Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (53 page)

Manny Sanguillen skipped the service because he preferred to be in a boat off Punta Maldonado all day helping the search teams. Sangy kept churning and bobbing in the dismal sea; an expression of loss deeper than any public statement. Eight Navy scuba divers were on the scene, going deep in pairs fifteen minutes at a time. They found small, scattered pieces of aircraft in 120 feet of water and were able to recover parts of the forward cockpit. About two-hundred yards away, the cutter
Sagebrush
appeared to locate larger pieces of wreckage; the divers would have to wait until the next day to confirm it. There were also reports of another body floating in a coral pocket closer to shore, but turbulent waters kept divers away at first, and when they reached the area there was nothing.

In keeping with her daily ritual, Vera had returned to Piñones Beach in the morning with friends and relatives. She was there for the commotion over the body sighting. No sign of Roberto, dead or alive, only rags and sticks. On the way back, she got trapped in a traffic jam on the clogged roads and never made it to the memorial mass in Carolina. It was not a funeral or burial mass that she missed, there was no body to bury, and there would be another memorial service a few days later, at the stadium, open to everyone. Vera did reach the house on the hill in time to host the Pittsburgh delegation early that evening. She was standing in the lush living room, surrounded by relatives, as she greeted the visitors one by one, expressing thanks to each of them.

Les Banos, the team photographer, had worried on the plane about what he would say when he saw Vera. “I thought about it all the way,” he said later. “Then I saw her and said, ‘I’ve lost my best friend.’ And she said, ‘So have I.’” The evening was soft and calm. From the balcony
of the house, visitors could see the ocean where the DC-7 had gone down. Steve Blass had felt so much already, but from a distance. This was the real thing. “Vera is there. The boys are there. The emotions are like a raw vein.” Dock Ellis, always with something to say, was now somber and shaken. Al Oliver had contained himself throughout the day. Now he thought about how Clemente had to die for people to realize what an uncommon man he was, and how Roberto reminded him of his father, who had died on the very day that Scoop, as he was known, got called up to the major leagues. Clemente and his dad were strong individualists who carried themselves with dignity and talked about life the same way. “I probably have not broke down more than once or twice in life, but I was hurt bad,” Oliver said later. “The team went over to the house and reality set in. I was just standing there thinking about it. All of a sudden tears started rolling.”

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By the end of that weekend the search team, reinforced with more divers and sophisticated sonar and salvage equipment, had located most everything that was to be found. First they came across significant portions of the cockpit, with the pilot seat attached, instruments and electrical wiring dangling freely, along with some fuselage sections and melted medical equipment. Behind the pilot seat, divers recovered a shirt and trousers with a wallet inside that belonged to Jerry Hill. Then they found the tail section intact, from the tip to the large cargo loading doors, with the tail number N500AE clearly visible. About 150 feet away from the tail they encountered a twenty-five-foot section of one wing, with the landing gear attached and in the down position.

Following an underwater line perpendicular to the tail section, they spotted three engines, all separated from the wings. The No. 1 engine showed nothing unusual. On the No. 2 engine, two propellers were bent and one sheared off. These remnants offered more clues to National Transportation Safety Board investigators in determining the cause of the crash. Arthur Rivera’s DC-7 was a death trap even before it rolled down Runway 7, but it appeared from the wreckage clues that there were some final errors. Trying to fly a previously damaged and
untested plane that was overloaded and imbalanced, it seemed that Hill had overboosted the engines, pushing them beyond their limits. His crewmates, who were to monitor the instruments and throttles and perhaps could have prevented the overboosting, were not trained for the task.

The seers and psychics were less effective zeroing in on Roberto Clemente. Rumors and false sightings continued. They were no closer to finding him than was his youngest son, little Ricky, who picked up the telephone and pretended that he was talking to his father. No closer than the mourners who started rowing out from the beach to spread flower petals in the sacred water. Vic Power had been convinced that his friend was alive until he saw a photograph of some more debris collected from the wreckage. There was the briefcase Clemente had bought in Nicaragua during their baseball trip, with the little alligator head he thought looked funny and wanted to cut off. Ohhh, baby, Power said, he’s gone. That was January 6, Three Kings Day. Later that day, Power joined his fellow ballplayers at the annual Puerto Rico winter league All-Star game at Hiram Bithorn Stadium. The game was conducted in honor of Clemente, the greatest Latino player of them all.

The long, bleak week was closing, and at the end, after his people by the thousands lined the Atlantic shore in expectation that Clemente would walk out of the sea, and thousands more made pilgrimages up the hillside to shuffle past his house like a shrine, and the seers said that he was alive but dazed, and President Nixon got involved at the White House, and Pittsburgh comrades arrived in Puerto Rico to show their grief and solidarity, and the U.S. Coast Guard, with all its boats and planes and divers and equipment, slowly dragged up the wreckage and debris, searching in a Probability of Detection Area stretching for miles—at the end, finally, on a coral reef a mile east of Punta Maldonado, they found one sock, and Vera knew it was Roberto’s. One sock, that’s all, the rest to sharks and gods.

Three decades after Clemente’s death, an official at San Juan’s leading art museum suggested that he would be an interesting subject for an exhibition. After some grumbling from the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico’s board of directors—what does baseball have to do with art? they asked—the project moved forward and two avant-garde designers, Nestor Barretto and Jorge Carbonell, were brought in to create the exhibition. Barretto and Carbonell were interested in art and culture, politics and sociology, but had little knowledge of baseball and less of Clemente. They were, in fact, the perfect team for the assignment. Clemente represents more than baseball, and though he was a singular person, he also represents more than himself. In life he was a work of art; in death he has become a cultural icon. During the early stages of the project, Barretto and Carbonell spread the word that they were looking for any art related to Clemente. Soon enough they were overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of material. Thousands of people from Puerto Rico and all corners of the United States came forward with thousands of objects: paintings, murals, cards, gloves, shrines, carvings, statues, gadgets, photographs, songs. The stories that accompanied each collection were spiritual, poetic, and the stuff of myth.

The mythic aspects of baseball usually draw on clichés of the innocent past, the nostalgia for how things were. Fields of green. Fathers and sons. But Clemente’s myth arcs the other way, to the future, not the past, to what people hope they can become. His memory is kept alive as a symbol of action and passion, not of reflection and longing. He broke racial and language barriers and achieved greatness and died a hero. That word can be used indiscriminately in the world of sports, but the classic definition is of someone who gives his life in the service of others, and that is exactly what Clemente did. He was also the greatest of the early Latino players in a game that is increasingly dominated
by Spanish-speaking athletes. Ramirez, Martinez, Rodriguez, Pujols, Rivera, Ortiz, Beltran, Tejada, Guerrero—these are the names of baseball today, among the 204 Latinos who opened the 2005 season on major league rosters, about one-quarter of all players. Puerto Rico itself has mostly moved on to basketball and other faster-paced sports, leaving the baseball obsession more to the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, but the story of how Clemente was the best among them is passed along from generation to generation, country to country.

At Clemente’s sweetest moment of glory, in the dugout after his Pittsburgh Pirates won the 1971 World Series, he brought pride to all of Latin America by choosing to speak in Spanish to honor his parents back home. Thirty-four years later, when another Latino, Ozzie Guillen, the Venezuelan manager of the champion Chicago White Sox, stood atop the baseball world, he too paid homage, revealing that in the study of his house he kept a shrine to the one baseball figure he honored above all others, Roberto Clemente. For many years after Clemente’s death, Tony Taylor, the Cuban infielder, made a point of walking young Latino teammates out to the right field wall whenever they visited Pittsburgh to give them a history lesson about the great Clemente. He is your heritage, Taylor would tell them, but more than that he is what you can become.