Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero Read online

  The two men would be defined by race in the United States, one black and one white, but thought of themselves only as fellow Puerto Ricans. They talked about baseball and their hopes for their team at the twentieth amateur world championships that were to begin in Nicaragua at noon that same day. A lawyer and Korean War veteran, Gil (pronounced “heel”) was president of the Puerto Rican amateur baseball federation and had persuaded Clemente to come along and manage the team. Puerto Rico had finished third last time, and Gil thought all they needed was a push to get past the favored teams from Cuba and the United States and perhaps win gold. Clemente might make the difference.

  So much had happened since Gil had first caught sight of Clemente more than twenty years earlier. Roberto was still in high school then, starring for the Juncos Mules in the top amateur baseball league in Puerto Rico. Most people who had seen him play carried some deeply ingrained memory, and Gil’s went back to the beginning: He sat in the bleachers of the park in Carolina and watched this kid hum a throw from deep center field, the ball seeming to defy physics by picking up speed as it buzzed toward the infield and sailed over the third baseman’s head into the stands. Even a wild throw by Roberto Clemente was a memorable work of art.

  From there followed eighteen seasons in the big leagues, all with the Pittsburgh Pirates, two World Series championships, four batting titles, an MVP award, twelve Gold Gloves as a right fielder, leading the league in assists five times, and—with a line double into the gap at Three Rivers Stadium in his final at-bat of the 1972 season—exactly three thousand hits. The beautiful fury of Clemente’s game had enthralled all of baseball. More than simply another talented athlete, he was an incandescent figure who had willed himself to become a symbol of Puerto Rico and all of Latin America, leading the way for the waves of Spanish-speaking baseball players coming North to the majors. And he was not done yet. At the end of each of the previous two seasons, he had talked of retiring, but he had at least two good years left.

  Clemente would not be playing right field for this team. He was in Nicaragua only to manage. During practice sessions in Puerto Rico, he had underscored the distinction by showing up in civilian clothes. The job was not new to him, he had managed the San Juan Senadores in winter ball, but his players then had been professionals, including many major leaguers, and these were young amateurs. It was apparent to Gil that Clemente understood the potential problem. He was so skilled and brought such determination to the game that he might expect the same of everyone, which was unrealistic. Still, he was Roberto Clemente, and who wouldn’t want him leading the Puerto Ricans against the rest of the world?

  The simple life of a ballplayer is eat, sleep, fool around, play. Many athletes wander through their days unaware of anything else, but Clemente was more than that. He had a restless intelligence and was always thinking about life. He had an answer for everything, his own blend of logic and superstition.

  If you want to stay thin, he told Gil, don’t drink water until two hours after you eat rice so the food won’t expand in your stomach. If you want to keep your hair, don’t shower with hot water; why do you think they scald chickens in boiling tubs before plucking feathers at the poultry plant? If you want to break out of a slump, make sure you get at least three swings at the ball every time up. With a total of at least twelve swings in four at-bats a game, all you need is one good one to get a hit. So simple: to break a slump you have to swing at the ball. And it wasn’t all body and baseball. Clemente could also talk politics. His sentiments were populist, with the poor. His heroes were Martin Luther King Jr. and Luis Muñoz Marín, the FDR of his island. He lamented the inequitable distribution of wealth and said he did not understand how people could stash millions in banks while others went hungry. The team president had to beg off, exhausted, or the manager would have yakked until dawn.

  The next morning before breakfast, there was Clemente in the lobby, enacting his own modest wealth redistribution plan. He had instructed the cafeteria to give him a bagful of coins in exchange for a $20 bill and now was searching out poor people. A short old man carrying a machete reminded him of Don Melchor, his father. A boy without shoes reminded him of Martín el Loco, a character in his hometown of Carolina. When he was home, Clemente looked out for Martín and gave him rides in his Cadillac and tried to buy him shoes, but El Loco was so accustomed to going barefoot that he could not stand to have anything on his feet. Martín the Crazy is not that crazy, Puerto Ricans would sing. Of the needy strangers Clemente now encountered in Managua, he asked, What’s your name? Who do you work for? How many in your family? Then he handed them coins, two or three or four, until his bag was empty. It became another routine, every morning, like not sleeping at night.

  The Inter-Continental, a soulless modern pyramid that rose on a slope above the old Central American city, was enlivened by an unlikely alignment of visitors that week. Not only Clemente and his ballplayers were there but also squads from China and Japan, West Germany and Italy, Brazil and El Salvador, Honduras and Panama, Cuba and Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, the United States and Canada. Then there was Miss Universe, Kerry Anne Wells of Australia, who won her crown days before at the pageant in Puerto Rico and had been flown across the Caribbean to Nicaragua at the same time as Clemente, creating a stir at Las Mercedes International Airport when the “two people who are news in any part of the world,” as a report in La Prensa put it, arrived and posed for pictures in the VIP lounge. The photographs showed Clemente wearing a shirt collar the size of pterodactyl wings, while the beauty of Miss Wells, said to “exceed all words,” thrilled fans who were “looking at her from head to toe and complimenting her in the most flowery manner”—such a polite description of catcalls. Also in the same hotel then was Howard Hughes, the billionaire recluse who had chosen Managua as his latest obscure hideaway. Hughes occupied the entire seventh floor in a luxury suite, but might as well have been in another solar system. The baseball folks heard that he was around but never caught sight of him. The story was that he sequestered himself in his spooky aerie, drapes drawn, ordering vegetable soup from room service and watching James Bond movies in the nude. No coins for the people from Mr. Hughes.

  On the fifteenth, late in the morning, Clemente and his Puerto Rican team left the Inter-Continental for the opening ceremonies at the Estadio Nacional. There was a confection of Olympian extravaganza, baseball delirium, and military pomp, all orchestrated by Nicaragua’s strongman, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, whose family owned much of the country and ran its institutions. For the time being, forced by the national constitution to cede the presidency to someone else, at least in title, Somoza controlled the government from his position as supreme commander of the Armed Forces. He also happened to be president of the organizing committee for the baseball tournament, which offered him an opportunity to bask in self-generated glory. Novedades, a journal that catered to his interests, declared that General Somoza’s presence “gave a formidable support and shine to the event and confirmed the popularity of the leader of the Nicaraguan majority.”

  Fans more likely were clamoring to see Clemente, and to find out whether the scrappy Nicaraguan team, with the same underdog hopes as the Puerto Ricans, could stay in there with the Cubans, a sporting rivalry intensified by Somoza and Fidel Castro, the yin and yang, right and left, of Latin American dictators. So baseball mad was Managua then that thirty thousand people filed into the stadium and overflow throngs spilled into the streets outside, just to watch the opening ceremonies and a preliminary game between Italy and El Salvador. Black marketers had snatched vast blocks of seats in all sections of the stadium and were scalping them for as much as eighty córdobas, nearly triple the established price. Somoza and his wife, Mrs. Hope Portocarrero de Somoza, watched from the presidential box, not far from Miss Universe. A torch was lit, symbolizing the hope that baseball would become an official Olympic sport, then a procession of International Amateur Baseball Federation officials marched in, and gymnasts tumbled and c
artwheeled, and beautiful young women in traditional dress pushed wooden carts, and Little Leaguers flooded the field, sixteen teams of nine, each team wearing the uniform of a country in the tournament.

  After the visiting Panama National Guard military band played patriotic anthems, Somoza, wearing a light-colored sports suit and Nicaraguan baseball cap, descended from his perch and strutted onto the field. He stepped up to the pitcher’s mound at ten minutes of noon. A swarm of reporters, photographers, and television cameramen closed in as El Comandante raised high his right hand and swiveled left and right, recognizing the applause. Most of the attention was directed not at him but at home plate, where a right-handed batter had appeared from the dugout, stretching his neck and taking his stance deep in the batter’s box. It was Roberto Clemente, in full uniform. Everyone wanted a picture with him. It took fifteen minutes to clear the crowd. Finally, Somoza gripped the hardball and hurled it toward the plate. His house journal called the opening pitch “formidable.” A less-flattering account came from Edgard Tijerino, a fearless little sportswriter from Pedro Chamorro’s opposition newspaper La Prensa. “Obviously,” reported Tijerino, “it was a very bad pitch.”

  Luckily for Somoza, Clemente did not swing. He loved to hit what others would call bad balls—They’re not bad if I hit them, he would say—and had a habit in batting practice of ripping vicious line drives back through the box.

  • • •

  Clemente took to the people and sights of Nicaragua. He enjoyed strolling past the stalls in the central market and down narrow side streets where he picked out embroidered blouses and dresses for Vera made of the finest cloth. He had the hands of a craftsman and a taste for colorful art. But he never had much luck with baseball in Nicaragua. He had visited Managua once before, in early February 1964, when Nicaragua hosted the Inter-American baseball winter league series. Clemente led the San Juan Senadores, who were stocked with major leaguers, including his friends Orlando Cepeda, the slugging left fielder, José Antonio Pagán at shortstop, and Juan Pizarro, the left-handed pitcher, but they failed to win the championship, and the lasting memory from that trip was of a fan heaving an iguanalike garrobo lizard from the right-field bleachers and Clemente blanching in fright.

  This trip went no better. The Puerto Rican team started with convincing wins over China and Costa Rica, but then struggled the rest of the way, losing to the United States and Cuba and even the Nicaraguans, who prevailed 2–1 in eleven innings, largely on the brilliance of their pitcher, a future major league right-hander named Dennis Martínez. The team wasn’t hitting, and Clemente became increasingly frustrated. How could players managed by Roberto Clemente not hit? From the dugout, he noticed a batter in the on-deck circle scanning the stands for beautiful girls. “Forget about the women, look at the pitcher!” he shouted. One of his better hitters struck out and threw his helmet, breaking it. For the rest of the game, Clemente kept pointing to the mound and saying, “There’s the pitcher who struck you out—he’s the one to be mad at, not your helmet.” With outfielder Julio César Roubert slumbering in a zero-for-seventeen slump, Clemente invited him to breakfast at the Inter-Continental to talk hitting.

  “Roubert,” said the manager, repeating the theory he had presented to Osvaldo Gil late at night, “who do you think has more chances to hit the ball, the batter who takes three swings or the batter who takes one swing?”

  “Three,” said Roubert.

  “Then take three swings!” ordered Clemente.

  After the early losses, Clemente kept Gil up to talk about what went wrong and how to fix it. Gil eventually would excuse himself for a few hours’ sleep, but Clemente could not rest. He found their driver and paid him to chauffeur him around and around through the dark streets of the city until dawn. That stopped when Vera arrived, but the sleeplessness continued. His longtime friend from Puerto Rico and the big leagues, Victor Pellot Power, known on the mainland as Vic Power, the classy first baseman for the Cleveland Indians from the late 1950s to early 1960s, was brought along to serve as trainer. In Puerto Rico, trainer is a term for an instructor in fundamentals. As the longtime manager of Caguas in the winter league, Power had more experience running a ball club than Clemente. But he had his own troubles in Managua. He had gone to a restaurant for a Nicaraguan típico meal, and got a bone stuck in his throat while eating a supposedly boneless fish. The incident prompted two trips to the hospital and a local doctor’s suggestion to eat a pound of bananas, none of which helped much. With the disagreeable bone making him queasy, Power could sleep no more than Clemente. Early each morning, suffering together in the lobby, they read newspapers and talked baseball.

  Power and Clemente were brothers in many ways. They were charismatic, black, Puerto Rican, from modest backgrounds, talented ballplayers with inimitable style. Power’s pendulum swing at the plate, awaiting the pitch, the bat dangling vertically toward the ground, and his cool, jazzy, one-handed flair around first base were as distinctive as Clemente’s neck gyrations, basket catches, and looping underhanded tosses back to the infield. Each man had fierce pride, but Clemente’s was always on view, burning in his eyes, pounding in his chest, where as Power covered his with smiles, a rumbling laugh, and a signature response in his basso profundo voice to anything life brought his way, “Ohhhh, baby.” Power seemed to have an easier time dealing with people, which made him the more comfortable manager. You want everyone to play like you play, Power cautioned Clemente. “To manage baseball, you have to know what you have. How they run, how they hit, what kind of temperament they have. You have to know who is Mickey Mantle, who is Billy Martin”—Mantle’s hot-tempered Yankee teammate.

  Clemente knew best of all who was not Clemente. One morning, reading La Prensa, he was shocked to see a column by Edgard Tijerino describing a throw from the outfield by Cuban Armando Capiró, “which was capable of making Clemente blush.” Tijerino suggested a duel of arms between the two. This insulted Clemente, the very notion that anyone, let alone an amateur, might have an arm he would envy. Later that day, at the ballpark, he saw Tijerino before the game and summoned him to the dugout. It was the Nicaraguan sportswriter’s first encounter with Clemente, but a scene that would sound familiar to many North American writers who had covered him over the years. After the Pirates won the World Series in 1971, Clemente declared that the anger he had carried with him was gone at last, cleansed by a series that had allowed him to prove his greatness to the world. But some part of his proud disposition was immutable.

  “Hey, why the hell did you compare my arm with Capiró’s?” Clemente said urgently, his pain obvious. “I throw to get outs on third from the right-field corner in the huge Pirates stadium, and with Pete Rose sliding in. There is no comparison. You have to be more careful.” Tijerino tried to argue, to explain himself, but ended up saying that Clemente was right. That night, when Gil entered Clemente’s hotel room, he found him in his boxer shorts, as usual, still angry. Why did you do that? Gil asked. He could not understand why Clemente felt compelled to berate a local sportswriter about something so trivial. “When they say Babe Ruth hit over seven hundred home runs, I keep my mouth shut,” Clemente explained, meaning that he was not a home-run slugger. “But when they talk about throwing the ball, I can’t keep my mouth shut.”

  Days later, lobby-sitting with Vic Power early in the morning, Clemente read something else by Tijerino that set him off. The Dominican Republic had defeated Puerto Rico 4–1 the previous day, and in a strained effort to describe the brilliance of the Dominican pitcher, Tijerino had written, “Roberto Rodriguez, on an inspired night, was even en route to striking out the very Roberto Clemente . . .” Tijerino was in the press box that night when his colleague, Tomás Morales, told him to go down to the field because the Puerto Rican manager wanted a word with him.

  When Tijerino approached, Clemente rebuked him sternly. “I bat against Roberto Rodriguez with a bare hand,” he said. Mano limpia. He could hit the kid without a bat.

  Tijerino was now “
oh for two” with Clemente, but their relationship was not over. Perhaps the only thing that bothered Clemente more than being underestimated or misunderstood was not being given a chance to express himself. He had much to say, and in Nicaragua, Edgard Tijerino was the best means of saying it. One night Clemente invited the writer to his room at the Inter-Continental for a wide-ranging interview, greeting him in white pants and a flowery silk shirt. Vera was seated nearby. “The dialogue with Roberto was agitated that night,” Tijerino said later.

  They talked about why the Pirates lost to the Reds in the playoffs that year, after winning the World Series a season earlier, and about which team was better between the two Pirates championship teams of 1960 and 1971. Clemente said the 1972 Pirates actually had more talent than either. Then the subject turned to the treatment of Latin ballplayers. Clemente was done blistering Tijerino for his sloppy comparisons. He had a larger target, the North American press. “I attack it strongly, because since the first Latino arrived in the big leagues he was discriminated against without mercy,” Clemente said. “It didn’t matter that the Latino ballplayer was good, but for the mere fact of him not being North American he was marginalized . . . They have an open preference for North Americans. Mediocre players receive immense publicity while true stars are not highlighted as they deserve.” To make his point, Clemente talked not about his own long fight for recognition, but about Orlando Cepeda, his fellow Puerto Rican, and Juan Marichal, a Dominican, two stars now struggling at the end of their careers, whose flaws seemed more interesting to North American writers than their talents. “No one can show me a better pitcher than Marichal in the last fifty years,” Clemente said.

  Tijerino was sympathetic to the larger point, but believed objectively that Sandy Koufax was better than Marichal. “Koufax was a five-year pitcher,” Clemente responded. “Marichal has a notable regularity. He is a pitcher forever.” The problem, he said, was that Marichal would never be measured correctly.