Clemente: The Passion And Grace Of Baseball's Last Hero Part 1

Clemente.

The Pa.s.sion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero.

David Maraniss.

In memory of Elliott Maraniss, my wonderful dad, the sweet-swinging left hander.

from Abraham Lincoln High.

Good actions enn.o.ble us, we are the sons of our own deeds.

-MIGUEL DE CERVANTES.

PHOTO BY LINDA MARANISS.

Memory and Myth.

THE FAMILIAR SOUNDS OF MODERN BASEBALL, PINGS OF aluminum bats punctuating the steady drone of a crowd, can be heard from the street a half-block away. It is late on a Sunday afternoon in February, overcast and drizzly in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Inside the stadium, there is a game going on, the Escuela de Deportiva against Bayamn. Nothing special, just teenage boys playing ball, the way they do every afternoon, and then the right fielder from Deportiva scoops up a base hit and fires to second, his throw a bullet-low, hard, right on the bag. Groups of men huddle in the stands, talking, laughing, playing cards, barely paying attention, or so it seems until the throw. It elicits a murmur of recognition, and suddenly they come alive, stirred by communal memory. All fires are one fire, the novelist Julio Cortzar once wrote. And all arms are one arm. The throw from right field reminds them of the original, the unsurpa.s.sable arm of the man for whom the stadium is named, Roberto Clemente.

Beyond the stadium, closer to the street, stands a cenotaph thirty feet long and seven and a half feet high. It is the nearest thing to a headstone for Carolina's favorite son. On its three panels the sculptor Jose Buscaglia has etched the stations of the cross of Roberto Clemente's thirty-eight years on this earth. In the far left panel, Roberto is a babe, held in the arms of his mother in the barrio of San Antn, and his father is seen working in the nearby cane fields. In the far right panel, Clemente pa.s.ses from greatness into legend; first he is being honored for his three-thousandth hit, then his spirit is received by a figure of death in the Atlantic's watery grave, and finally his widow holds the plaque for his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. But the center panel is the most telling. There, between scenes of Clemente batting, running, fielding, throwing, visiting hospitals, and consoling the sick and the poor, he is depicted standing regal and alone, holding a lamb.

Memory and myth are entwined in the Clemente story. He has been dead for more than three decades, yet he remains vivid in the sporting consciousness while other athletes come and go, and this despite the fact that he played his entire career in relative obscurity, away from the mythmakers of New York and Los Angeles. Forty public schools, two hospitals, and more than two hundred parks and ballfields bear his name, from Carolina, Puerto Rico, where he was born, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he played, to far-off Mannheim, Germany. In the world of memorabilia, the demand for anything Clemente is second only to Mickey Mantle, and far greater than Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Juan Marichal, or any other black or Latin players. Extraordinary as he was, Clemente was not the greatest who ever played the game, yet there was something about him that elevated him into his own realm. Much of it had to do with the way he died. He was young. He went down in a plane crash. His body was lost to the sea, never found. He was on a mission of mercy, leaving his family on New Year's Eve to come to the aid of strangers. In Spanish, Clemente means merciful. Some of it had to do with the way he looked and played on the ball field, No. 21, perfectly cut in his Pirates uniform, a portrait of solemn beauty, with his defiant jaw and soulful eyes. And much of it had to do with the way he lived. In sainthood, his people put a lamb in his arms, but he was no saint, and certainly not docile. He was agitated, beautiful, sentimental, unsettled, sweet, serious, selfless, haunted, sensitive, contradictory, and intensely proud of everything about his native land, including himself. To borrow the words of the Puerto Rican poet Enrique Zorrilla, what burned in the cheeks of Roberto Clemente was "the fire of dignity."

1.

Something That Never Ends.

IT WAS LONG PAST MIDNIGHT IN MANAGUA, NICARAGUA, and Roberto Clemente could not sleep. Not sleeping at night was part of his routine, the same wherever he went. At his apartment at Chatham West in Pittsburgh, at his house atop the hill in Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico, on the team plane during late-night cross-country flights, at road-trip hotels in Chicago, St. Louis, or Cincinnati-at each of them equally he could not sleep. He might find rest after sunrise, under the covers, with the air conditioner turned full blast and the drapes shut and taped tight to the wall so no light could penetrate a blackened room. Or he might doze off at work after lunch, in some subterranean chamber of a stadium, dark and cool. In the old days at Forbes Field, he often slipped away from his teammates before a game and took a nap inside the vacant clubhouse of the football Steelers. Left-handed pitcher Juan Pizarro, his countryman and occasional teammate, found him there once and started calling him Old Sleepy Head.

The hours from one to five in the morning were another matter. Sleep rarely came to him then, and if by chance he did drift off, he might be startled back into consciousness by a nightmare. In one bad dream that had haunted him recently, he was hiding under a house, feeling grave danger. In another, he was on a cras.h.i.+ng plane. His wife, Vera, knew all about these recurring nightmares. She knew that he looked for omens and that he believed he would die young.

On this night, November 15, 1972, Vera was home in Puerto Rico with their three young boys. She would join Roberto in Managua in a few days. Until then he was on his own at the Hotel Inter-Continental. His friend, Osvaldo Gil, had the adjacent room, and at Clemente's insistence they kept the doors open between the two so they could come and go like family. Deep into the night, they stayed up talking, Roberto down to his boxer shorts. That was all he would wear in the hotel room, his sculpted mahogany torso at age thirty-eight still evoking a world-cla.s.s ballet dancer, with muscled shoulders rippling down to a narrow waist, thirty inches, the same measurement he had as a teenager, and powerful wrists, and hands so magical they were said to have eyes at their fingertips.

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 champions.h.i.+ps that were to begin in Nicaragua at noon that same day. A lawyer and Korean War veteran, Gil (p.r.o.nounced "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 champions.h.i.+ps, four batting t.i.tles, an MVP award, twelve Gold Gloves as a right fielder, leading the league in a.s.sists 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 superst.i.tion.

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 Muoz Marn, 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 Martn el Loco, a character in his hometown of Carolina. When he was home, Clemente looked out for Martn 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. Martn 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 j.a.pan, 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 inst.i.tutions. For the time being, forced by the national const.i.tution to cede the presidency to someone else, at least in t.i.tle, 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 sc.r.a.ppy 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed vast blocks of seats in all sections of the stadium and were scalping them for as much as eighty crdobas, 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 cartwheeled, 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 b.a.l.l.s-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, Jose Antonio Pagn at shortstop, and Juan Pizarro, the left-handed pitcher, but they failed to win the champions.h.i.+p, and the lasting memory from that trip was of a fan heaving an igua.n.a.like 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 21 in eleven innings, largely on the brilliance of their pitcher, a future major league right-hander named Dennis Martnez. 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 Cesar 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 cla.s.sy 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 tpico 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 ba.s.so 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 Capir, "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 h.e.l.l did you compare my arm with Capir'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 41 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, Toms 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 champions.h.i.+p 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.

Clemente took everything so seriously and would not give in, Tijerino wrote later. "Conversing with Clemente is something that never ends."

During his travels with the Pirates in the United States, Clemente had developed a routine of visiting sick children in National League cities. The hospital visits were rarely publicized, but ailing kids seemed to know about it everywhere. Before each road trip Clemente sorted his large pile of mail in the clubhouse and made a special stack for letters from children in cities where the Pirates were headed next. One morning in Nicaragua, he brought Osvaldo Gil and a few players along on a visit to El Retiro Hospital. There he met a wheelchair-bound twelve-year-old boy named Julio Parrales, who had lost one leg and mangled another playing on the railroad tracks.

Clemente could seem somber, reserved, cautious about letting strangers close to him, with pride bordering on arrogance. In Puerto Rico, some said he was orgulloso, meaning he had oversized pride of self. "n.o.body buys Roberto Clemente cheap! I have my pride! I am a hero to my people!" he had harrumphed one midsummer day in 1967 at Shea Stadium as he angrily rejected a film company's offer to pay him a hundred dollars to hit into a triple play for a scene in The Odd Couple. But he was also intuitive, looking for connections, and if something touched him, he reacted deeply, immediately, and took you in as part of his family. It didn't matter who you were to the rest of the world-Jewish accountant, Greek pie maker, black postman, shy teenager, barefoot Puerto Rican wanderer-if Clemente saw something, that was that. Family was everything to him. When he saw Julio Parrales he knelt by the wheelchair and said that for the next world tournament Julio would be the team batboy. "Don't worry, we are going to help you," he vowed, and then turned to Gil and said they had to raise the $700 needed to enable Parrales to walk with prosthetic legs. Each player on the Puerto Rican team would end up chipping in $10, the Cubans would donate $50, and Clemente would provide the rest. But before he left the hospital, Clemente said he would see Parrales in the dugout the next time he was in Nicaragua.

The streets of Managua were festive as December arrived, a celebratory spirit intensified by three weeks of good baseball and the approach of the Griteria de Maria festival and Christmas season. The favored Cubans won the tournament, the decisive victory coming in extra innings against the Americans, but their only loss had been to the home Nicaraguans, a glorious upset that led to a wild night of firecrackers, rifle shots, and honking cars in the crowded streets. There was no celebrating for the Puerto Rican team, which finished in the middle of the pack, beating only teams that had no baseball tradition. Gil thought Clemente might be so upset that he would never want to manage again, but it seemed just the opposite. Clemente talked to him about what they had to do better next time, as though it were a.s.sumed that he would come back as manager.

Clemente would have to consult his wife about it, no doubt. He talked to her before he did most things, or so it seemed to Gil. "You ask your wife for advice too much," Gil told him one night. Clemente said he relied on her because she was settled, tranquil, even-tempered, and had a better sense than he did about whether people were trustworthy. Anyway, he needled Gil, the comment reflected the sort of stereotypical macho s.e.xism that had held people down throughout history. "The way you think about women is what happened with the major leagues and black players," Clemente said. "They were afraid that if they let black players in, they'd take over. That's the way you are with women."

One day in the old city Clemente visited a luggage shop and bought a new briefcase made of alligator skin. The handle was ghoulish; styled with the head of a baby alligator. Back at the hotel, Vic Power boomed with good-natured laughter at his friend's purchase. Clemente worried that the briefcase looked too feminine and said he would cut off the alligator head. No, Power said, leave it like that. Maybe it would be good luck. A few days later, at Vera's suggestion, the Clementes took a side trip to Granada on Big Lake Nicaragua. When they entered a restaurant in the old colonial town, Roberto encountered another stranger with whom he connected immediately. It was a trained spider monkey who greeted patrons as they walked into the establishment.

"That's the monkey we need," Clemente told Vera. She knew he was serious. Before leaving Ro Piedras, he had promised their youngest son, Ricky, that they would come home from Nicaragua with a pet monkey for him. Clemente found the proprietor and said that he wanted the monkey. But the owner was reluctant to part with it. "Anything you want, don't worry about the amount," Clemente insisted. "I need that monkey." The deal was done and he left with a new family member, a primate known thereafter as Tefilo Clemente.

Clemente flew back to Puerto Rico on December 8 bearing so many gifts that he had to call a driver to haul the cache from the airport. The monkey for Ricky, the briefcase with the little alligator head, dresses and blouses for Vera, presents for his parents and his three sons, Robert.i.to, Luisito, and Ricky, and brothers, nieces, nephews, and friends. One of his prized gifts was a red and white hammock that he brought back for Rafael Hernndez Coln of the Popular Democratic Party. To Clemente's delight, the young liberal, a protege of Luis Muoz Marn, had just been elected governor of the commonwealth. Red and white were the colors of his party, and of the Puerto Rican flag. Clemente had been invited to play a key role in the inaugural ceremonies coming up in a few weeks in Old San Juan, but after much deliberation respectfully declined, following the advice of Osvaldo Gil, who also supported Hernndez Coln but said the partisans.h.i.+p might needlessly alienate half of Roberto's baseball fans.

All seemed well back home after that. Vic Power ate a juicy steak, and suddenly the bone problem in his throat disappeared. Clemente loaded his family into the car for a trip to see his parents at the house he bought for them on Calle Nicolas Aguayo in the El Comandante neighborhood of Carolina. All the boys excited, the great ballplayer exuberant, his magical fingers on the steering wheel, a Hohner harmonica held by a neck brace humming and wailing at his lips, and the newest member of the family, the tailed one, Tefilo, screeching, dancing to the music, and scampering across the shoulders and legs of the little ones as the gold Cadillac Eldorado rolled down the streets of Roberto Clemente's hometown.

2.

Where Momen Came From.

IT HAS RAINED A LOT SINCE THEN, AS THE PROVERB goes. This was the summer of 1934, a time of relentless heat and hards.h.i.+p in Puerto Rico. Twelve miles to the southeast of the capital city of San Juan, in Carolina's rural barrio of San Antn, a large family was about to grow by one. The household of Melchor and Luisa Clemente was crowded enough already. Luisa had two teenage children, Luis and Rosa Oquendo, from a first husband who died and left her widowed at an early age, and she and Melchor had produced four children of their own: Osvaldo, Justino, Andres, and Anairis. Three cousins also stayed with them in the five-room wooden house at kilometer seven on Road 887, and sugarcane workers stopped by every day for meals. With her mother pregnant again, the youngest girl, Anairis, announced that she wanted to have a little brother, but had one other wish. She hoped that he would come out white. On the Sat.u.r.day afternoon of August 18, the baby was born, and Roberto Clemente Walker was soon presented to Anairis. "Here he is-a little dark."

The story has been told for seven decades, accompanied by laughter. Color of skin is noted in Puerto Rico-there is racism there-but it tends to be hidden and silent, with a history far different from the States. When Roberto was born in Carolina, a U.S. citizen by birthright, no laws on the island prohibited people of different shades from eating at the same restaurant, sleeping in the same hotel, or dating and marrying. Within five years of his birth, after a professional winter baseball league was formed, many talented players from the Negro Leagues, banned from organized ball in the United States, were hired to play for the San Juan Senadores and Santurce Cangrejeros and were hailed as stars by Puerto Ricans of all ages and colors. The elite of San Juan and Ponce tended to be white and boast of Spanish heritage, but being "a little dark" was not disqualifying.

Luisa's family, the Walkers, came from Loiza, the next town east from Carolina and the nave of blackness on the island. Runaway slaves, known as cimarrones, hid from the Spanish Army there in the dense, tangled mangrove swamps off the Atlantic coast, and formed their own community. In Puerto Rican folklore, there is a story that when slavery was abolished in 1873, a messenger bringing word to Loiza was killed in front of a big tree, and for years thereafter the tree dropped sc.r.a.ps of paper like leaves, pieces of a puzzle that former slaves tried in vain to fit together to decipher the lost message of freedom. For Luisa, the message could be found in her Baptist religion and favorite hymn, which she taught all her children. Life is nothing. Life is fleeting. Only G.o.d makes man happy.

Melchor Clemente, already fifty-one when his youngest son was born, grew up in Gurabo, called the city of stairs, in the interior foothills to the south of Carolina. In many ways he was a man of the previous century. Slavery had ended only ten years before his birth. During his childhood, until he turned fifteen in 1898, Puerto Rico was still under Spanish domain. His relatives were poor farmers and sugarcane workers of black and Taino Indian blood. While Luisa had converted from Catholic to Baptist with her family as a child, Melchor was "not very Catholic," as his son Justino later described him. This meant that he was not particularly religious, though his given name came from the Three Kings, Melchor, Baltazar, and Gaspar, revered in Puerto Rico as magis of the Christmas story. Melchor Clemente's gift was not frankincense, gold, or myrrh, but sugar; he held a job as foreman for the sugarcane processing company, Central Victoria.

Sugar then was nearing the end of a four-century run as the economic mainstay of Puerto Rico. The first sugar mill had been built in 1523, only three decades after Columbus reached the island on his second voyage to the New World. More sugar was produced in Puerto Rico in the year of Clemente's birth than ever before, exceeding a million tons, but still the industry was dying. Devastating hurricanes, lower prices from world compet.i.tion, deplorable working conditions in the fields, and a protectionist U.S. Congress-all were conspiring against it. In an effort to help mainland growers that year, lawmakers in Was.h.i.+ngton, treating Puerto Rico like a colony it could manipulate at will, pa.s.sed legislation that set limits on exports, imposed higher taxes, and paid bonuses to landowners not to grow sugarcane. Jobs were still there, but work was seasonal and unpredictable, and most laborers were paid less than full-time scale. One study showed that in 1934 sugarcane cutters, with the most grueling job, averaged $5.76 a week. Foremen brought home twice that amount, but that still left Melchor Clemente little more than a dollar a week for each member of his extended family.

By the standards of Depression-era Carolina, the Clementes were not poor. They had food, shelter, electricity, clothing, and shoes. Rainwater for drinking was collected in a water box on the kitchen roof. Everything plain inside: iron beds, one bathroom, built of concrete; bare white walls, furniture of wood and pajilla, rolled corn leaf. Bedrooms overcrowded, some children sleeping in the living room. When they were old enough, ten or twelve, the children earned pennies bringing pails of ice water to workers in the canebrake behind the house. Luisa brought in extra money sewing and making lunches for Melchor's workers. A front room in the house served as a neighborhood grocery where they sold rice, eggs, milk, flour, and, on weekends, meat. Luisa was a dignified woman, correct and literate, reading her Bible, always finely dressed, and not bulky, but she had muscular shoulders and arms with which she could lift the carca.s.s of a freshly slaughtered cow from a wheelbarrow and butcher it into cuts of beef. (A powerful right arm was something she pa.s.sed along to her youngest son. When people later asked about his awe-inspiring throws from right field, he would say, You should see my mother. At age eighty, she could still fling a baseball from the mound to home plate.) Roberto's earliest days were shaded by tragedy. He was still an infant when Anairis died from hideous burns. Luisa Clemente had two cooking stoves at her house, one in the kitchen, for family meals, and a larger one outside on the patio, where she cooked for the sugarcane workers. Known as a fogn, the outdoor stove burned firewood inside a pit made of three large rocks. One weekday afternoon, when only the women and children were in the house, Anairis was playing near the fogn and a can of gasoline spilled onto the fire and the whoosh of flames flashed onto her silk dress. Luisa took her to the munic.i.p.al hospital in Carolina and stayed with her day and night. Little Anairis died three days later, burns covering 90 percent of her body. The hospital sent a man out to Central Victoria to give Melchor the sad news. The messenger's name was Flor Zabala, which meant nothing at the time, but later would prove to be a great coincidence. It was the father of Roberto's future wife, a woman he would not meet for another thirty years.

One husband lost, now a daughter. Luisa tried to hide her pain, but sometimes late at night her son Justino saw her crying alone when she thought no one was watching. Roberto was too young to know his sister, but for decades after her death she remained with him. Here she is, he would say. I can feel Anairis at my side. She was part of the mysticism of his life. Clemente was haunted by fire. He had been too young to help his sister, but years later, when he was twelve, he saved a man who had crashed in Carolina by running across a highway and pulling him from the burning wreckage of his car.

From a young age, Roberto had his own way of doing things. He was pensive, intelligent, and could not be rushed. He wanted to know how and why. His most common phrase was "moment.i.to, moment.i.to," when he was interrupted or asked to do something. Time out. Wait a minute. He said moment.i.to so often that Flora, one of the older cousins who often took care of him, shortened it and started calling him "Momen." To his family and Puerto Rican friends, at school and on the ball fields, Momen was his nickname from then on.

The sprawl of metropolitan San Juan eventually would reach Carolina and turn much of it into a noisy jumble of auto shops and storefronts, but it was a very different place, slow and pastoral, during Roberto's childhood in the thirties and forties. The choke of urban life seemed far away. There was an orange grove across the street from the Clemente house, and in the other direction, behind them, a lane led back to vast fields of sugarcane. Road 887 saw little traffic, so quiet that Roberto and his childhood friend Ricardo Vicenti, who lived across the way near the orange trees, spent much of their time playing improvised variations of baseball in the dusty street. Baseball was Roberto's favorite sport, his obsession, from an early age. "When I was a little kid, the only thing I used to do was play ball all the time," Clemente recalled during an interview decades later. "With a paper ball, with a rubber ball, with a tennis ball." Sometimes the ball was a tin can, emptied of beans or tomato sauce, or a lumpy sphere made of string and old rags. Often, they hit fungoes using a broomstick as the bat and a bottle cap as the ball. But it was always baseball. Rosa Semprit, a neighbor who walked by the Clemente house on her way to school, remembered that every time she saw Roberto outside he was throwing something; even if he was alone, he would be tossing a ball against a wall.

There was not that much else for a boy to do in the barrio of San Antn. The beaches of the Atlantic were ten miles north, and El Yunque, the exotic rainforest, stood fifteen miles further east. On a clear day, the breeze carried a scent of salt.w.a.ter from one direction and the mountains were visible in another, but without a car both were too far away. Many years, the lone trip to the beach as a family came on the Fourth of July, when much of the neighborhood traveled by bus caravan to Isla Verde for the day. For local entertainment, movies were projected onto a wall inside a ranch house down the street. Children attended in packs and sat on hard wooden benches, laughing at grainy movies, a few from Hollywood but most in Spanish and produced in Mexico, black-and-white short films starring the comedian Cantinflas.

The adults walked to work. Melchor was a regular figure along the back roads, a short man with straw hat and machete, trooping miles at a time to the fields to the west or processing plant to the north, occasionally riding an old country mare. In later years, he also carried a .38 revolver and transistor radio wherever he went. Radios were a family trademark. Melchor was a man of habits, like his son. He was said to eat precisely eight hard-boiled eggs a day. He was gone from dawn until after nightfall, so his children did not see much of him, though Roberto, as an adult, spoke nostalgically of family gatherings that included Melchor. He grew up, Clemente once said, "with people who really had to struggle." His mother never went to a show, never learned how to dance. "But even the way we used to live, I was so happy, because my brothers and my father and mother, we used to get together at night and we would sit down and make jokes and eat whatever we have to eat. And this was something that was wonderful to me." His older brother Justino, known to the family as Matino, had one memory less wonderful. His father was loving, but also strict, and punished the boys with a horsewhip. Melchor gave his sons this advice about nonviolence: "Don't hit anyone, but don't let anyone hit you, either. I'd prefer to see you in jail than in a coffin." There was a tradition of dueling in Carolina that stretched back into the nineteenth century and was reflected in one of the town's old nicknames, El Pueblo de los Tumbabrazos-the town of those who cut off arms.

The old man knew nothing about baseball. The sport had reached the island from Cuba even before U.S. Marines came ash.o.r.e in July 1898, but Melchor never had time for it as a young man and had not learned the basics. Once, watching from the stands, he felt sorry for his son for having to run all the way around the bases after hitting a ball while most of the other batters were allowed to return to the bench and sit down after sprinting to first base. But Roberto was not the first or only Clemente to love the game. Matino, who was seven years older, played first base in the top amateur league, a slick fielder and feared line-drive hitter. Roberto admired his older brother, and always insisted that Matino was the best ballplayer in the family but came along too soon, just at the cusp of the segregated era in professional baseball in the States. His career was cut short in any case when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in October 1950 and served three years, including eleven months in Korea with C Company of the 10th Engineers Combat Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division. Matino was Momen's first baseball instructor, and he maintained that role, offering advice and counsel long after his little brother became a major league star.

Baseball was the dominant sport on the island, followed by boxing, horse racing, track and field, volleyball, and basketball. Soccer, by far the most popular sport elsewhere in Latin America, had not caught on in Puerto Rico, another sign of how it was influenced by the United States. The mainland seemed remote to young Clemente, and baseball there even more unreachable, but he followed winter league baseball in Puerto Rico religiously. In the San Juan area, loyalties were divided between the San Juan Senadores (Senators) and Santurce Cangrejeros (Crabbers), a split that in many ways mirrored the one between the Yankees and Dodgers in New York. The Cangrejeros were grittier, beloved by cabdrivers, hotel workers, factory hands, and much like the Dodgers, they had a strong black following. Josh Gibson, star of the Negro Leagues, played for Santurce in the early years, followed by Roy Campanella, Ray Dandridge, Willard Brown, and Junior Gilliam, whose range at second prompted Cangrejeros fans to call him the Black Sea. But Clemente grew up rooting for the San Juan Senadores. His loyalties were shaped by his idolizing of Monte Irvin, San Juan's graceful outfielder. Irvin's color kept him out of the majors for most of his career, until 1949, when the Giants brought him up, but he was a star for the Newark Eagles in the Negro Leagues for a decade before that, and tore up the Puerto Rican winter league for several seasons in the mid-forties, when Clemente was eleven to fifteen, formative years for any baseball fan.

The Senadores and Cangrejeros played in the same stadium, Sixto Escobar (named for a bantamweight boxing champ), just off the ocean on Puerta de Tierra, the long finger of land leading to Old San Juan. The way the winter league worked, there were only three games a week, one on Sat.u.r.day and a doubleheader on Sunday. Irvin said later that he enjoyed playing there because of the beauty of the island, the leisurely schedule, the excitement of the fans, the first-rate compet.i.tion, and above all, the fact that "we were treated much better there than in the States." If a black American hit an important home run, fans might pa.s.s a hat through the stands to collect an impromptu bonus for the player. When they went out to eat in Old San Juan or the restaurant strip in Condado, they were treated as celebrities and offered meals on the house.

When he could, Momen caught the bus from Carolina on weekends to hang out at Sixto Escobar with swarms of other kids. Juan Pizarro, who lived much closer, near Loiza Avenue in Santurce, never had money to get inside, but s.h.i.+mmied up a palm tree to watch the games. Clemente sometimes had a quarter from his father. He used a dime for the bus and fifteen cents for a ticket. His goal was to get there early enough to watch Monte Irvin glide through the throng outside on the way to play. "I never had enough nerve, I didn't want to even look at him straight in the face," Clemente remembered. "But when he pa.s.sed by I would turn around and look at him because I idolized him." Just by being there, hanging around, as shy as he was, Clemente eventually struck up a friends.h.i.+p with Irvin. And Irvin made sure that his young fan got in to watch the game, even without a ticket. "I used to give him my suit bag to carry into the stadium so he could get in for free," Irvin recalled. From a seat in the bleachers, Clemente studied everything about his hero: how he looked in a uniform, how he walked, how he ran, how he hit, and especially how he threw. More than half a century later, still trim, dignified, white-haired, Irvin could bring back that mentoring relations.h.i.+p in his mind's eye. "Yeah, I taught Roberto how to throw," Irvin said. "Of course, he quickly surpa.s.sed me."

By the time he was fifteen, Clemente was starring at shortstop in a softball league on a team sponsored by Sello Rojo, a rice-packaging firm. He was fast, had a gun for an arm, and surprising power for a lanky teenager. Sello Rojo (Red Seal) was coached by Roberto Marn, a rice salesman who became his baseball guardian. By the next year Clemente was also playing hardball, mostly outfield, for the Juncos Mules, a top amateur team in Carolina, and occasionally partic.i.p.ated in track and field events at Julio Vizcarrando Coronado High School, running the 440 meters and throwing the javelin. The javelin, though he threw it only a few times, became an iconic symbol in the mythology of Clemente. It represented his heroic nature, since the javelin is a.s.sociated with Olympian feats. On a more practical level it served to further explain his strong throwing arm.

Marn's former wife, Maria Isabel Cceres, taught history and physical education at the high school and also watched out for Clemente. Cceres developed a friends.h.i.+p with her student that deepened over the years, but her early impressions stayed with her. During the first day of cla.s.s, when she invited students to choose seats, Roberto settled inconspicuously in the back row. He spoke quietly when called upon, not looking up. But "despite his shyness," she later wrote, "and the sadness around his eyes, there was something poignantly appealing about him."

While Cceres noticed the sadness in Roberto's eyes, Marn focused on his baseball skills. As a bird-dog scout for Santurce, he pa.s.sed the word to the owner of the Cangrejeros, Pedrin Zorrilla, known affectionately as the Big Crab. Zorrilla had grown up in Manat, to the west of San Juan, and still spent much time there. He was always on the move around the island, looking for a ball game, searching for talent. In the fall of 1952, Marn told him that the next time the Juncos came to play Manat, there was a kid that Zorrilla had to look at for his professional club. Zorrilla scribbled the name on a card and stuck it in his pocket. A few days later, he was in the stands watching a game. First he saw a Juncos player smack a line shot against the fence 345 feet away and fly around first and make a perfect slide into second. Later in the game, as he was talking with friends in the stands, he took notice when the same player sprinted back to the fence, grabbed a drive in deep center field, and made a perfect throw to second to double-up a runner.

"That boy, I must have his name," Zorrilla said.

"Roberto Clemente," came the answer.

"Clemente?" Zorrilla fished into his s.h.i.+rt pocket and pulled out the card. It was the name he had written down at Roberto Marn's suggestion.

When the 1952 season began on October 15, the youngest Cangrejero, freshly signed by the Big Crab, was Roberto Clemente, barely eighteen and still in high school. He was signed for $40 a week, and all he had to do was learn how to hit the breaking ball, low and away.

Less than a month later, on the Sat.u.r.day of November 6, the Brooklyn Dodgers held a tryout at Sixto Escobar. On hand was one of Brooklyn's top scouts, Al Campanis, who was managing the Cienfuegos Elephants in Cuba that winter. Clemente was one of about seventy players at the tryout, and the obvious standout, throwing bullets from center to third and displaying excellent time in the sixty-yard dash. "If the sonof.a.gun can hold a bat in his hands, I'm gonna sign this guy," Campanis said before Clemente stepped into the batter's box. On the mound was one of Zorrilla's crafty old pitchers, Pantalones Santiago. Clemente stroked line drives all over the field. When Campanis filled out the official Brooklyn scouting report, this is how it read: SCOUT REPORT.

Club SANTURCE.

League PORTO RICAN Pos. OF Age 18 Hgt 5'11" Wgt 175.

Bats R Throws R Name CLEMENTE ROBERT.

Arm A+ GOOD CARRY.

Accuracy A Fielding.

A GOOD AT THIS STAGE.

Reactions A Hitting A TURNS HEAD BUT IMPROVING.

Power A+ Running Speed Base Running A Definite Prospect? YES Has Chance? ____ Fill-In? ____ Follow ____ Physical Condition (Build, Size, Agility, etc.) WELL BUILT-FAIR SIZE- GOOD AGILITY.

Remarks:.

WILL MATURE INTO BIG MAN. ATTENDING HIGH SCHOOL BUT PLAYS WITH SANTURCE. HAS ALL THE TOOLS AND LIKES TO PLAY. A REAL GOOD LOOKING PROSPECT! HE HAS WRITTEN THE COMMISSIONER REQUESTING PERMISSION TO PLAY ORGANIZED BALL.

Report By:.

AL CAMPANIS.