Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (6 page)

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It was Clemente’s way, throughout his life, to pay tribute to those who came before him. Blessings to his parents, he would say, and to his elders, and to his brothers. Along the path he took to northern baseball, several others went before him.
The Three Kings, in a sense, were Hiram Bithorn, Luis Olmo, and Vic Power. Bithorn first, Olmo second, and Power down the line but before Clemente, and paving the way for him because of color distinctions that were made in the United States that had no bearing back on the island.

Clemente was seven years old when Hiram Bithorn, a right-handed pitcher, became the first Puerto Rican to play in the major leagues. Bithorn made his first start for the Chicago Cubs on April 21, 1942, against the Pittsburgh Pirates, five years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line. That Bithorn had white skin meant very little to fans in San Juan, where he had played with and against the Americans Josh Gibson, Monte Irvin, and Roy Campanella and the great Puerto Ricans Pedro Cepeda and Poncho Coimbre, all of whom had darker skin. But it meant everything to the men who ran organized baseball in the States. It was the only reason they let him play.

Bithorn was big and burly, a jolly giant and three-sport star in his native Santurce, excelling in basketball and volleyball as well as on the mound. The first story on him in the
Chicago Tribune
called him an “intriguing rookie,” noting that his parents came from Denmark and that he liked pie and ice cream for breakfast. The sportswriters of San Juan thought he was “a little, if not wacky, okay, different,” according to Eduardo Valero, who covered Bithorn for
El Imparcial.
Valero remembered the time Bithorn emerged from the dugout with an umbrella when the umpires were slow to stop play for rain. Bill Sweeney, who had managed him on the Hollywood Stars in the Coast League before his call-up to the Cubs, said the key to making Bithorn win was to yell at him in Spanish whenever he tried to throw sliders and forkballs. “Tell him to stick the slow stuff in the ashcan and throw
like everything. You’ll have to holler several times in every game, but he’ll win with the high hard one,” Sweeney advised. Bithorn’s pale appearance did nothing to protect him from ethnic stereotyping. A Chicago writer, making the same point as Sweeney, said the trouble with Bithorn was that “fast pitching apparently doesn’t appeal to his conception of Latin cunning.” The press Americanized his first name, pronounced ee-rum, to the familiar “Hi.”

The Cubs also had a rookie catcher from Cuba that year, Chico Hernández, and together he and Bithorn formed the second all-Latino battery in major league history, a quarter-century after the first pitcher-catcher duo of Cubans Adolpho Luque and Miguel Gonzalez played for the Boston Braves. At one point during the season, Bithorn and Chico Hernández decided to dispense with hand signs and simply call and receive pitching signs aloud in Spanish, assuming that opposing batters would be none the wiser. That worked fine until the Giants figured it out and sent their bench coach, the same Adolpho Luque, out to the third-base coaching box to intercept the verbal signs; suddenly Giants batters began cracking base hits.

The Cubs manager, Jimmy Wilson, was said to have a “soft spot” for Bithorn, fascinated equally by his attempts at English and his willingness to scrap with Leo Durocher of the Dodgers. During his sophomore season in 1943, the Cubs had more reason to be fond of Bithorn. He developed into a first-rate pitcher, one of the best in the National League. He pitched 249.2 innings that year, won eighteen games, fourth highest in the league, while losing only twelve, had an earned-run average of 2.60, and threw seven complete game shutouts. When the season ended and Bithorn returned to San Juan, he was greeted at the airport with a hero’s welcome, paraded through the streets in a convertible, and handed the keys to the city. Then, asked to say a few words, Bithorn balked, explaining that he would rather face Mel Ott. That moment of glory, on the afternoon of October 26, 1943, turned out to be the high point of his career.

One month later, while managing in the winter league for San Juan, Bithorn received a draft notice and decided to enlist in the U.S. Navy. He served not quite two years, and came out a different man. When he arrived back in Chicago for the final weeks of the 1945 season, he was
described as out of shape with “a sore arm and an unduly expansive waistline.” He also was mentally troubled. His brother, Waldemor Bithorn, said that Hiram had suffered a nervous breakdown. In any case, his skills had vanished, and soon enough his major league career was gone, too. The Cubs cut him in 1946, after which he was picked up and released by the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Chicago White Sox. Bithorn scuffled through the minors, in Oakland and Nashville, and his prospects deteriorated from there. By 1951 he was umpiring in the Class-C Pioneer League on the West Coast, then went south to try a pitching comeback in Mexico.

Four days after Christmas 1951, Bithorn checked into a hotel in El Mante in northeastern Mexico. According to his family, he was on his way south to Mexico City to pick up his mother. The manager of the hotel, W. A. Smith, recalled that Bithorn arrived at three in the morning, and that when he checked out the next day he told Smith that he only had a single dollar. Smith told Bithorn to forget the charge, but instead Bithorn went out on the streets and tried to sell his car. He was stopped for questioning by a local cop, Ambrosio Castillo, who acted as though he were trying to inspect the car’s registration but probably wanted to confiscate it for himself. The encounter ended, in any case, in violence. Castillo fired several shots into Bithorn, who was seriously wounded and died after being driven eighty-four miles over rough roads to a hospital in Ciudad Victoria. Doctors there issued a statement saying that he might have lived had he been treated earlier. Castillo claimed that he acted in self-defense, that Bithorn struck him and tried to escape. He also claimed that Bithorn’s last words to him, after being shot, were “I am a member of a Communist cell on an important mission!” But Castillo’s story eventually collapsed and he was sent to prison on a homicide conviction.

News of Hiram Bithorn’s death reached home on New Year’s Eve, 1951. December 31 . . . Then and later, in the history of Puerto Rico and baseball, it would be the darkest day. The Mexicans had buried him in an open grave, until Bithorn’s family and all of Puerto Rico expressed outrage at his treatment. They had his body exhumed and placed in a double-sealed casket for the trip back to Puerto Rico. Before he was reburied on January 13, 1952, his funeral bier was
placed on the field at Sixto Escobar and thousands of fans filed past to pay their last respects, including members of his old team, the San Juan Senadores, who played the rest of the season with black patches on their sleeves. Bithorn had died alone and destitute, an unknown stranger in a strange land, but his forlorn ending was transformed once his body reached Puerto Rican soil. He became a legend, a king in the mythology of baseball on the island—and all who came after him to play in the States, including Roberto Clemente, who began his professional career at Sixto Escobar the same year that Bithorn was buried, knew his story as the first among them.

One year after Bithorn made his debut with the Cubs, Luis Olmo was called up from the Triple-A Montreal Royals to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. As the second king on the northern pilgrimage, his experiences, too, served as context for the later coming of Clemente. Olmo joined a crowded outfield in Brooklyn, with Augie Galan, Paul Waner, Dixie Walker, Joe Medwick, and Frenchy Bordagaray, but the Puerto Rican’s talent won him more and more playing time, until by 1945 he was a team star, batting .313, leading the National League in triples with thirteen, and driving in 110 runs. Like Bithorn, Olmo grew up playing baseball in a place where skin color did not matter. But although he was considered white in the United States, and was allowed to play there before the race barrier was lifted, he was not free from the sting of prejudice. Something strange happened during the 1945 season that he would never forget. As he remembered it sixty years later, he was hitting well over .350 in July, using a heavy black bat. He considered the bat his magic wand, even though it was nothing special. He had bought it at a pharmacy near the apartment that he and his wife, Emma, rented at 55 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn. One day in the dugout at Ebbets Field, manager Leo Durocher picked up the black bat, said that it was too damn heavy, and broke it in two. Why? Durocher could be volatile but he was far from racist and was obsessed with doing whatever it took to win. Yet in retrospect Olmo could think of only one reason that made sense to him: “They didn’t want me to have a good season. They wanted Dixie Walker to beat me out and I was playing more than Dixie Walker.”

That was not the first time Olmo felt discriminated against for being
Puerto Rican. In 1942, playing for Richmond in Triple-A, his manager, Ben Chapman, constantly made bed checks but only checked on Olmo. It seemed to Olmo that Chapman was determined to catch him with a woman, though it never happened. When the season was over, even though Olmo led the team in most offensive categories and excelled as an outfielder, Chapman gave the team’s most valuable player award to someone else—himself. A few years later, when Jackie Robinson broke the color line and Chapman proved to be among the most virulent racists in major league baseball, Olmo was not surprised.

In a touch of irony, it was Jackie Robinson’s benefactor, Branch Rickey, who caused Olmo the most grief after his breakthrough season in 1945. His salary that year was $6,000, and after his stellar play he asked for a $3,000 raise. Rickey, then Brooklyn’s general manager, offered him an extra $500, but this was not a raise at all but rather the equivalent of the $500 bonus that had been handed out to every player on the team except Olmo. Take it or leave it, said Rickey, who was known as both the wisest and perhaps the cheapest man in baseball. Olmo left it. He decided to play in a new league that had begun in Mexico in direct competition with the majors. “They were paying good money in Mexico,” Olmo recalled. “They paid me $20,000—more than three times as much as Rickey offered.”

Induced by the higher salaries, and with no bargaining power of their own in that era, more than two dozen ballplayers left the States to play in Mexico. For their brazen act of independence, they were all suspended from baseball for five years. The winter leagues in Puerto Rico and Cuba had agreements with the majors, so the players were banned from those leagues as well. When the Mexican league folded in 1947, the vagabond players were left to scrounge in Venezuela, Canada, and an alternative league in Cuba. The suspensions were lifted after three years, and Olmo returned to the majors, along with Sal Maglie. He rejoined the Dodgers in time to play in the 1949 World Series against the Yankees, where he became the first Puerto Rican to hit a World Series home run. It came in the ninth inning against Joe Page, and was followed shortly by another homer by the great black catcher, Roy Campanella, his old teammate in San Juan. After the season, Olmo was traded to the Boston Braves. He played two years in
Boston, then one in Triple-A in Milwaukee, and his career in the States was over.

Olmo was hailed as another legend of baseball when he returned to Puerto Rico. He stayed with the game deep into middle age, joining Momen Clemente in the Santurce outfield one winter and also managing several teams and scouting for the Braves, who had moved to Milwaukee in 1953. He was a top-notch scout, bringing the Braves two talented young Puerto Ricans, Juan Pizarro and Felix Mantilla, and just missing on a third, Clemente.

When Puerto Ricans reenact the story of the Three Kings, one king is portrayed with dark skin. In the baseball story, this would be Victor Pellot Power. Seven years older than Clemente, Power signed with a major league club several years before him, and became the first black Puerto Rican to play in the American League. Power grew up in Arecibo, to the west of San Juan, though his family history traces back to slaves on the nearby islands of St. Thomas and St. John. His father, like Melchor Clemente, knew little of baseball and tried to discourage him from playing, but died of tetanus when Victor was thirteen. Three years later, when he was barely sixteen, Power was hailed as a baseball prodigy, playing in the Puerto Rican winter league for the Caguas Criollos, a club that would be his winter home for decades.

His name alone is a lesson in sociology. Pove was his mother’s original surname, but during her youth, in the early days of U.S. control, Puerto Rican schoolchildren were taught in English, and a teacher changed the v to a w and added an r at the end and made her name Power. At home, in any case, he would be known as Pellot, since that was his father’s surname, just as Roberto Clemente Walker was known as Roberto Clemente, not Roberto Walker. But during his first year north, playing in Canada, Power was introduced at a ballpark in French-speaking Quebec in a way that provoked laughter and some ridicule from the stands. He wondered whether fans were laughing because he was black, until someone told him that his name sounded like something bawdy in French slang—
pelote
means he who paws or pets women. From then on, when not in Puerto Rico, he went by the name Power. It was left to sportswriters to call him Vic, just as many called Roberto Bob or Bobby. And so the creation of Vic Power.

The social transition from Puerto Rico to the mainland was more difficult for Power than it had been for Bithorn or Olmo. “Here we were all together,” he reminisced later in San Juan, speaking of people of different colors. “We went to school together. We danced together. A lot of black Puerto Ricans marry white women. When I get there—the States—I don’t know what to do.” What he did, often, was use humor as a shield to protect himself from deadly serious discrimination. His stories about how he confronted racism in the South have become a part of baseball lore, accurately reflecting social conditions in 1950s America even if some might shade into apocrypha. When a waitress told him that her restaurant did not serve Negroes, Power replied, “That’s okay, I don’t eat Negroes. I just want some rice and beans.” Stopped by a policeman for crossing a street against the “Don’t Walk” sign, Power explained that he thought street signs were for whites only, like all the other signs. There was nothing funny about the segregation that forced Power to sleep in a room above a black funeral parlor during spring training in Plant City, Florida, because he was not allowed to stay in the same hotel as his white teammates. But at least in retrospect, he transformed the scene into dark comedy. “People ask me what I learned from that experience and I say two things: that dead people don’t snore, and that they don’t get out of there. Because I was waiting for them upstairs with a bat, ohhh, baby. In Puerto Rico we believe that dead people might get you. I was a little bit afraid.”