Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (37 page)

In Pittsburgh two days later, a new era began with the opening of Three Rivers Stadium. Forbes Field, with its ivy-covered wall in left, and stylish fourteen-foot Longines clock above the scoreboard, and center field so vast they stored the batting cage out there . . . Forbes Field, with its high screen at the flagpole in right, and cement-hard infield, and obstructed seats, and dingy and dank locker rooms, and tunnel rats, and Forbes Avenue trolleys, and hucksters and peanut men on Bouquet—old Forbes was obsolete. Now, near where the Monongahela and Allegheny converge to form the Ohio, here rose Three Rivers, a sleek concrete bowl with a record sixty-one turnstiles and sophisticated scoreboard and synthetic playing field and synthetic, zipperless, buttonless lightweight stretch uniforms to match—all the latest in modern artificiality. Forbes Field served the city well for more than sixty years, noted the
Pittsburgh Press.
“Here’s to the next 60 at Three Rivers Stadium.” (But they didn’t build them the way they used to—only thirty years and Three Rivers was gone.)

The Pirates were in a pennant race that July, leading the Mets and Cubs in the NL Eastern Division, but even with a solid team and a new stadium they were not attracting big crowds. On July 23 against the Atlanta Braves, they drew only 14,327 fans. One night later, the stadium was packed, 43,290 in attendance. It was not the game that brought them, but the man being honored.
July 24 was Roberto Clemente night at Three Rivers Stadium. In the crowd were several planeloads of Puerto Ricans who had been flown up for the event, many of them wearing pavas, the traditional straw hats of
Jibaros,
the island’s rural peasants. Ramiro Martínez, the Cuban-born announcer and jack-of-all-trades who had moved to San Juan in the early 1960s, and had first met Clemente when the Montreal Royals played the
Havana Sugar Kings in 1954, helped organize the ceremonies, which were bicultural in every respect, half conducted in Spanish, half in English.

There were tables of plaques and gifts, but at Clemente’s request fans who wanted to show their appreciation were asked to donate money to Children’s Hospital. Juliet Schor, his devoted young fan, wearing a body cast from her back operation, was one of the youths who took the field to receive the charitable check for the hospital. Vera and the three little boys, all wearing suits, were there, along with Doña Luisa and Don Melchor, who had turned to a psychiatrist to help him overcome his fear of flying so that he could visit Pittsburgh for the first time at age eighty-seven. His friends Carol and Carolyn came over from Kutztown, along with Carolyn’s new husband, Nevin Rauch, and sat with Stanley and Mamie Garland, Phil Dorsey, and Henry and Pearl Kantrowitz, his American extended family.

The Puerto Rican side of the ceremony began more than an hour before game time, as the park was still filling with fans. The snug, new Pirates uniforms did not flatter all who wore them, but Clemente came out looking perfect, even in their new tight-fitting synthetic clothes. His family sat on folding chairs behind him on the side of the field as Ramiro Martínez took the microphone and began the proceedings, which were being broadcast on radio and television back to Puerto Rico. He introduced the entire family. Melchor said he was very proud. Luisa said it was an honor to be in Pittsburgh with all the Puerto Ricans who came to honor Roberto. Vera said she was very touched and grateful. Robertito said his daddy was the best baseball player in the world. One by one, the Latin players, José Antonio Pagán, Orlando Peña, Manny Sanguillen, and Matty Alou, came out and embraced their friend. Then Martínez invited Clemente to speak. Clemente stood silent, hands on hips, his hat off, looking down. “Oh, Ramiro, before we get started, I’d like to send a big hug to my brothers . . .” His voice was soft, surprisingly sweet and lyrical to those who had not heard it before. He tried to continue, but choked up. Martínez, a showman never at a loss for words, filled the silence.

“That’s okay. We understand the emotion,” Martínez said. “Roberto
is reliving the last forty-eight hours. He has been nervous [with] doubts, emotions, as this moment has been approaching. This is the greatest moment of his existence. We’d like for him to say some words for us. Some words that are surrounded by tears. Men cry, but when men cry it is because their hearts are turning in happiness. And this evening, Roberto Clemente’s words for you . . .”

Little Ricky, his youngest son, had escaped from an adult’s grasp and toddled toward first base. Robertito, the oldest son, mistook his father’s tears for sadness and wondered what had gone wrong. Clemente continued, slowly.

“Ramiro, I would like to dedicate this honor to all the Puerto Rican mothers. I don’t have words to express this thankfulness. I only ask those who are watching this program and are close to their parents, ask for their blessing, and that they have each other. As those friends who are watching this program or listening to it on the radio shake each other’s hands as a sign of friendship that unites all of us Puerto Ricans. I’ve sacrificed these sixteen years, maybe I’ve lost many friendships due to the effort it takes for someone to try to do the maximum in sports and especially the work it takes for us, the Puerto Ricans, especially for the Latinos, to triumph in the big leagues. I have achieved this triumph for us the Latinos. I believe that it is a matter of pride for all of us, the Puerto Ricans as well as for all of those in the Caribbean, because we are all brothers. And I’d like to dedicate this triumph to all Puerto Rican mothers . . . and Ramiro . . . as I’ve said, for all those Puerto Rican athletes, for all of those who have triumphed and those who have not been able to. And that is why I don’t have words to express this thankfulness. And especially to see my parents, who are already old. The emotion that it gives them. And I want to send a hug to my brothers, Osvaldo, Andres, and Matino, Fafa [his niece, Rafaela], and all my friends in Puerto Rico, thank you.”

For the Pittsburgh-oriented half of the ceremony, there were more gifts, an entire yellow pickup truck full of them, and heroic words from his pal the Gunner, Bob Prince, voice of the Pirates.
¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!
And when it was over everyone rose and thunderous applause waved across the new stadium and Clemente tipped his cap in recognition. He thanked the fans again during the ball game by the way he played,
cracking two hits and making two of his trademark sliding catches, before Murtaugh took him out for another standing ovation in the eighth inning.

In the locker room afterward, reporters jostled around him as Bartirome worked on a cut on his knee.
What was going through your mind as you stood out there during the ceremonies?
he was asked. Sometimes, the honest answer is, nothing. This time, for Clemente, the heartfelt answer was, everything.

His whole life raced through his mind, he said, going back to the old house in Carolina on Road 887 and his first baseballs made of socks and bottle caps, and taking the bus to Sixto Escobar to watch Monte Irvin play, and how Roberto Marín believed in him when no one else did, and how Pancho Coimbre and other great Puerto Ricans never got the chance, and how hard he had fought over the years to be understood and recognized for who and what he was, a proud Puerto Rican. Maybe he cried, he was not ashamed to cry, he said. He was not crying from pain or disappointment. But if you knew the history of his island, the way he was brought up, the Puerto Ricans were a sentimental people, and his feelings now were about his island and all of Latin America, and how proud he felt when he stepped on the field knowing that so many people were behind him, and how lucky he was to be born twice, in a way, once in Carolina in 1934 and again in Pittsburgh when he arrived in 1955. “In a moment like this, your mind is a circular stage,” he said. “You can see a lot of years in a few minutes. You can see everything firm and you can see everything clear.”

IN BALTIMORE ON THE EVE OF THE 1971 WORLD SERIES,
Vera Clemente was deeply concerned about her husband. She had seen Roberto this sick only once before, when he was bedridden, delirious, and losing weight in the spring of 1965. Then it had taken his doctors in Puerto Rico several days to determine that he had malaria. Now the cause was obvious: food poisoning. Earlier that night, Vera, Roberto, and two of his teammates, José Antonio Pagán and Vic Davalillo, had joined a festive party of family and friends for dinner at a restaurant in nearby Fort Meade, where Vera’s brother, U.S. Army Captain Orlando Zabala, was stationed. Roberto had ordered clams, and by the time they returned downtown to the Lord Baltimore Hotel he was so sick the team doctor had the dehydrated star hooked up to an IV at his hotel bed. “I was so worried,” Vera said later. “Tomorrow is the first game of the World Series. He was so weak. I said, ‘Oh, my God, maybe he cannot play.’”

The next morning, after a troubled night, the thirty-seven-year-old Clemente was still weak but determined to play. Only his wife and a few others knew of his illness. The press was preoccupied with the latest discomforts of another Pirate, Dock Ellis, a nineteen-game winner with a sore arm but indefatigable mouth who was scheduled to start the series opener.

During the National League playoffs against the Giants, Ellis had reaffirmed his freewheeling reputation by carping about his hotel bed in San Francisco. Now, before throwing his first pitch in Baltimore, he had switched rooms three times and made headlines by saying whatever entered his mind. He had always been a free-talker, Ellis said, it
was just that no one listened until he started winning. “
I’m never sorry for anything I say,” he explained. “If you don’t say what you want in so-called America, I might as well go to Russia.” This riff was tame for Ellis, whose eccentricity was amplified by his counterculture predilections for Jimi Hendrix, greenies, dope, and acid, which he once dropped before pitching a no-hitter against San Diego. (The ball appeared to have comet tailings as it soared toward the plate, he said.) None of his beefs about hotel rooms compared with his declaration at mid-season, after he was named to the All-Star team, that he would not be chosen to start because another black pitcher, Vida Blue, was starting for the other league. (In fact, Ellis did start, and was on the mound when Oakland’s Reggie Jackson cracked a memorable early career home run off the right-field light tower at Tiger Stadium.) But in the so-called America of 1971, Dock Ellis was a kaleidoscope of color in what many thought would be a monochromatic World Series.

Pittsburgh and Baltimore were solid baseball towns, but there were no teams from New York or Los Angeles for the media machines to hype, and baseball seemed on a downward trend in any case. A Louis Harris survey released that week showed that among the major American sports, football and basketball were rising in popularity while only baseball had declined from the previous year. Baseball games took too long, people complained, and there was not enough action. The consensus in the sporting press was that Orioles versus Pirates was a one-sided matchup that would do nothing to reverse the trend. The O’s came into the series as defending champions, winners of 101 games, riding a fourteen-game winning streak that included four shutouts in the waning days of the regular season and a sweep of Oakland for the American League pennant. The Pirates, after losing to Cincinnati in the playoffs a year earlier, had finally captured the National League pennant this time by defeating the Giants, and had run up a respectable ninety-seven wins during the regular season, yet few gave them a chance against Baltimore. In place of the Murderers’ Row that the Pirates had faced in their last World Series against the slugging Yankees in 1960, this time they were going up against a fearsome quartet on the mound. Good pitching beats good hitting is the first truism of baseball, and Baltimore had superlative pitching, with four twenty-game
winners: Dave McNally, Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar, and Pat Dobson.

“Now they’ll learn about agony,” a San Francisco writer, reflecting the common wisdom, said of the Pirates after they had defeated the Giants. “Now they have to play the reigning champions of the Universe and the light and dark sides of the moon.”

Clemente entered the World Series overshadowed again. His magnificent talents as a hitter and fielder were duly acknowledged (
Right Field: Roberto is there, and what do you say about a player who can do it all?
read a position report in the
Baltimore Sun
), yet he was not at the center of the discussion. While writers quoted Dock Ellis, many Orioles talked about how much they feared Willie Stargell, who was coming off a career year of forty-eight home runs and 125 runs batted in. That Stargell had gone hitless in the playoffs against the Giants only made Baltimore fear him more. “Willie scares the hell out of me,” said catcher Elrod Hendricks. “Hitters like him don’t stay in a slump very long.” Brooks Robinson, the Baltimore third baseman who had made a lifetime’s worth of spectacular plays against Cincinnati in the last World Series, said he had watched the Pirates on television several times and was impressed by the power of Bob Robertson. He would “cheat a little,” Robinson said, and move a step or two closer to the line when the strapping young infielder came to the plate, since he tended to pull everything.

This lack of attention was exactly what Clemente needed to prepare himself for the occasion. Phil Musick, a Pittsburgh writer who had endured Clemente’s wrath and come out on the other side, respecting him, considered him “headstrong and prouder than a lion,” and always thought that his enemies “real or imagined, weren’t worth the passion he invested in them.” Perhaps they weren’t, but the key phrase was “real or imagined.” The truth is they were mostly imagined, and they were imagined for the very purpose of stirring passion. Roy McHugh, the
Pittsburgh Press
columnist, had studied Clemente for years and struggled to understand him, and concluded that he used every perceived slight to his psychological advantage. “
Anger, for Roberto Clemente, is the fuel that makes the wheels turn in his never-ending pursuit of excellence,” he reasoned. “When the supply runs low, Clemente
manufactures some more.” And so, offered another chance to show his genius to the world, here came Clemente, at age thirty-seven the oldest player in the World Series, fueling himself with the anger of an underappreciated artist. Hours before the first game, even as he recovered from food poisoning, he told some teammates not to worry, this was his moment, and he was ready for it, and he would not let them down. José Pagán heard him recite precisely what he would do to win the championship for Pittsburgh.