Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (45 page)

Clemente eventually found a ham radio operator who was picking up detailed reports of the earthquake. A team of radio operators from San Juan to Chicago to Caracas to the State Department shortwave station in Washington had formed a link with a Managuan identifying himself as “Enrique,” who was broadcasting in Spanish from a mobile unit inside a truck as he drove around the remains of the city. There were still minor tremors, Enrique reported. It looked like five or six thousand people were dead. Maybe a hundred thousand homeless. Two of the three major hospitals were destroyed, along with the presidential palace, the newspaper offices of
La Prensa
and
Novedades,
the U.S. embassy, and two of the three major hotels, the Balmoral and Gran. The main fire station had collapsed, trapping essential equipment and making it more difficult to fight the fires. Even a giant statue of Somoza’s father had toppled from its pedestal. “People run through the streets like zombies, with terror. Big buildings are cracked,” Enrique reported over his mobile radio. “There is blood on people’s faces, legs, and arms as they leave their houses. We have never seen a catastrophe like this.”

What did people need? Clemente asked. Everything, was the answer—food, clothing, medical supplies.

The disaster relief effort was underway. At seven-thirty that morning, a telex from Ambassador Shelton requesting immediate medical help had crossed the desk of Colonel Maurice Berbary at the United States Southern Command in the Panama Canal Zone. While larger tactical hospital units were readied to fly in from Fort Hood in Texas and MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa the following day, Berbary had the first forty-six-man medical team loaded inside a mammoth C-130 and on its way to Managua before noon. The Red Cross and other volunteer groups were traveling to the devastated capital from Mexico City, South America, the United States, and even Europe. Only a year earlier, in the wake of a humanitarian crisis in Biafra, a small group of French doctors had formed a new medical assistance organization called Doctors Without Borders, and upon hearing of the Managua earthquake they went into action for the first time.

It was right then, twelve hours after the temblor, when many were coming to Managua’s rescue, that Howard Hughes made his escape.
Somoza had hoped that Hughes might somehow assist in the recovery. But as soon as the general passed word along to his guest that the runways at Las Mercedes International appeared undamaged, Hughes and his entourage left directly for the airport. When they got there, an aide asked a local rental car agent, who was also an amateur radio operator, to send a message to Florida. After some trouble with the equipment, a second ham radio operator was found, and the cryptic message he sent, as he recalled it later, went like this:
We’re okay. Leaving on Lear jet. Destroy all records and x-ray. Proceed immediately to Miami. When arrive in Miami call 31 Los Angeles for ultimate destination.
And with that, Howard Hughes fled Managua at its time of greatest need.
American soldiers arriving from the Canal Zone in the first C-130 remembered seeing the private jet take off just after they landed.

On that first long day of the Managua disaster,
the attention of President Nixon at his compound in Key Biscayne and millions of sports fans around the United States was focused on something else: the first round of playoff games in the National Football League. Interest was especially intense in Pittsburgh, where the resurgent Steelers were hosting the Oakland Raiders at Three Rivers Stadium. The Steelers had been perennial losers, known for getting beat and beating the hell out of the other team at the same time, but now, for the first time since 1947, they were playing in the postseason. After calling Henry Kissinger in Washington, D.C., Nixon settled in to eat lunch and watch the game in the living room of his vacation house at 516 Bay Lane. It was a defensive struggle with little action until the end. With a minute and thirteen seconds remaining, the Oakland quarterback, Ken Stabler, ran thirty yards for a score to put the Raiders ahead 7–6. Then, with Pittsburgh’s last gasp, came one of the most memorable plays in NFL history.

Fourth and ten, ball on the Steelers’ forty, another sixty yards to score. Twenty-two seconds left. Art Rooney, Pittsburgh’s owner, resigned to a loss, was taking the elevator from his box down to the clubhouse to deliver a consolation speech. Bill Nunn Jr., the former sports editor of the
Pittsburgh Courier,
now a personnel man for the Steelers, thought the game was over and sat in the team box cussing out the defense for the breakdown that allowed Stabler to score. Terry
Bradshaw, the third-year quarterback, called the play: 66 Option.
Bradshaw back and looking, looking for someone to throw to . . . fires it downfield . . . It’s caught in the air
 . . . The pass was intended for the halfback Frenchy Fuqua, but Oakland’s fearsome safety, Jack Tatum, arrived with a wallop just as the pass got there, and the ball ricocheted back several yards and was snatched out of thin air at ankle level by rookie running back Franco Harris, who swept across the field and down the sideline for the winning score.

Myron Cope, the Pittsburgh sports figure who had written the seminal story on Clemente’s aches and pains for
Sports Illustrated
in 1966, was now the color announcer for Steelers football. He had left the broadcast booth with two minutes to go and was on the field, standing behind the corner of the end zone as Franco thundered toward him. After conducting postgame interviews in the bedlam of the Steelers locker room, Cope went to dinner and then drove to the WTAE-TV studios to write a commentary for the eleven o’clock news. Pecking at his typewriter, he took a call from a woman named Sharon Levosky, who said she was celebrating with a group of delirious Steelers fans at the Interlude bar downtown. One of her friends at the bar, Michael Ord, had thought up a name for Franco’s miracle catch—the Immaculate Reception—and told her to call Cope to spread the word. Cope thought it was a phrase well worth appropriating, so he wrote it into his commentary, and it caught on from there. Forever after, the Immaculate Reception meant only one thing to any pro football fan—perhaps the most stunning last play in pro football history.

If one were to point to the moment when pro football permanently surpassed baseball as the sporting passion of Pittsburgh, when the Steelers became a winning rather than losing tradition, that might be it. The Immaculate Reception transcended even Maz’s home run in the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series. It was the talk of western Pennsylvania all weekend and all week through Christmas and the days leading up to the next game against the Miami Dolphins on New Year’s Eve. The disaster in the rubble surrounding the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Managua seemed far, far away.

All day long Clemente had been tracking the ham radio reports
from Managua and thinking about what he could do to help. He called his friend Osvaldo Gil, the amateur baseball president who had been at his side all those days in Nicaragua. “What should we do?” he asked. Before Gil could answer, Clemente added, “
I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going to do something about it.” Luis Ferré, in his final week as governor of Puerto Rico, and Rafael Hernández Colón, the governor-elect, had both issued public expressions of sorrow and promised to help Nicaragua. That night, Roberto and Vera went to a nightclub he owned, El Carretero, in Carolina, then drove downtown to the San Jeronimo Hotel for a banquet at which he was to receive another award. He was tired, but felt an obligation to go. Vera wore the elegantly embroidered dress that Roberto had bought for her in Managua. Ruth Fernández, the singer and political activist who had just been elected to the Puerto Rican Senate, was there, along with Luis Vigoreaux, a local television personality. They huddled with the Clementes to talk about the temblor, and Vigoreaux suggested that as well-known figures in the community they should take prominent roles in the relief effort. Clemente, as a national hero, would lead the way. What came to be called the Comité Roberto Clemente Pro-Nicaragua was born.

The next morning, a Sunday, Christmas Eve,
President Nixon took breakfast at eight forty-five in his Key Biscayne bungalow. The morning papers were full of reports about the devastation in Nicaragua. According to the daily diary kept by his secretaries, Nixon began making long-distance calls as soon as he finished breakfast. There were two people in Managua that he especially wanted to reach. First he tried General Somoza at his residence, but the call was not completed. Then, two minutes later, according to the diary, “the President telephoned long distance to Howard R. Hughes, President of the Hughes Tool and Manufacturing Company, in Managua, Nicaragua.” That call, too, went unanswered, since Hughes by then was long gone. A half hour later, the President finally got through to Somoza. His concerns were personal and political. Nixon had first met Somoza in 1955 when he was Vice President and toured Central America. Sixteen years later, as President, he had hosted Somoza at a White House dinner. The general had arrived with six boxes of cigars for Nixon and a gold lapel pin
for the First Lady. Nixon, in his toast, had congratulated Somoza for “a quarter-century of service to the cause of peace and freedom.” Now, in his call to the disaster zone, Nixon was reassured to learn that Somoza and his family were safe. But he was worried that chaos in the aftermath of the natural disaster might lead to civil disturbances and give an opening to Somoza’s opponents. His instinctive fear was that the tumult might lead to a Communist uprising.

Along with medical teams and combat engineers, Nixon would dispatch a battalion of paratroopers to keep order in the Nicaraguan capital.

At the White House, the President’s military adviser on the National Security staff, General Alexander M. Haig Jr., was receiving hourly updates on Nicaragua. At five-fifteen that morning, the first of fourteen C-141s, departing in one-hour intervals, left MacDill Air Force Base with medical supplies, equipment for a field hospital, and emergency communications. The planes, Haig was informed, were to bring back “some one hundred dependents of American personnel and nonessential staff members as well as those nonofficial Americans who want to be evacuated.” People everywhere were doing what they could to help. In Atlanta, workers at an Army depot spent the day filling more than four thousand five-gallon jugs with water. Fire stations in New Orleans became collection centers for food and supplies. The Associated Press noted that a church congregation in Mountainview, Ohio, “donated its entire Christmas Eve offering.” The offices of Lanica, the Nicaraguan national airlines, served as Red Cross relief headquarters in Miami, whose large Latin population responded generously to the crisis, some people coming in with their Christmas turkeys and pigs.

In San Juan, Clemente and Ruth Fernández made a public plea for assistance on WAPA-TV, getting air time between telecasts of horse races at El Comandante Racetrack in Carolina. They announced that the parking lot of Hiram Bithorn Stadium, the winter league ballpark for San Juan and Santurce, would be used as the collection point for aid for the entire Christmas Day. By then, Clemente had developed a direct ham radio connection to a hospital in Masaya, thirteen miles from Managua, and was told how much they needed medicines and
X-ray equipment. Masaya itself had been hard hit. The size of the town, known for its handicrafts, had nearly doubled to more than sixty thousand because of the exodus from the capital. Many houses there had red flags hanging from windows indicating there were survivors inside. Conditions could not be more urgent. Clemente decided to lease a plane to get supplies to Nicaragua faster.

On Christmas morning,
Pedro Chamorro circled Managua on his motorcycle, weaving his way through what he called the rubble zone. No one was thinking about the religious holiday, he noted. “However, on the sidewalks, patios and parks of the fallen city, those who were still together shared their things—and the earth stopped shaking.” His city, the editor of
La Prensa
observed, seemed “crushed by a sort of incomprehensible peace.” Nicaraguan troops were stationed at street corners in the downtown section, their concentrations most obvious outside banks and government buildings. The stench of death was overwhelming. On some blocks, hundreds of mutilated bodies still littered the streets and many more remained trapped under debris. “We are fighting against time,” said Jorge Cogna, a Red Cross volunteer from Mexico City. Health officials were concerned about the spread of typhoid and other diseases if the dead were not recovered and buried soon. In contrast to the sharing that Chamorro saw, General Somoza thought the best policy was to instruct all service agencies to stop feeding the poor and hungry in the center of town; it was, he argued, a matter of public health, the only way to force people to obey his evacuation orders and leave the dangerous precincts. A six o’clock curfew was imposed, but late into the night the old city echoed with gunfire. Some looting had begun, people walking off with whatever they could find in the rubble. Somoza now issued another order. He directed his civil guardsmen to shoot looters on sight.

Dawn on the morning of December 26 “broke with the arrival of parachutists,” Chamorro recalled. They were U.S. troops dropped in from Panama to supplement Somoza’s guard. But the tension only increased. Chamorro, in his lyrical style, described “the thousands and thousands of hands extended toward emptiness, asking for the food, which was kept in the same place as the limousines . . . under custody of the government tanks. They didn’t give out the food. They didn’t
give out the food.” The paradox grew starker; more aid, less help. Chamorro was amazed at how the “boxes of medicine and food continued to arrive at the airport and the tent hospitals waved flags from all countries.” Yet as aid was coming, residents were leaving. “Processions of people left the city from the three roads, barbed wire stretched around the most destroyed parts and the sounds of dynamite blasts could be heard smashing walls and sinking rooftops. Buses, trucks, small carts loaded with paintings, dressers, scissors, suitcases, trunks passed over the ashes and rocks looking for an exit.” A massive white tent city was arising on the edge of town. At the general cemetery, they dug a mass grave and buried the first thousand bodies. Most of the old city had been declared a contaminated area. U.S. Army engineers, following a block by block grid system, began systematically clearing the ground in the hundred-degree heat. Demolition crews used bulldozers and dynamite to level anything that had managed to stand after the quake. Lime was spread over the rubble. For the first time, on that day after Christmas, vultures circled overhead, drawn by the odor of death.