Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (51 page)

The Pirates had a working relationship with the San Juan Senadores that year, and the team was stocked with young Pittsburgh players. Many of them had gathered on New Year’s Eve at a waterfront condo. Chuck Goggin, who had slapped his first major league hit in the same game that Clemente got his three-thousandth, was sitting on the patio deck with Richie Zisk and Bob Johnson shortly after midnight and noticed “a bunch of commotion going on over the ocean, it looked like helicopters and planes” and lights. There were no radios, no phone calls, no one at the party had a clue. They speculated that there must have been a plane crash, or maybe a boat was missing.

Steve Blass and his wife were hosting a party at their house in Upper St. Clair Township, a Pittsburgh suburb. There were eight couples there from the neighborhood, including Dave Giusti and his wife. By two in the morning, everyone had left but the Giustis, who were going to stay and party all night. Then a call came from Bill Guilfoile, the Pirates public relations man. There is an unsubstantiated report that a plane has gone down near Puerto Rico and Clemente was on it, Guilfoile said. My God, Blass thought. Clemente! He’s invincible. He doesn’t die. He plays as long as he wants to and then becomes governor of Puerto Rico. With the stunning news, Blass and Giusti sobered up quickly. Not knowing what else to do, but wanting to do something, they drove to general manager Joe L. Brown’s house in Mount Lebanon, the adjacent township in the South Hills area. Brown let them in and they sat around drinking coffee. As Brown later recalled the scene, the three men “talked about Roberto and cried” as they recalled “the depth of the man and the intelligence of the man and the humor of the man.” Clemente never held anything back from the people, Brown thought. He gave them more than they had any right to expect from him. He reminded Brown of a panther, the grace and power of a panther. He would always think of footage from the 1971 World Series of Clemente rounding second and sliding into third, so graceful and strong, such spectacular passion. What a good man.

From there, Blass and Giusti drove across town to Willie Stargell’s house, and the three Pirates consoled one another until the sun came
up, eventually making their way over to the annual New Year’s Day party at the home of Bob Prince. The Gunner had thought about canceling his party after he heard the news, but decided that Roberto would want the party to go on. It did, as a wake.

The fans of Pittsburgh were in shock. On New Year’s morning, Ann Ranalli’s mother was in the kitchen when she heard a radio report. She ran upstairs to tell her daughter, who three months earlier had taken the streetcar to Three Rivers Stadium and thrown confetti over the right-field railing after Roberto Clemente got his three-thousandth hit. Ann started sobbing. She spent the rest of the day praying that he would be found. “It was really hard,” she said later. “He was the Pope to me.”

“Adios, Amigo Roberto”
read the lights atop Mount Washington. The mayor declared a week of mourning. Richard Santry was home for the holidays during his freshman year at Notre Dame. All through his childhood, Santry had watched Clemente from the Knothole Gang seats in the right-field bleachers. He and his father would stand at the screen and wave and sometimes Clemente would come over to talk to them or throw a ball their way. There are days you remember your whole life, Santry would say decades later. Where you were when JFK was shot. Where you were on 9/11. He would always remember New Year’s morning, 1973. “The sound I remember is the bedroom door opening, the creaking of rusty hinges. My mother sat on an empty twin bed and started to poke me a bit. I glanced over at the clock. It was eleven-twenty or so; I had slept pretty good. My mom’s first words to me were ‘I have some very bad news.’ I sat up, and Mom said that Clemente had died in a plane crash. I looked at her, groggy, not quite sure what I heard, waiting for a punch line. What are you talking about? He was on a plane delivering supplies to people in Nicaragua and the plane dropped into the ocean, she said. I was eighteen years old. I went into the bathroom . . . and just sat there and had a cry like a family member or my best friend just died.”

Nancy Golding had gone to bed on New Year’s Eve with her radio on. Things always seemed louder in the morning, and when she awoke the radio was blaring the news. She was just an average kid in Pittsburgh, and yet she happened to live near Roberto’s accountant and the
Clementes had been so kind in letting her into their lives. She had been to their house in Río Piedras and had eaten in their kitchen and had played with their little boys. Roberto Clemente is missing and presumed dead in a plane crash, the radio announcer was saying, and she started screaming.
“Clemente died! Clemente died!”

In Miami that morning, William Couric, the FAA official who had battled with Arthur Rivera almost daily during his tenure in San Juan, exploded in uncharacteristic fury when he heard the news. How could they let the tramp aircraft from Cockroach Corner ever roll down a runway? “They wouldn’t listen to me! They wouldn’t listen to me!” he cried. “I tried! I tried so hard to put those people out of business!”

The three Clemente boys, Robertito, Luisito, and Ricky, were brought back to the house in Río Piedras late the next morning. Everything was a blur, but there were a few images they would never forget. Parked cars line both sides of the street all the way up the hill. They are led across the little bridge from the sidewalk to the front gate. A big black bow is on the door. Military police stand at attention at the entry-way. The flags of Puerto Rico and the United States frame the doorway. The door opens into a sea of faces.
Oh, there are the kids!
And people rush up to hug and squeeze them. Finally they are taken into a bedroom with their mother and grandparents and their mom starts crying and holds them tight and searches for the words.

SECONDS AFTER N500AE DISAPPEARED FROM THE RADAR
screen, San Juan’s air traffic control tower activated the emergency accident notification system,
a sequence of twenty telephone calls. The second call went to the U.S. Coast Guard Rescue Center located near the cruise ship piers in Old San Juan, nine miles west of the airport. Since the plane went down in the water, there was little the airport’s fire rescue team could do beyond rush to the beachfront and beam spotlights into the dark Atlantic. The search required boats, planes, helicopters, divers—the realm of the Coast Guard and Navy. One Coast Guard vessel and two aircraft went out on the first call after ten that night, but search officers had not yet plotted the Probability of Detection Area so the rescuers were operating on guesswork, literally in the dark, and found nothing.

Not long after sunrise on New Year’s Day it became obvious that this was not just a routine search. From Isla Verde to Punta Maldonado, the shore was lined with people who had come to bear witness. The two-lane roads leading to the water became more congested as the day progressed until by afternoon there was a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of pilgrims flocking toward the place where their hero had fallen.

“
That night on which Roberto Clemente left us physically, his immortality began,” the Puerto Rican writer Elliott Castro later observed, and here, on Piñones Beach, was the first manifestation of the transformation from man to myth. Although Governor Luis A. Ferré, in his final day in office, had declared a three-day mourning period, in effect acknowledging that Clemente was dead, many Puerto
Ricans refused to believe it. The vast crowds at the beach were quiet, expectant. They waited for Roberto to come walking out of the sea. Men carried portable radios, women brought infants; a shout, a sighting of color or shape, and suddenly a line of people were holding hands wading out to take a look. A Coast Guard helicopter landed at the beach and was swarmed by citizens as the false report spread of a body aboard. Vera and her father-in-law, Melchor, returned to the beach and were treated as royalty as they sat in stoic silence, holding hands.
Vera wavered between not wanting to believe the accident had happened, desperately holding on to the miracle that her husband was still alive, and more realistically hoping the searchers would find his body or some tangible evidence of his loss. Osvaldo Gil, the family friend who was among those joining Vera at the beach, remembered her saying softly two or three times, “If they could find at least a hand.”

Manny Sanguillen, the Pirate catcher from Panama who adored Clemente like an older brother, showed up ready to do anything he could to help the search. He stripped down to his swimming suit and went out with a group of volunteer local divers who focused on the underwater caverns of the coral reef a hundred yards offshore, a likely place for a body to snag. The official Coast Guard and Navy search party included three helicopters, two fixed-wing aircraft, two smaller rescue vessels, and the cutter
Sagebrush,
a 180-foot buoy tender outfitted with a cranelike boom.
The effort that day was slowed by rough waters, four- to six-foot swells. While finding no people or bodies, the rescue team recovered the first swath of debris, including seat cushions, life vests, a deflated raft, papers, a nose wheel and strut, two other wheels, and the wallet of Angel Lozano, who had been riding in the cabin near Clemente. They also came across an oil slick under which they suspected they might find the fuselage, but it was growing dark by then so they marked the position of the oil slick to return to it the next day.

At ten on the second day of January, Hernández Colón was sworn in as Puerto Rico’s new governor. Less than a month earlier, Clemente had brought back a red and white hammock from Nicaragua as a gift for his political friend. Now the great ballplayer’s loss cast a dark shadow over the inaugural ceremony. All the musical festivities that
were to be held that night at La Fortaleza were canceled. Before the swearing-in began, the cutter
Sagebrush,
on its way out to the crash site, cruised by within sight of supporters gathering at the capital grounds. At the start of the program, there was a minute of silence in memory of Clemente. In his speech, Hernández Colón said of him, “Our youth have lost an idol and an example; our people have lost one of their glories.” The governor was following the lead of Puerto Rico’s newspapers, who that morning had published their editorial eulogies. “Off the field,” the
San Juan Star
wrote of Clemente, “he was a complicated, intense man who felt a special burden to use his fame and prestige for noble ends . . . He was a unique man, a shining example for the rest of us. A man who thrilled and entertained us with his athletic exploits and ennobled and inspired us with his humanism.”

In the early afternoon, another rumor buzzed through the large crowd that had gathered at the beach for a second consecutive day. Someone had seen a body floating in the water fifty yards from shore a mile west of Punta Maldonado. But a search of the area came up with nothing. It could have been a log, a scrap of debris, even a fish. The Coast Guard station in San Juan was being deluged with calls from people saying they could help, even from thousands of miles away. “It seemed like every psychic and seer all over the world was calling in, telling us they had heard from Roberto,” remembered Captain Vincent Bogucki, then commander of the Coast Guard unit in San Juan. “They might say he was on a small island and okay but needed help. We had a lot of unasked for leads . . . that to some extent we followed.”

Captain Bogucki was feeling pressure from all sides. President Nixon was interested in Clemente, and that meant top Coast Guard officials in Washington had to know about the search and were requesting constant updates from San Juan. In Puerto Rico, the plane crash had surpassed even the inauguration as the dominant news story, and every official from the governor on down wanted to make sure that everything possible was being done to find the plane and its occupants. Deep into the second day with no results, Vera contacted Captain Bogucki and asked him to come to her house in Río Piedras. She wanted to know what he was doing, and why he wasn’t doing more. He talked about the possibility of getting another plane, but did not feel he
could tell Mrs. Clemente the cold truth, which was this: The Coast Guard is in the business of search and rescue, not salvage. Bogucki and his men had already privately reached the grim conclusion that there was nothing to rescue, and probably not much in the way of human remains to recover. As one of Bogucki’s officers, Lieutenant John Parker, later explained, “If a plane breaks up badly and if bodies break loose, it is rare to recover them. Why? The sharks. They are hungry. It is a shark-infested area.” None of this could be said to the widow. Bogucki told Mrs. Clemente that he would try to add another plane to the search and invited her to visit the Coast Guard Rescue Center to see for herself how diligently his crew was working.

As Bogucki was leaving the Clemente house, he looked across the room and noticed that Vera had brought in her own seer. “I saw the figure from the rear, and she had a robe on,” Bogucki said later. “I wasn’t invited to meet this person.” This seer was among those claiming that Clemente was still alive. Her supernatural signs were telling her that he was dazed and walking through the streets of La Perla, a poor waterfront neighborhood nestled below Old San Juan. Fernando González, the rookie Pirate infielder from Arecibo, happened to be at the Clemente house then and left with a scouting party of friends and relatives. “We went to La Perla to look for him,” González said later. “And we never found him.”

•   •   •

It was not mythmaking but pure baseball that led Jack Lang’s colleagues in the press corps to start calling his home in Huntington Station, Long Island, that night. “I’m way ahead of you. That’s the first thing I thought of,” Lang told one caller. What others wanted to suggest to him, and what he had already thought of, was that the Baseball Writers Association of America, of which he was secretary-treasurer, should take the extraordinary step of immediately inducting Clemente into the Hall of Fame, foregoing the requirement that a player be inactive for five years before being eligible for enshrinement. Certain statistical achievements virtually ensured a place in Cooperstown, and one of those was three thousand hits. Clemente died with precisely that number, along with his .317 career average and closetful of Gold
Gloves as the finest right fielder of his generation. Lang had already talked to commissioner Bowie Kuhn about waiving the waiting period. It had happened only once before in baseball history, when Lou Gehrig was chosen by acclamation in 1939 while he was dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Eleven weeks after Lang started the process, the BBWAA would overwhelmingly vote Clemente into Cooperstown, making him the first Latin American player among the game’s all-time elite. Ninety-three percent of 424 writers would support him, with most of the others saying they did not want to break the five-year requirement.