Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (27 page)

At the same time, Pittsburgh’s minor league clubs during the late 1950s and early sixties were “jam-packed” with black players, as Clendenon put it. The minor league bundling was a reality hard to ignore, whether it was the result of a racial quota at the top, which Joe L. Brown, the general manager, denied, or simply because the Pirates were signing increasing numbers of black players at a time when the major league squad already was stocked with World Series–quality talent. Another black Pirate who came into his own in 1964, Bob Veale, the big left-handed pitcher, recalled playing for the Wilson Tobs (Tobacconists), the Pirates farm club in the Carolina League, in 1959. By Veale’s account, the team had so many black players that many Southerners assumed it was a Negro League outfit.
The Tobs had a rivalry that year with the Raleigh Capitals, who were led by a future Hall of Fame outfielder named Carl Yastrzemski. “There used to be an old white gentleman waiting in the stands in Raleigh before we got there,” Veale remembered. “We would come riding in on the bus, and he would shout out, ‘Here comes Wilson and all that black magic!’”

In any case, by the time Clendenon, Veale, Stargell, and other black Pirates finally started making the Pittsburgh club in the early 1960s, in the post–World Series years, they brought with them varying degrees
of pent-up frustration. Clendenon, for one, was hoping that Clemente would protect him and counsel him on how to survive and thrive in the majors. When that didn’t happen immediately, he instead turned to veterans on other teams like Willie Mays and retired trailblazers like Jackie Robinson and Joe Black. Clendenon shared a house with Stargell and Veale at 428 Dakota Street in Schenley Heights that year, not far from Clemente, but did not hang out with him.

By 1964 Clemente was in the early stages of his emergence as a leader.
He had become a big brother of sorts to other Caribbean players, not just on the Pirates but throughout the league. Tony Taylor, a Cuban who played second base for the Philadelphia Phillies, said that he and other Latin players would go out to eat with Clemente whenever they were in the same city, and that he revered Clemente, as much for the way he behaved as the way he played. “He’d try to help you and talk to you about the way to play baseball and the way to handle yourself in society and to represent your country,” Taylor recalled. “He was the type of guy who would just sit with you and talk, do this, do that. In my life, besides my mom and father, I’d met no person who meant so much to me. People say he was moody, he was this and that. But he would say the truth. He told you the truth. He never tried to hide anything from anybody.”

On the Pirates, Clemente took Manny Mota under his wing that year. Mota was a Dominican outfielder who was starting to get some playing time in his third major league season. He was far slighter than Clemente, only 5’ 9’’ and 160 pounds, and displayed little power, but shared that rare skill of being able to get wood on almost any ball. Like Clemente, who excelled in the Puerto Rican winter league before shining in the majors, Mota had led his Dominican league in hitting two winters in a row before gaining notice up North. He had been traded from the Giants to Houston to Pittsburgh within two seasons, devalued because it was thought he lacked power. Clemente identified with the struggle and became Mota’s closest friend and adviser on the Pirates. At the stadium every day before games, they could be seen working on hitting, bunting, fielding, and throwing. “He’s always been a good hitter,” Clemente said of Mota at midseason, pushing his cause to skeptical Pirate beat writers. “He can hit big league pitching if he’s
given the chance.” Mota eventually proved his friend and mentor right, playing fourteen seasons with a career average over .300. And Clemente would do it again a few years later, working to transform another Dominican Pirate, Mateo Alou, from a mediocre pull hitter into a first-rate spray hitter.

Clemente would always have some sharp angles to him, not the easy, steady-as-you-go personality of the traditional clubhouse captain. He was shy, yet bursting with pride. He was profoundly humble, yet felt misunderstood and undervalued. Even when he wasn’t angry at a sports writer or feeling some perceived slight, it could be hard to tell by looking at him in the clubhouse. Television sportscaster Sam Nover, during an interview, told Clemente that some members of the press “come away from seeing you for the first time in the locker room and say, ‘
Clemente’s a mean man. He frowns. The man never smiles’”—and then posed the question: “Is the shape of your face such that you never smile too often?” Clemente took the query seriously, and noted that some teammates had a physiognomy that made them look like they were laughing even when they were mad, whereas his was the opposite. “Now you might think I am serious when I am not serious,” he said. “This is the way that I am. And I like to be that way because sometimes you are smiling and then the next time you don’t see me smiling and say, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with you?’ So now, I am natural. That is the way I am. Nobody can say Roberto is mean. I might look mean but I really respect people.”

That Clemente defined himself as Puerto Rican, rather than by the color of his skin, also might have shaped Clendenon’s perceptions. “He kept saying, ‘I no black,’” Clendenon recalled. In fact, Clemente was proud to be a black Puerto Rican, yet never wanted to be categorized or limited by race. When he talked about the issue, especially in English, his comments occasionally were seen as rebukes of blackness, which they were not. The
Pittsburgh Courier
made that mistake in 1960, but later realized that it had misinterpreted Clemente’s intent and his remarks. The clearest account of his perspective on being both Puerto Rican and black came in the wide-ranging interview with sportscaster Nover. “I am between the worlds,” he said. “So anything I do will reflect on me because I am black and . . . will reflect on me
because I am Puerto Rican. To me, I always respect everybody. And thanks to God, when I grew up, I was raised . . . my mother and father never told me to hate anyone, or they never told me to dislike anyone because of racial color. We never talked about that. As a matter of fact, I started listening to this talk when I came to the States.”

That leads to another way of looking at Clemente and his slow evolution as a leader in the States: language. After a decade in North America, Clemente knew English and the idioms of baseball, including the lexicon of profanity. He knew how to use variations of the all-purpose word fuck as a noun, verb, and adverb in any sentence. (“You pitch me the fuck inside and I hit the fucking ball to McKeesport.”) Clendenon suspected there were times when Clemente pretended that he couldn’t understand something in English “because he didn’t want to deal with something.” That is certainly probable, but more often Clemente wanted to speak English and insisted on doing so. It was his fear of being misinterpreted that could make him seem reserved and defensive, especially when writers lurked in the clubhouse. “
I always had a theory that here was a very bright man who had taken verbal risks with English before and had been burned and didn’t care for that to happen again,” Blass recalled. “I think the writers relating what he said in pigeon English was actually secondary to the fact that he had concepts that he was trying to convey and wouldn’t be understood because his English wouldn’t convey it as well as his Spanish. And I think that frustrated him.”

Don Leppert, a backup catcher who arrived in Pittsburgh in 1961, the season after the World Series victory, said later that he was amazed by the gap between Clemente’s talent and his public recognition, and attributed that to the language barrier.
Leppert placed the blame largely on the baseball writers who covered the Pirates. His locker was near Clemente’s and Leppert felt frustrated by the way some writers portrayed his teammate. “They tried to make a buffoon out of him,” Leppert recalled. “I was sitting there one night when Biederman [Les Biederman of the
Pittsburgh Press
] was asking Clemente something, and Biederman had a little smirk on his face. I went off on Biederman: ‘Why the hell don’t you ask him questions in Spanish?’ I didn’t endear myself to Biederman, but didn’t give a rat’s ass, either. They tried to
take advantage of every malaprop.” Clemente said as much himself once to Pittsburgh writer Myron Cope. “I know I don’t speak as bad as they say I speak,” Clemente told Cope. “I know that I don’t have the good English pronunciation because my tongue belong to the Spanish. But I know where the verb, the article, the pronoun, whatever it is, go. I never in my life start a sentence with ‘me.’ I start with ‘I.’ The sportswriters [make it] ‘me.’ ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’”

And finally there were lingering questions about Clemente’s aches and pains and his constant physical laments. Since his third season, 1957, when he had suffered through a year-long slump that he attributed to an undiagnosed malaise (eventually, it was determined to be a lower-back condition), he had been unable to shake the reputation of being an oversensitive hypochondriac. In the long run, this perception was utterly contradicted by his enduring statistics; he would break Honus Wagner’s cherished record and play more games in a Pirates uniform than any player in Pittsburgh history. In the medium term, the perception would be contradicted by his determined clutch play, month after month, year after year. As Clemente himself put it one day, “Hypochondriacs cannot produce. I fucking produce!” But in the short run, whenever he took two or three days off to rest his troubled body, his behavior was deemed by some to be too sensitive and unbefitting a team leader. He probably didn’t help his own cause by talking so much about his ailments, but that reflected his desire to be perfect more than a need for excuses. His physician in San Juan, Dr. Roberto Buso, said that Clemente’s sensitive personality included a low threshold for pain. “If his back hurts he worries and then
it becomes a vicious circle leading to more things,” Buso once explained. “If he has a little diarrhea he worries that he has a little stomach difficulty.” Pittsburgh, with its blue collar ethos, a milltown whose mythic figure was a giant named Joe Magarac, who by legend made steel with his bare hands, was a particularly difficult atmosphere for someone as sensitive to all things and especially pain as Clemente.

His relationship with Danny Murtaugh had been uneven precisely because of this sensitivity. Since taking over the Pirates in mid-season 1957, Murtaugh had occasionally criticized Clemente for not playing. The manager’s admiration for Clemente as a magnificent player had
grown year by year, yet he never stopped sticking in the needle. It was nothing personal; that happened to be Murtaugh’s personality. The “whistling Irishman” would say what was on his mind and then forget it. Clemente’s personality was altogether different. Whatever was said about him hurt, and kept hurting. Mazeroski, who enjoyed a smoother relationship with Murtaugh, thought their manager didn’t think twice about how to handle Clemente or would have done it better. “Roberto just wasn’t the type of guy you just took off and embarrassed in front of the team,” Maz said later. “
He’d crawl in a shell and the more Murtaugh hollered at him, the more moody he got.” Their periodic difficulties had busted into the open during a road trip in May 1963. Clemente had been groaning about his physical ills during a three-day series in Los Angeles, when he had played poorly and asked for a day off as the Dodgers had swept the Pirates, and Murtaugh, feeling grumpy about the losses, confronted Clemente when they reached Houston. “You let me know when you’re ready to play again,” Murtaugh said. “You’re making too much money to sit on the bench. The next time you feel like playing you’ll play and you’ll play every day until I say you won’t play.”

Clemente, acutely conscious of his dignity, felt insulted by the reproach. “You talk like I don’t want to play baseball,” he told Murtaugh.

He ended up playing 152 games that season, but the story of the encounter seeped into the press and became part of the mythology of Clemente’s fragility. Mazeroski, for one, thought the undeserved reputation was linked to the language problem. “When he was hurt he had trouble explaining himself because of the language problem and everyone thought he was jakin’,” Mazeroski later wrote about Clemente in
Sport
magazine. “I don’t think he’s ever jaked. He just could do things when he was hurt as well as the rest of us could when we were healthy and people would see this and decide that he was dogging it.”

All of this—pride, shyness, culture, language, preoccupation with his physical condition, anger over being underappreciated, even the shape of his face—could make Clemente seem guarded and at times unapproachable. Roy McHugh, a talented columnist for the
Pittsburgh Press,
had decided to write his first piece about Roberto early in the 1964 season after Clemente had blasted a tape-measure home run over
the left-field wall at Forbes Field. In the clubhouse after the game, McHugh asked Clemente if it was the longest ball he had ever hit.
Clemente took offense at the innocent question. It reminded him of all the other long balls he had hit that got no notice, going back to a home run at Wrigley Field in 1959. “It was like throwing a lighted match into a can of gasoline,” McHugh said later. “He blew up, shouting, a torrent of words. He went on for five minutes before I could get in another word.” Clemente had nothing against McHugh, but the question unwittingly hit a sensitive spot. McHugh, who was predisposed to like Clemente, or at least to present him accurately, decided to choose another subject for his column, and for several years thereafter tended to stay away from the Pirates right fielder, thinking he was too difficult.

Yet Clemente could be thoroughly engaging when he was around people who made him feel comfortable, including not only friends, family, and fellow Latin ballplayers, but also children, taxi drivers, old people, clubhouse attendants—anyone who seemed to have the soul of an underdog. “He would extend himself more to somebody who seemed unsure than to a cocky writer or player,” pitcher Blass noticed. In the same locker room where his vibes held sportswriters at bay, he was a magnet for the children of other players. He kept a jar of honey in his locker—he took a spoonful before games to relax—and shared it with the kids. Jim Marshall, a utility infielder for a few seasons in the early sixties, remembered that whenever he brought his young son Blake into the locker room, “he always ran for Roberto, sitting on his knee, the two of them eating honey.” Tony Bartirome, the pint-sized former first baseman who began working in the Pirates’ training room in 1964, recalled that reputations did not always reflect reality. Some established older white stars who were portrayed as “great guys” by the press virtually ignored the clubhouse staff, but not Clemente. In the daily give and take, he would tease them, ask about their families, offer his folklore medical advice, tip them generously. “
Everybody in that clubhouse, we loved him,” Bartirome said.