemente would flip onto his stomach and have his right Achilles tendon pulled for a few minutes, then attention turned to his lower back. Often he would relax to the point of almost falling asleep on the table, then emerge from semiconsciousness calling out, “Where’s Bob? Bob?”

That would be Bob Veale, the colossal six-foot-six left-handed pitcher. Veale made the mistake of rubbing Clemente’s shoulder one afternoon, a friendly act that was followed by a good day at the plate. “From then on I had a lifetime job,” Veale remembered. “Every game I had to touch him. I had to rub his shoulder for good-luck purposes. He felt he could only have a great day if I rubbed him, and he had quite a few of those. If he said, ‘Rub hard,’ I would rub hard.” Like many ball players, Clemente had his superstitions. Some actions or totems brought good luck, some bad. He might have been wrong in
the end, but during the magical 1960 season he had insisted that the team’s Dixieland band was a jinx, especially when it followed the Pirates on the road, and he didn’t want it anywhere near him. He had lucky shirts that he would wear until the Pirates lost. And now the big hands of Bob Veale were a force for the good.

The training room was an inner sanctum for the players, but mostly it was Clemente’s lair. As much as he loved baseball, he was obsessed with the healing arts. He thought of himself as an adjunct trainer, and knew more about massage than Bartirome, a former first baseman who learned how to be a proficient trainer so that he could stay around a major league club. Whenever a teammate, coach, or friend complained of a bad back or sore joint, Clemente offered his services. In many ways, he was ahead of his time, a New Age experimentalist searching for noninvasive methods to ease pain. With his long, sensitive hands, he was especially adept at deep massages. “It was something . . . supernatural,” said his wife, Vera. “He would put pressure and say you have this or that and find the problems. He could see with his fingertips.” When Harding Peterson, a former catcher who became director of scouting, complained of a sore lower back one night at training camp, Clemente, though nattily dressed for dinner, retrieved oils from his room, took off his suit coat, rolled up his sleeves, and went to work, rubbing Peterson down for twenty minutes. He often carried liniments in his duffel bag for just such emergencies.

Another tool of his trade seemed straight out of science fiction, an ultrashock device that reportedly went haywire and burned a red welt into coach Clyde King’s rear end. “It looked like some kind of cross between a cattle prod and flyswatter with goddamn sparks flying all over the place,” recalled pitcher Steve Blass. But Clemente could also use something as simple as his bat, which he employed to beneficial effect on Les Banos, the team photographer. Banos once complained of a stiff lower back before a game in Montreal after he had endured two cross-country flights within twenty-four hours, and Clemente eased the pain by adeptly manipulating his Frenchy Uhalt model Louisville Slugger into the little Hungarian photographer’s pressure points, lending new meaning to the description of him as a magician with a bat in his hands.

Over the years, as Clemente sought help for chronic pain in his back and spine, he became a devotee of chiropractics. His interest in the practice went back to 1957, his third season in the majors, when his pain was so bad that he considered retiring. During a road trip to St. Louis, he visited the Logan College of Chiropractics, where the founder Vinton Logan took X rays showing the arthritic condition in Clemente’s neck and relieved the pain. From then on, Clemente stopped in for treatment whenever the Pirates were in St. Louis, and began looking for chiropractors in San Juan and Pittsburgh as well. He learned their techniques so thoroughly that he started to think of himself as a member of their profession. Vera recalled that he had shelves of books on chiropractics. “He was a chiropractor without a license,” she said. “He worked on many patients who would have gone to surgeons.” As he began to consider his future after baseball, he often talked of two parallel dreams: One was to run a free sports city for the children of Puerto Rico; the other was to set up a lucrative chiropractic vacation spa on the ocean outside San Juan.

When he thought sportswriters mistook his health obsession for hypochondria, Clemente would explode. But inside the clubhouse, he learned to go with it. Early in the 1967 season, his teammates noticed a subtle change; he could rib and be ribbed with no hard feelings. Year by year after that, he eased more to the center of the locker room fun. His nickname for Bartirome was Dago. “I’m a dago, too,” he would insist, pointing out that Clemente was also an Italian surname. “I don’t know whether it was the personalities on the team or that he had matured and felt it was all right to put his guard down and enjoy it and be silly with us, but he seemed to loosen up,” Blass observed. It was likely some of both, and also the fact that with the MVP award in 1966 he felt some measure of deserved recognition. In any case, it was a sign that he finally felt comfortable with the role of team leader.

Bartirome once heard Clemente tell a reporter that he stayed in shape by lifting weights and working out at the gym three hours a day during the off-season. It was Roberto’s way of joking; not a word of it was true. His physique was a wonder of genetics, not an artificial creation. He was careful about what he ate. He loaded up on vegetables, was always looking for a new fruit shake concoction, and took great
pride in knowing when to push away from the table. He never lifted weights and his workouts during the off-season amounted to little more than walking the beach in search of driftwood, playing some more baseball, shampooing the rugs, and mowing the lawn. Yet his body changed imperceptibly from the time he was eighteen. At five-foot-eleven, his weight barely fluctuated between 182 and 185 pounds. His biceps and calves had sinewy muscularity yet he was not muscle-bound. “He was a sculpture. He could have posed for Greek statues,” said photographer Banos. “What you saw with him was archaeology. He was a perfect model. Not an ounce of extra fat. All the right muscle. A perfect figure for a man of any age.”

Because of his persistent aches and occasional injuries, misconceptions surrounded Clemente. Some thought he had the sort of tightly wound body that was perpetually on the verge of breaking down from a pulled hamstring. Nothing was further from reality. Clemente had the ability to go full speed without even warming up. He was notorious for lingering in the locker room until the last moment. If a game started at eight, he would scuttle out of the clubhouse at 7:58:30, and go right to work. “Twenty seconds before the game he would go out to the field,” Bartirome said. “He never did any sprints; no warming up. And there was something about him, that he did, that I could not believe any man could do without hurting himself seriously. In the first inning, he [might] chop a ball off the plate and run to first full blast and then five feet beyond first he would stop—completely. A dead stop. I never saw a ballplayer do that. He would not gradually stop. It was amazing.”

•   •   •

For Clemente, 1968 started out troubled and deteriorated. In February, after winning his fourth batting championship the previous season, he was trying to climb between two patios built into the hillside of his home in Río Piedras when a steel railing collapsed and he fell, injuring his shoulder. He reported to spring training late and hurting, without telling Pirates officials what had happened. A doctor in Puerto Rico had suggested that he rest the shoulder for several months, he told friends, but he felt compelled to play, if only to prove to doubters that
he was not jaking it. “I shouldn’t have been playing in spring training,” he said later. “I should have taken care of my shoulder.”

The injury haunted him all year, and he was also slowed by a bout with the flu, and the result was his worst season of the decade, which in his case meant that he batted
only
.291. Following seasons of .314, .351, .312, .320, .339, .329, .317, and .357—with four batting titles and an MVP award in the mix—an average of .291 was deemed a miserable slump. But not only was Clemente subpar physically, he was struggling during a season that became known as the Year of the Pitcher, when all hitters were having difficulty. Only five National League players batted over .300 in 1968, and Clemente’s average actually ranked as tenth best in the league. The twenty-fifth best hitter in the league was Richie Allen at .263. Meanwhile, the composite earned-run average for National League pitchers was 2.98, a record low for the modern era. Bob Gibson, only a year after having his lower right leg broken by a vicious Clemente line drive, pitched the most unhittable year in baseball history, finishing with an inhuman 1.12 earned-run average. Juan Marichal threw thirty complete games that season, and Don Drysdale pitched 58.2 consecutive scoreless innings.

That Clemente would have an off-year in those circumstances was understandable. In every respect, with the Pirates regressing to a losing record, 80–82, it was a season he wished to forget. In conversations with Vera, for the first time he broached the idea of retiring, though he always added “in a year or two.”
One nagging concern was the amount of flying a major league baseball player endured. During the long season, the airplane becomes a second home, but it was never a comfortable one for Clemente. In 1968 alone, the Pirates flew from Pittsburgh to Houston to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Pittsburgh to St. Louis to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia to Atlanta to Pittsburgh to New York to Chicago to Cincinnati to Pittsburgh to Los Angeles to Houston to San Francisco to Pittsburgh to St. Louis to Philadelphia to New York to Chicago to Pittsburgh to Atlanta to Pittsburgh to Cincinnati to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Houston to Pittsburgh to Cincinnati to St. Louis to Atlanta to Pittsburgh to New York to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh to Chicago and back to Pittsburgh. They were in the air for more than ninety hours covering 35,080 miles.