Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (52 page)

Clemente had never been an easy case for baseball writers. For eighteen seasons, he had burned with resentment about being underappreciated and called a hypochondriac and quoted in broken English. His fury had helped motivate him on the diamond, even as it confused the men in the press box. Yet he was usually willing to admit when he was wrong, and was so much more earnest and committed than most ballplayers that by the end he had earned the respect of those he fought with the most. Now, after the first news cycle of stories about the plane crash, they were all writing more personal columns praising and trying to explain this complicated man. Many of them repeated the dramatic cycle of anger, understanding, and loss.

“I remember the first time I ever spoke to him, the day he shouted at me, the anger streaming out of those fierce black eyes and washing over me so that I could almost feel its heat,” wrote Phil Musick in the
Pittsburgh Press.
“ ‘You writers are all the same,’ he yelled at Byron Yake of the AP and me, the passion in his voice freezing the few people left in the Pirate clubhouse. ‘You don’t know a damn thing about me.’ I had hollered back, scared clear through at watching the fury rise in his face, afraid to back down.” Musick then went on to remember a day, much later, when he had felt comfortable enough to needle Clemente as the old man—“and he laughed, and for a moment we weren’t natural enemies. And when I heard he was dead, I wished that sometime I had told him I thought he was a hell of a guy. Because he was, and now it’s too late to tell him there were things he did on a ball field that made me wish I was Shakespeare.”

Milton Richman of UPI, who covered Clemente’s entire career,
said he had seen all sides of the complex man. “You had to be around him a while to see both sides. I’ve seen him when he’d rail up at a newsman’s perfectly innocent question, and as a guest at his home in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, as well as on other occasions, I’ve seen him when he was one of the most hospitable, helpful and cooperative individuals ever to wear a major league uniform.”

“Roberto,” wrote David Condon in the
Chicago Tribune,
“was kind, generous, considerate, and humble about his own abilities . . . Yet Roberto was a man of mighty wrath. One day in the spring training camp he cut loose with language that humbled the thunder as he berated writers for overkill in their idolatry for American-born baseball players. Because he was speaking from his heart and his argument was credible, Roberto offended no one that afternoon.”

Milton Gross of the
New York Post
wrote that he was indeed once offended by Clemente, but then won over again. A few years earlier, Gross had conducted a long interview with Clemente at training camp in Bradenton. After his article appeared, he received a handwritten letter from Clemente. “I give you two hours of my time, and you write horseshit story about me. I don’t want to talk to you no more if you write horseshit stories. I don’t want you to write about me no more.” The letter left Gross angry and confused. His column about Clemente had been “a positive one in which I attempted to correct some of the unfair raps on Clemente, particularly the tale that he was a malingerer.” Gross wrote Clemente back demanding to know what he objected to in the piece. Weeks later, he encountered Clemente in the visitors locker room at Shea Stadium. Clemente said that he had based his first angry letter on what a friend from New York had told him about the story. Now that he had read the story himself, he said, “I find out that you did not write what my friend said. So now I apologize to you for the letter and I tell my friend he is no longer my friend because he does not tell me the truth.”

“It was a rare moment in my years in sports; a player admitting that he may have been wrong,” Gross declared in his sports page eulogy two days after the crash. “Clemente didn’t need me but he felt it incumbent upon himself to tell me that he had done me an injustice.”

On that night of January 2, as Jack Lang first contemplated Clemente’s
place in the Hall of Fame and his colleagues were writing their newspaper requiems,
President Nixon mentioned in a conversation with aide Charles Colson that the White House should work with the sports world to organize a Roberto Clemente Memorial Fund. Nixon already had released a taped statement on Clemente—calling him “one of the greatest baseball players of our time” and “a generous and kind human being”—and had written a personal $1,000 check to donate to the cause. There was a nobility to the Clemente story that seemed lacking in other matters Nixon and Colson were dealing with then, Vietnam and Watergate. Nixon that day was obsessed by suspicions that Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser, had been telling newspaper friends that he privately questioned the President’s decision to bomb Hanoi during Christmas. Get the Secret Service to check Kissinger’s telephone logs, Nixon told Colson, according to biographer Richard Reeves, and Colson came back with the delicious report that Kissinger had spent hours talking to columnist Joseph Kraft even while insisting to Colson that he would never talk to “that son-of-a-bitch.”

The next morning, January 3, presidential aide Richard A. Moore followed up on the Clemente issue. In a memorandum to chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Moore suggested that the President meet later that day with a delegation from the Pittsburgh Pirates. Moore said that he had talked with the team president, Dan Galbreath, who told him that he liked Nixon’s idea of a memorial fund. If the President had the time, Galbreath and a few players could be in the Oval Office that very afternoon. “The visit would be in time for the television news shows and would be a superb kickoff for the project,” Moore noted. “In the course of telling the press about the memorial, Galbreath or a player could allude to the fact that the President already made a generous contribution himself.” At the end of his memo, Moore added a special note: “Colson wholeheartedly endorses meeting with the President.”

During their discussions that day, Haldeman and Nixon had Colson on their minds, but not in the context of the death of Roberto Clemente. They were discussing the role Colson and former attorney general John Mitchell had played in the Watergate bugging. Nixon asked, “Does Mitchell know that Colson was involved, and does Colson know
that Mitchell was involved?” and Haldeman answered, “I think the answer is yes to both,” On the other matter, Haldeman liked the idea of the President seeing the Pirates delegation. He initialed a box in Moore’s memo approving a ten-minute meeting at quarter to four that afternoon.

An hour beforehand, Moore was ushered into the Oval Office to brief the President. He brought in a list of talking points for Nixon:

A) Clemente was chosen by the President for his postwar National League All-Star Team.

B) Apart from baseball, Clemente was known for his year-round service to good causes and his love of Puerto Rico, where he was virtually a folk hero. He was aboard the airplane because he had heard that a previous shipment [to Managua] had been diverted by profiteers and he wanted to make certain that the clothing and food reached the people in need. Clemente had been the chief organizer in raising $150,000 plus tons of clothing and foodstuffs.
[In citing “profiteers,” the memo avoided saying that these were the sons and relatives of General Somoza, a great Nixon fan who had recently sent a letter supporting the President for the Nobel Peace Prize.]

C) Members of the club and other Pittsburgh friends will fly to Puerto Rico in a chartered plane tomorrow for a special memorial service.

D) Clemente, thirty-eight, was National League batting champion four times in eighteen seasons, named twelve times to the All-Star team, most valuable player in NL in 1966, and MVP in 1971 World Series.

E) Daniel Galbreath’s father, John Galbreath, has met the President at All-Star games and sports dinners. He named a racehorse Roberto in honor of Clemente.

At three forty-three, Galbreath was escorted into the Oval Office along with pitchers Steve Blass and Dave Giusti, who had slept little since they first received word of the plane crash. Television cameramen and the White House photographer were ushered in and out of the room.
Nixon impressed everyone with his detailed knowledge of Clemente and the Pirates roster. They talked until a few minutes after four.

By that hour in the choppy Atlantic waters about a mile and half off Punta Maldonado, dragging operations by the
Sagebrush
had brought a body to the surface. It was identified as the pilot, Jerry Hill, and transferred to Centro Médico Hospital in Río Piedras. The autopsy conducted by forensic pathologist Nestor A. Loynaz revealed the overwhelming corporal trauma occupants of the plane experienced when the plunging DC-7 hit the water, which was much like hitting a brick wall at two hundred miles an hour. Hill’s body was broken everywhere: multiple fractures of the head and face; multiple fractures of the ribs and sternum; completely broken spinal column; multiple fractures of the tailbone; complete amputation of right leg; broken left leg; cavities in the stomach and diaphragm; ruptured aorta; ruptured bladder. Manny Sanguillen had seen the body on the recovery boat before it was flown to the hospital and the devastation of it convinced Sangy that he would never find his friend Roberto alive.

Early the next morning, a chartered jet left Pittsburgh carrying more than sixty members of the Pirates family to a memorial service for No. 21 in Puerto Rico. The contingent included manager Bill Virdon and most of the players and coaches and many wives, former managers Danny Murtaugh and Harry Walker, John and Dan Galbreath, general manager Joe L. Brown, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Marvin Miller and Richard Moss of the players association, and Preston Pearson, representing the Pittsburgh Steelers, who on the day Clemente died had lost an NFL playoff game to the Miami Dolphins. The plane was “real quiet going down,” Richie Hebner recalled, though Pearson happened to be sitting near Dock Ellis, the irrepressible pitcher, who could not stop talking. The baseball men were all dressed in black. After they filed off the plane and assembled in San Juan International’s lobby for a press conference, Joe L. Brown stepped to the microphone. Addressing the bustling throng of local writers, television crews, and onlookers, Brown showed his deep respect for Clemente, yet also sounded as though Roberto’s real family had arrived at last to tell these people about him.

“We would like to get on with it, please. Ladies and gentlemen,
when you are ready, we’ll get started,” Brown began. “I’d like to say a few words first. Gentlemen, please. I don’t want your attention as far as the camera’s concerned, we’d just like a little quiet, please. I’d like to say a few things first. This plane from Pittsburgh contains many of Roberto’s closest and dearest friends. There is one purpose in their visit: to show their love and respect for Vera and the Clemente family. We ask your cooperation in keeping this as a family affair. There perhaps might be some questions. I will try to answer them before you ask them . . . I’m sure you are going to ask about memorial services for Roberto. They will be held at three-thirty this afternoon. . . . If you want to take pictures of friends or family entering or leaving the church, you are certainly free to do so. But no pictures inside. I think there is no way to handle a thing of this sort except to tell you that behind me are part of Roberto’s family. If you care to talk to them, if you care to take their picture, I’m sure they’ll be happy, not happy, but they will accommodate you.”

Commissioner Kuhn followed with a brief, well-received lament: “It is a very sad event to be here in Puerto Rico for this service for Roberto. Very sad for baseball, for Puerto Rico. He was a truly great man in every way.”

Dan Galbreath described his meeting in the Oval Office with President Nixon, just as the President’s aides had hoped. “I thought it was going to be a perfunctory meeting but we talked with the President for twenty-five minutes,” Galbreath said. “He showed a genuine concern over Clemente and displayed a remarkable knowledge of Clemente the athlete and the humanitarian. His manner was not that of a passing gesture. He said that he and Mrs. Nixon were donating a thousand-dollar check . . . on behalf of Roberto’s memorial fund.”

When an island reporter told Galbreath about Clemente’s interest in using some abandoned San Juan Naval Station property for his sports city dream, the team president promised to pass the information along to the White House.

Bill Virdon said these were the only circumstances he could think of that would make him return to Puerto Rico without enjoying it. Danny Murtaugh, his predecessor, was nearly at a loss for words. He recalled the first time he had seen Clemente in 1955 and had said to
himself then that he was watching a kid who was going to be one of the greatest ballplayers of all time. Gene Clines said Roberto was like a big brother to him. Al Oliver said Clemente was the strongest inspiration in his baseball career. Steve Blass said he would never forget Roberto as long as he lived. The room fell quiet as Willie Stargell spoke. For nearly a decade, Stargell had been the other pillar on the Pittsburgh team. He towered over Clemente physically, but always looked up to him.

“I’ll tell you, it’s really hard to put into words all the feelings that I have for Robby,” Stargell said. “Since I’ve been with him I’ve had a chance to know a really dynamic man who walked tall in every sense you can think of. He was proud, he was dedicated. He was in every sense you can determine a man. And I think going the way he went really typifies how he lived. Helping other people without seeking any publicity or fame. Just making sure that he could lend a hand and get the job done. . . . The greatness that he is, we all know the ballplayer that he is. For those who did not know him as a man they really missed a fine treat for not knowing this gentleman. I had the opportunity to play with him, to sit down and talk about the things that friends talk about. And I am losing a great friend. But he will always remain in my heart.”

The baseball delegation filed into two buses for the short ride from the airport to the central plaza in Carolina and the memorial mass led by Archbishop Luis Aponte Martínez at San Fernando Roman Catholic Church. Crowds lined the streets into town, and thousands of
carolinenses
filled the plaza, much as they had only eight years earlier when Roberto and Vera had been married in the same stone chapel. Mourners entering the church were handed programs with an artist’s rendering of Clemente and the words of his mother’s spiritual refrain:
Only God makes man happy. Life is nothing. Everything ends. Only God makes man happy.
Steve Blass, speaking for his teammates at the service, read a poem that Pirates press man Bill Guilfoile gave him, a slightly reconfigured version of an ode to another baseball hero who had died young, Lou Gehrig. Blass was more afraid in the pulpit than he had ever felt on the mound. All the way down on the plane, all he thought about was whether he could do this. The poem had the sentimentalism
of 1930s sports journalism, when writers often expressed themselves in rhyme, but Blass infused the words with sincerity and choked up several times during his reading.
Let this be a silent token/Of Lasting friendship’s gleam/And all that we’ve left unspoken/Your pals on the Pirates team.
As Blass faltered, so too did many in the audience. “Blass is one of the funniest guys you’d ever want to meet,” recalled trainer Tony Bartirome. “Yet it brought tears to your eyes when a guy like that was up there crying.” Not a dry eye among the Pirates delegation, recalled Joe L. Brown.