Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (3 page)

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 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 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.

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. “Nobody 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.