Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (44 page)

The question of retirement was broached by Sam Nover of WIICTV, who recorded an hour-long conversation with Clemente on October 8, a wide-ranging interview that was perhaps the most revealing of his career. “Bobby, at thirty-eight years old, and eighteen years in the major leagues, and having accomplished everything you wanted to accomplish in baseball, I guess the thought enters your mind that one of these days it’s going to be all over,” Nover began. “Do you have any idea now when it will be over, and when it comes, what are you going to do with your life? What would you like to do?”

Offering no hints that he planned to retire, Clemente instead took the opportunity to delve into his philosophy of life and happiness. “People are always asking me, ‘How much money do you have? Are
you secure?’ I don’t worry about that. The only thing I worry about is being happy. If I can live. If I can for example have my health I can work. I don’t care if I’m a janitor. I don’t care if I drive a cab. As long as I have a decent job, I will work. I know these players that they’ve been rich and they lost everything they have and they kill themselves because of the money. To me, I can be a person like me—I make a lot of money, but at the same time I live the life of the common fellow. I am not a big shot. If you go outside the ball park you are never going to see me trying to put on a show or pull attention, because that’s the way I am. I am a shy fellow and you see me with the same people all the time. If you want to be my friend you have to prove to me that you want to be my friend and you want to be aware that I need lots of time when I play baseball. Now in the wintertime we can be as slow as you want, but in the summertime we have to call it short. So I would say I don’t worry about what I am going to do after I stop playing baseball. Probably I will stay in some capacity in baseball. But I don’t worry one way or the other. I just worry that I be healthy and live long enough to educate my sons and make them respect people. And to me this is my biggest worry: to live for my kids to be people that people look at them and respect them and they respect other people.”

Clemente had a busy winter ahead. He had been hired on a three-year contract by Eastern Airlines as a special sports consultant, which meant the company could use his name on promotions and call on him to speak at conventions and sales meetings. In return, Eastern would sponsor baseball clinics for underprivileged children in Puerto Rico, which Clemente viewed as a precursor to his larger dream for a sports city. The planning had already begun for clinics to be held in October and early November in Carolina, Ponce, Mayagüez, Arecibo, and Aguadilla. Clemente had also asked his friend Ramiro Martínez to help him organize a Bob Prince Day celebration for later in October.
¡Arriba!
Clemente believed that Prince had always treated him fairly, and he wanted to show his appreciation by honoring the Gunner in San Juan. (When the time came, Clemente showed how deeply he cared for Prince by presenting him with one of his most cherished possessions, the Silver Bat he was given for winning his first batting title in 1961.) And there was more: Osvaldo Gil, president of the Puerto
Rico amateur baseball federation, had asked him to manage the Puerto Rican team at the world championships in Nicaragua, a job that would take three weeks in November and early December.

On October 14,
the night before he left the mainland for his off-season in Puerto Rico, Clemente joined several teammates for Al Oliver’s twenty-sixth birthday party at his apartment in Pittsburgh’s Greentree section. “Everybody’s lips were moving,” Oliver later said of the party. “That’s one thing about the Pirates, all of us can talk. We enjoy talking and we really liked each other . . . Roberto I remember was bringing a sermon. He always did. He gave sermonettes. This time he was talking about life, people getting along, that’s all he talked about, how he just can’t understand why people can’t get along. I was in his amen corner. He had a tendency to use his hands when he spoke, and he had a passion about what he believed in that was so obvious.”

Late that night, before they scattered, Oliver asked his teammates to gather around him. “Okay, let’s all take a picture,” he said. “It might be the last time we’ll be together.”

THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, AT FIVE-THIRTY ON A
Friday afternoon, President Richard Nixon drafted a congratulatory note to his friend Howard Hughes. Nixon was in Florida, unwinding at the Southern White House compound on Key Biscayne that he shared with his loyal friend Charles (Bebe) Rebozo. Hughes, the billionaire
recluse, was in Managua, Nicaragua, holed up in a seventh-floor suite at the Hotel Inter-Continental, where he oversaw his business enterprises from a darkened room, dealing exclusively with male secretaries, security guards, and nurses, who at his insistence had to be Mormons. It was the same hotel that Roberto Clemente had left fourteen days earlier after managing Puerto Rico’s team in the world amateur baseball championships.

Nixon and Hughes were longtime acquaintances, the knot of their connection tightened by power and money. Hughes had ingratiated himself with the Nixon family by once making a $205,000 loan to the politician’s brother, Donald. He also had funneled a hundred thousand dollars in secret donations to Nixon’s recently completed 1972 reelection campaign (though the existence of those donations would not be revealed publicly until Senate Watergate Committee hearings a year later). The campaign money arrived in briefcases full of hundred-dollar bills, and the person to whom a Hughes aide handed the cash was none other than Bebe Rebozo.

The President considered his friendship with Hughes so important that he wanted his message delivered in person by the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, Turner B. Shelton. A written note had become necessary because Nixon—even with one of the world’s most sophisticated communications systems at his disposal—could not get a telephone call through to the obsessive-compulsive germ-freak who was hiding from the world up in his cave-like hotel suite. The occasion was the approach of Hughes’s seventieth birthday, or so Nixon thought. There was mystery even to the inception of Howard Hughes: while his commonly stated birthday was December 24, 1905, court documents in Texas recorded another date, September 24. In either case, Nixon was wrong about the age. Hughes was sixty-seven.

“Threescore years and ten is a major milestone in any man’s life, and you especially have much to look back on with pride and much to look forward to with pleasure from this vantage point,” Nixon wrote. “I’m sorry that circumstances don’t permit me to congratulate you by telephone on this important birthday, as I had wished to, but I trust that the warmth of my good wishes can be conveyed by this means as well. Not only have I greatly valued your support, but I also have enormous
respect for the contributions you have made to the nation during the course of a long and brilliant career. Pat joins me in wishing you a very happy birthday, and many more to come. Cordially, Richard Nixon.”

The birthday greeting was sent from Key Biscayne up to the White House and then conveyed by telex from the Situation Room down to the ambassador’s residence in Managua. Shelton was to hand-carry it to the hotel the next morning. It never happened.

This was the start of a joyous weekend in Managua, the height of Christmas season. Colored lights festooned the shops along Avenida Centrál and glowed from the pyramid-shaped hotel up on the hill.
Holiday revelers were out strolling along the narrow streets of the old city late into the night. For days, it had been hot and oddly still, following the worst drought of the century, but now, after midnight in the first minutes of December 23, a sudden wind blew in, cold and strong. The animals could tell. And Pedro Chamorro, with the alert instincts of an opposition newspaper editor on guard against danger, also noticed something. The leaves rustled as if in warning, he thought. Then came the first tremor and the earth shuddered side to side. Soon a second rumble, more up and down than horizontal, like some gargantuan creature bursting to the surface from deep underground. Later a third quake, again up and down, more violent than the second—and in a thunderous spasm the city collapsed on itself. The temblor, registering 6.5 on the Richter scale, flattened 350 square blocks in two horrific hours, pipes erupting, fires flashing, debris and soot choking the air, people running, staggering, screaming, ripping off their burning clothes, dazed, blood everywhere. The clock atop the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception at the epicenter of the earthquake stopped at exactly twelve twenty-seven.

When the oscillating began, Ambassador Shelton was at his residence in the El Retiro section on a hill above town and had just tuned his radio to listen to the news. Chairs started flying, paintings, small tables, glassware, anything loose. The lights went out. He dashed upstairs to check on his wife, who was safe, then retreated to his study, where he had an emergency generator and radio. Within minutes, he learned that the American embassy had been in the vast destruction
zone. His secretary, Rose Marie Orlich, had been trapped inside, one among the probable thousands of victims. Shelton sent a Morse code message that made its way to the State Department’s relay station in suburban Washington.
Embassy destroyed. Will require help. More later.

Nicaragua’s military leader, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was next door, inside his sprawling ranch house with his wife, Hope, and the three youngest of their five children. At the first tremor they ran from the house into an alley. The second and powerful third tremors bounced them around so much, Somoza later said, that “we thought we were pieces of ice in a cocktail shaker.” When the rumbling ended, Somoza climbed into a car he used as supreme commander of the Armed Forces of Nicaragua and began working the radio, contacting police and guard headquarters. He learned that the guard building downtown had been destroyed, with massive casualties, and the national communications center, housed in the presidential palace, also had been knocked out of commission. He decided to set up emergency headquarters at his ranch house, which suffered only minor damage. Somoza was not the president of Nicaragua—he had relinquished that title temporarily to satisfy a constitutional requirement—but there was no doubt about who ran the country. Earlier in the month, in fact, the Nixon administration had given him the security protection of a head of state when he visited the Kennedy Space Center to watch the night launch of Apollo 17, the last manned flight to the moon. Now, with the earthquake crisis, Somoza dropped all pretensions and seized full control.

Over at the Inter-Continental, there was much commotion in the postquake darkness. With its squat base and pyramid shape, the building had not collapsed, though there were several cracks and the top floors listed slightly. The elevators were useless because of the power outage. Guests escaped down emergency stairwells, weaving their way past junked furniture that was being stored on the landings of several floors. Julie Sinkey, a Pan Am stewardess, scrambled down the steps and outside in her nightclothes. She had been asleep, and the rumbling split apart a wall so that when she rose from bed she could see the people in the room next door. Somehow, on the way out, she had
remembered to bring along her ten-dollar camera, and from the hillside she took pictures of the inferno raging below in the old center of town. Howard Hughes was said to have had a fear of dying in a natural disaster, but when this one struck he remained so unruffled that his staff had trouble persuading him to leave his protective suite. “He was cool, so cool,” recalled aide John Eckersley. “Everyone was saying we must evacuate immediately, but he said no. He wanted to be sure it was absolutely necessary.” His delay gave aides time to pack his clothes and medicines, which were scattered about the suite. He was so frail that they carried him down the darkened stairwell and placed him in a Mercedes-Benz limousine in the hotel parking lot. At dawn, they drove him to the nearby residence of Somoza, the man who ten months earlier had invited him to use Nicaragua as his hideaway when he had scooted from the Bahamas. The strongman general and phobic billionaire had a few things in common, foremost that they were both friends of the President of the United States.

•   •   •

The Clementes, at their house on the hill in Río Piedras, awoke on December 23 to news of the deadly quake. To them this was not some distant tragedy, but so close in time and memory that it felt like a family disaster. The old city, the shops where Roberto had bought fine clothes for Vera, all in ruins. What happened to the many people he had met during his more than three weeks in Nicaragua? The merchants, baseball fans, restaurateurs, the workers and farmers who reminded him so much of the poor in Carolina, the ones to whom he had given coins every morning. And the young boy at the hospital waiting for artificial legs to be fitted so that he could be the Puerto Rican amateur baseball team’s batboy next year—what happened to him? “As soon as we heard about the earthquake early that morning we were very upset because we met some very nice people down there and felt like we lost someone—you know, a relative or someone. We felt very involved with this,” Vera Clemente said later. Roberto wanted to know more than the San Juan media could tell him. Friends at a local radio station said they had no direct communications to Nicaragua.