Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (50 page)

“Nine sixty-four, Happy New Year, sir,” responded the Eastern pilot.

At nine-twenty the DC-7 started rolling down Runway 7.

Juan Reyes, an airport security officer, happened to be watching.
The plane didn’t seem to have the necessary speed to take off, he thought, and “by the sound of the motors it looked like it was making much effort.”

Gilberto Quiles, a cleaner for Pan Am, sensed that the plane was in trouble as it rumbled slowly down the runway.

Antonio Ríos, the Eastern employee, noticed how the plane kept rolling down the strip, six thousand, seven thousand, eight thousand feet. As it reached the end of the runway, Ríos heard several loud backfires about five seconds apart on the left wing.

Rafael Delgado-Cintron was near Ríos in the Eastern cargo area. “They were about at the end of the runway . . . I hear like a . . . three backfires . . . changing engine noise and a very big explosion. Then silence.”

At the far end of the runway, nearly nine thousand feet from where the takeoff roll began, the plane struggled into the air. Witnesses on the ground could no longer see it after it barely cleared the palm trees at the eastern edge of the airport. From his control tower perch, Cleaveland noticed that the DC-7 was not gaining altitude as it flew about a mile past Punta Maldonado and then banked to the north and out over the ocean. At that point, by his estimate, the plane was no more than two hundred feet above water. It appeared to be descending.

The radio scratched. “Tower, this is five hundred alpha echo coming back around.”

Cleaveland could not hear the transmission. “Five hundred . . . uh . . . alpha echo, say again.”

Nothing but silence. McHale, tracking on radar, watched as N500AE curved north and then suddenly disappeared from the Brite One display screen.

•   •   •

When the incoming Eastern flight arrived from New York on the passenger side of the airport earlier that evening, Vera was at the gate waiting for her friends Carolyn and Nevin Rauch and their daughters Carol and Sharon.
The Rauches were delighted and surprised to see her, considering how late their plane had been and how busy the Clementes were with the earthquake relief effort. When they asked about Roberto, Vera said he was probably halfway to Nicaragua. But he would be back the next day if there was no trouble with Somoza, and they would have a great celebration when he returned.

Vera was a warm woman with a contagious laugh and a self-deprecating nature that put people at ease. One of the little jokes she shared with friends was trying to find the right key on her key chain. There were so many keys, for various doors and security systems and gates and she always had to try a few before she found the right one. When they reached the house in Río Piedras, they could hear the telephone ringing as Vera fiddled with the keys. By the time they got inside, the ringing had stopped. “I wonder if that was Roberto,” Vera said.

Carolyn and Nevin were hungry and wanted to take Vera out to eat. She was tired, and feeling out of sorts, but they thought it would be good for her. Carolyn called around and found a seafood restaurant that was serving late. Vera agreed to go, but asked that they stop first at the earthquake relief headquarters at Plaza Las Americas. Something told her that she should be there in Roberto’s absence. “I felt the responsibility on my shoulders,” she said later. It was raining. After visiting the headquarters in Hato Rey and eating dinner at El Pescador in Santurce, they drove to the Zabala house in Carolina.

The boys were asleep. Robertito fussed before going to bed.
“Abuela,
why is Daddy leaving?” he had said to his grandmother. “That plane will crash.” Robertito had been anxious for days. One of the last things he had done before they took him away from his parents’ house the day before was to sneak into the dressing area behind their bedroom and look in the little dresser drawer divider where his dad usually kept plane tickets. Robertito never liked it when his father flew away, and often tried to hide the tickets in a futile effort to keep him at home. This time there had been no tickets. He had warned his father not to leave, and now his premonition was stronger. Mrs. Zabala told him not to be foolish, everything would be fine. But later, before Vera and her friends arrived, she was overcome by an odd sensation. It felt like her heart was going around in a circle of sadness. She went into the kitchen and cried. Something bad is happening, she thought, but
she didn’t say anything. Nearby, at his house on Calle Nicolas Aguayo, Melchor Clemente was also haunted by dark feelings. He had had a dream about Momen.

The radio was on at the Zabala house, but it was only background noise, no one was listening. The room was full of people talking. Vera, her mother, her brother Orlando, and his wife. Neighbors. Nevin and Carolyn Rauch and the daughters. A few times Vera thought she heard an announcer say the name Roberto Clemente, but that was nothing out of the ordinary; he was in the news every day for his relief work. The telephone rang constantly. Carol, now fluent in Spanish, answered it once. There was music blaring in the background, and the connection was bad, but she thought she heard something about a plane crash. By the time she handed the phone to Orlando, the caller had hung up. One of Vera’s close friends, the godmother to her youngest son, Ricky, called three times. She seemed tentative, evasive, asking how Vera was, then hanging up. The Navarros, Roberto’s friends from Carolina, rang the doorbell and paid a visit. They took seats in the living room and didn’t talk. It was as though everyone was expecting Vera to know something.

Then Roberto’s niece Fafa called. She was coughing, crying. “Are you listening to the news?” she asked Vera. Something about a crash of the airplane going to Nicaragua. At first, Vera was disbelieving, but then Carol took the phone. When word spread through the room the reaction was the same. It couldn’t be true. Roberto’s plane would have been arriving in Managua by now. “We all said, ‘This can’t be true! This can’t be true!’” Carolyn Rauch remembered. Vera’s sister-in-law called the airport and got the first sketchy confirmation. It was a cargo plane with five people bound for Nicaragua. In the far bedroom, Robertito heard his mother’s cry and feared the worst.

Vera grabbed her car keys and rushed out the door, followed by Nevin, Carolyn, and Carol. They didn’t want her to drive, but she insisted. She knew the way to Roberto’s parents’ house in El Comandante.

Matino Clemente, Roberto’s brother, had been at his father-in-law’s house when he heard the news on the radio. He looked outside toward Isla Verde and saw lights flaring in the night sky. He and his brother
Osvaldo reached their parents’ house before Vera got there. Melchor and Luisa were asleep.
Matino woke his father and took him outside to break the news. The old man was devastated, but not surprised. He had dreamed this, he said. Luisa eventually came out of bed and noticed all the people in her house. What’s going on? Matino told her it was a
Parranda,
a spontaneous house call during the holiday season. Then where is the music? Matino huddled with Osvaldo and they decided they had to tell her. She listened without saying a word, then collapsed in deep, sorrowful sobs. December 31. The final day of the year. On that same day eighteen years earlier, Luisa had lost her firstborn son, Luis Oquendo.

By the time Vera and the Rauches arrived, the street was buzzing with people. Soon a caravan of cars left for Isla Verde. They drove to the airport. Mass confusion. Sirens wailing, policemen everywhere. Had the plane crashed in Nicaragua? No, on takeoff, here in San Juan. They drove toward the ocean near where the plane might have gone down. In the rain, a crowd was already gathering on Piñones Beach near Punta Maldonado. Police cars were shining headlights into the ocean. Vera knew the area well; it was Roberto’s favorite spot to collect driftwood.

Sitting in a car nearby was George Mattern, the FAA inspector. He had been at home in Río Piedras, taking a shower, when his pager went off at about ten that night. He had no phone at his place, so he went out looking for help. Up and down his street, no one was home, they were all out celebrating. Finally, a block away, he found a neighbor who let him use the phone. He called the office and heard about a plane crash. A “newsworthy person” had been aboard. It went down in the Piñones area. Get there as soon as you can. Driving through the back roads along the beach, he ran into his boss, Leonard Davis. Stories were already spreading at the beach. José Ayala of Punta Maldonado had been in bed when he heard a plane flying overhead and the motors sputter and go dead. Gregorio Rivera had seen wreckage floating on the water about a mile out to sea, but a few minutes later it had disappeared.

Vera felt faint; Melchor was getting weak. A nephew took Vera’s car keys and drove them home long past two in the morning.

•   •   •

In Puerto Rico, New Year’s Eve is one of the biggest nights of the year, celebrated with fireworks, traditional street dancing, and vibrant Latin music. But Orlando Cepeda felt something eerie in the air long before he heard about the crash. “
It was quiet and sad. The night felt different. There weren’t many people celebrating. No stars were out. Man, nothing happening.” Cepeda, who had revered Roberto since he was a bowlegged batboy for the Santurce Cangrejeros in 1954, was with his wife at a brother’s house when he got the news. Roberto Clemente cannot die, he thought. And he remembered how Clemente had wanted him to come along on the flight to Nicaragua.

Osvaldo Gil, who had persuaded Clemente to make that first trip to Nicaragua to manage, and who would have accompanied Roberto on the mercy flight had his wife not talked him out of it, was celebrating with his family when word of the crash reached him. In Spanish, Gil is pronounced “heel,” and it sounds quite similar to the Spanish pronunciation of the English name Hill. With the first reports listing the names of the five people aboard the DC-7, friends and associates heard the name Hill and feared that Osvaldo was among the dead. He remembered a saying that Clemente had uttered only a few days earlier as they discussed the flight:
Nobody dies the day before.
You die the day you’re supposed to.

Caguitas Colón was at a family reunion in his hometown of Caguas at two that morning when a relative told him the news. He had tried to warn Clemente that the plane looked unsafe, to no avail. Now he remembered how Clemente had scoffed at danger with one of his colloquial sayings:
You even die riding a horse.
Colón felt so blue he retreated to his bedroom and would not come out.

Juan Pizarro was on the roof of his house in Castellana Gardens in Carolina, fiddling with his malfunctioning television antenna, when the plane went down. He happened to be looking toward the ocean at the time, and thought he saw an explosion. A few hours later, when he heard that Clemente’s plane had crashed, two thoughts rushed into his mind. He remembered when they were teammates on the Pirates and Clemente had told him that he was going to die in a plane crash. But he also thought Clemente absolutely could not die. He had to still be alive.

José Pagán was asleep at the family house in Barceloneta when his father came in and told him the news. The Pirate teammate remembered when Roberto had uncharacteristically fallen asleep on the team plane but jolted awake from a dream saying that a plane had crashed and he had been the only one killed, and how Pagán had tried to soothe him by saying that he often dreamed that he was rich but that didn’t make it so. When Pagán’s wife, Delia, heard the news, she insisted that they leave immediately for Río Piedras to be with her dear friend, Vera Clemente.

Pedrin Zorrilla, who had signed Clemente to his first contract with Santurce, heard the bulletins on the radio that night at his house in Manatí. The news left him gasping for air. Clemente, he thought, had become more than a baseball player; he was now a symbol, a representation of the Dream of Deeds, the burning pride for Puerto Rico expressed by Zorrilla’s poet father:
Land, blood, name, and race.

Eduardo Valero, a veteran Puerto Rican sports writer, was asleep that night when he received a call from a friend in Virginia.
You know who died? Roberto Clemente.
“It was like a cold water shower,” Valero said. But he could never figure it out. “Who in the hell in Latin American culture leaves a family on New Year’s Eve? If you find two, let me know the other one. He left his family to go there on New Year’s Eve.”

Luis Olmo, one of the Three Kings of Puerto Rican baseball, paving the way for Clemente in the major leagues, was with his son’s wife’s family in Naguabo when he heard the news on the radio. Olmo thought of Clemente as a man of passion for everything in life, and he had a different take on the question raised by Valero. “I don’t see any reason for him to be on that plane that night to go to Nicaragua,” Olmo said later. “That’s the night to be with family. The reason he went, I don’t know. That is the night to keep your heart at home.”

Vic Power, another of the Three Kings, heard about the plane crash a few minutes before midnight after he had finished dinner with his wife and son at a restaurant in Condado. The last time he had seen Clemente was on the plane returning from Managua after the amateur baseball championships three weeks earlier. Clemente had been quiet during that uneventful flight home, sleeping. Power had been restless, still bothered by that fishbone in his throat. Then Clemente had gone
off to run his youth baseball clinics, and Power had returned to manage Caguas. Power could not believe that his friend was gone.