Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (31 page)

Before submitting the article to his editors in New York, Cope showed it to Roy McHugh of the
Pittsburgh Press,
his close friend. “This is Clemente to the life, but he’s going to hate it,” McHugh said. “I know it,” Cope agreed. As it turned out, they were right; Clemente did not speak to Cope for a year afterward. The
Sports Illustrated
spread certainly gave him the wider exposure he had been seeking, though not in the way he wanted. Now not only Pittsburgh and San Juan but the entire sporting nation could consider his physiology and psyche and join the debate over whether he was a hypochondriac. But the final words in Cope’s story, overwhelmed by the pained-man motif, had nothing to do with Clemente’s body or mind, but were about his heart and passion. Clemente had driven Cope out into the countryside and showed him a piece of land where he hoped to start his sports city for Puerto Rican children. “I like to work with kids,” he said, in words that took on more resonance in retrospect. “I’d like to work with kids all the time. If I live long enough.”

•   •   •

Cope did not get out of Puerto Rico without one touch of poetic justice. Lounging at his hotel pool one hot afternoon, he took a misstep on the deck and cut his toes so badly that a rich matron, tanning herself nearby, snapped at him, “Do something about that foot, it’s attracting flies!” The chronicler of the chronic complainer took home a souvenir pain of his own, and it felt authentic enough to him.

A few days after Cope left, Clemente received a letter from Joe L. Brown on Pittsburgh Athletic Company, Inc., stationery, copies of which were also sent to the other Latin players on the Pirates—Matty Alou, Al McBean, Manny Mota, José Pagán, Andre Rodgers, and Manny Sanguillen. Five seasons after the glory of the World Series, Brown was desperately trying to turn things around, and his effort now included this no-more-Mr.-Nice-guy edict to all his Caribbean players. “In the recent past, it was the practice of a number of our players from the Caribbean area who train with the Pittsburgh club to report to Fort Myers several days after the date set for their arrival,” Brown wrote. “In the majority of cases, the lateness of their arrival was due either to carelessness or complete indifference. This will not be permitted in 1966 or in the future. If you are not in uniform in Fort Myers prepared to work out at the time and date on which you were requested to report, you will be fined One Hundred Dollars (100.00) for each day that you are late, and this money will not be given back to you at a later date.” For pitchers and catchers, Brown repeated, the arrival date was February 23, for infielders and outfielders, February 27. “If you have not already done so, it is recommended that you make arrangements immediately for your plane reservations, visa or passport (if required) and anything else that will require advance preparations . . . 1966 can be a wonderful year for everyone with the Pirates and it is important that all of our players report on time. Your attention to this letter is IMPERATIVE, both for you and the club.”

It was a perennial lament, the late arrival of Latin players. What interested Clemente and the others most about Brown’s latest missive was the line that said
any fines will not be given back to you at a later date.
Maybe, this time, he was serious. But the letter did not please the proud Clemente. He saw it as a reiteration of the stereotypes he was trying to overcome, that Latins were lazy and irresponsible. And as the
letter related to his own situation, it was true that he was a few weeks late reporting to spring training the year before, but was Brown insinuating that his malaria was a matter of complete indifference?

Clemente reported on time, leaving Vera in Río Piedras, where she not only took care of the infant Robertito but also made all the other arrangements for Pittsburgh. A week after her husband left,
she wrote a note to Phil Dorsey, their friend and aide in the States. ‘I’m fine but the baby has a cold now,” she began. After a few more pleasantries, she got down to business.

Phil, I sent the car this week by the Transamerican Steamship Corp. and will arrive in Newark, New Jersey on Tuesday or Wednesday [March 16]. I paid the expenses here. Enclosed are the key, the paper you have to present there and the car license. You can call the following person to ask if the car arrived. Mr. Ernie Caballero. Shed 152. Berth 20. Telephone BD 9-1700 (office). Newark, New Jersey. I sent some clothes and other things in the car, including one package of Mrs. Mota [wife of Clemente’s teammate]. I hope you don’t have trouble receiving the car. My best regards to Carole and kids and say them that I will see them on April. Please, excuse my bad English.

Sincerely, Vera.

Three years earlier, Clemente had begun shipping his car to the States for use during the season. Dorsey would pick it up at the port of Newark and drive it back to Pittsburgh. The bill of lading showed that it cost Clemente $203.76 to send his ton-and-a-half white Cadillac by freighter. It was part of the seasonal routine now, the Caddy following Momen on his migrations between island and mainland. In many ways, this new season marked a turning point for Clemente, a time when he was approaching the fullness of his life and career, but his days still were not without some rough spots.

The sixth of May rarely found Clemente at his best. In 1965, that was the day of reaction to his “trade me!” outburst. In 1966 his explosion was not verbal but physical. In the ledger of his life, here was a day for the case against sainthood. Not everything about him could be
resolved with the explanation that he was misunderstood.
The truth was he had a temper and occasionally did stupid things. This was one such time. The Pirates were on the road, playing the Phillies in Philadelphia. They had begun the season solidly, with thirteen wins in the first nineteen games, good enough for first place. But on this Friday night, after tying the game in the late innings and taking a four-run lead in the eleventh, the Pirates fell apart, their loose play allowing the Phils to come back with five in the bottom of the frame to win, eight to seven. A key error in the sloppy rally came when Clemente fired a strike toward home after a bloop single to right and the ball caromed off the leg of cut-off man Donn Clendenon, the first baseman. After the loss, the visitors’ locker room at Connie Mack Stadium was a trough of grumpy, foul-mouthed men.

A half hour later, as the Pirates were boarding the team bus at Lehigh Avenue near Twenty-first Street to return to the Warwick Hotel, Clemente was surrounded by several young fans. Among them was Bernie Heller, a nineteen-year-old from the village of Mary D, who was studying sheet metal work at Theodore Stevens Trade School in Lancaster. As Heller later described the scene, he and two friends had been walking to their car when “we seen where the players were coming out, and they happened to be giving autographs.” Heller got in line and waited, holding a ball he wanted signed. Clemente was doing most of the signing, a task that he did day after day, often joyously, usually without complaint. Now there was some movement in the crowd, people pushing for position, and Clemente, with one foot on the pavement and another on the bottom step of the bus, ready to board, suddenly wheeled around and clocked young Heller with a swift fist. “All I seen is his right hand. He got me right in the mouth. All I seen is a big white star.” Heller recalled forty years later. In his memory, Heller thinks he was knocked unconscious. According to police reports at the time, he told authorities that the blow buckled his knees and he fell to the cement, but got up and walked away, only then realizing that three of his teeth had been jarred loose. His friends escorted him to the stadium first-aid room, and from there he was taken to Women’s Medical College Hospital, where he was kept overnight for observation and X rays.

By the accounts of other witnesses, Clemente seemed unperturbed by the incident, almost as though he didn’t realize what had happened. After Heller fell to the ground, Clemente continued signing a ball for a young girl, then boarded the bus, and signed more scorecards and papers that were handed to him through an open window. The next morning, accompanied by Harry Walker and the traveling secretary, Bob Rice, he went down to police headquarters to be interviewed by Detective James Coyle. According to Coyle, Clemente told him that he didn’t know who he hit or where he hit him, but that there was a scuffle near the bus and that he “might have hit somebody as he was getting on.” Later, Clemente admitted directly that he threw the punch. He said that someone grabbed him and spun him around as he was boarding the bus. He then saw Heller with his hands up. “I took a punch at him,” Clemente said. “Not a real punch, just more to stay away from him.” What was Clemente’s concept of a real punch? By any definition his was strong enough. According to Detective Coyle, Heller’s teeth “were so loose they practically were falling out of his mouth.” John Heller, Bernie’s older brother, visited Bernie in the hospital in the middle of the night and said he looked “like a dog who had just had a fight with a skunk.”

There was talk of a lawsuit, and the Hellers hired a lawyer, but before matters went further Clemente apologized. “I’m very sorry it happened,” he said. “I hear [Heller’s] a nice fellow.” Harry Walker paid a visit to the hospital and brought along one of Clemente’s gloves and a bat, a 36-inch Frenchy Uhalt model Louisville Slugger that flared without a knob at the end and had No. 21 etched into the bottom. An out-of-court settlement of a few thousand dollars paid for Bernie Heller’s hospital bill; there were also free tickets for the family whenever the Pirates were in Philadelphia. Forty years later, Heller, who worked as the postmaster in St. Clair, Pennsylvania, still had the bat and glove, but not the ball that he brought to Connie Mack Stadium that long ago afternoon. “I took the ball with me from home to get autographs, but . . . I think the ball and everything went flying. I don’t have the ball anymore. Like I said, when he hit me the only thing I seen, it looked like a big white meteor . . . Nobody could understand why he did it.”

Much later, when reports of the incident filtered back to Puerto Rico, an embarrassed Clemente would concoct a version of the story that had centered on someone calling him names in the right-field bleachers during the game and then continuing the harassment afterward. But that story had nothing to do with the reality of his encounter with Bernie Heller.
The punch seemed more instinctive, and part of a pattern. Clemente had reacted similarly in 1964 outside Forbes Field, pushing two fans who were jostling too close to him, though no one had his teeth knocked loose that time. And in May 1963 he had been suspended for five days and fined $250 for accosting umpire Bill Jackowski during a home game against the Phillies. After being called out at first on a double-play grounder, he flew into a five-minute rage, twice bumping against Jackowski. In the clubhouse later, he defended his behavior by saying that he and the Pirates never got any breaks. “Other teams argue and get close decisions. Dodgers get every close play. Why? We don’t argue and we don’t get them.” Bad calls, he added, were costing him fifteen to twenty points a year on his batting average. “I seldom argue unless I feel the umpire is wrong,” he said. “I have a good record in the league office, but this is the worst year for umpiring I have ever seen.” Warren Giles, the National League president, sent a telegram to Clemente announcing his suspension and calling his actions “the most serious reported to our office in several years.”

The supposed ineptitude of major league umpires could not explain a winter league incident back home in Puerto Rico, when Clemente had been suspended for a playing field dispute during which he kicked an umpire and broke a rib. His pal Vic Power kept a photograph of that incident to remind himself and the world that not even the revered Roberto Clemente was beyond human lapses of self-control. “He fought, yeah, he got mad like every human being,” Power recalled in his blunt yet good-natured fashion. “The Puerto Rican people, I think 99 percent have bad tempers. They get bad temper, ohhh, baby.” It was not for nothing that Carolina became known as the town of those who cut off arms. Within the world of baseball, there was that glint of unpredictability to Clemente. If one examines videotapes of the most famous moment in Pirate history, Maz bounding toward the plate after
clouting the homer that beat the mighty Yanks in the bottom of the ninth of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, there is Clemente greeting him near the plate, and some fans rush close, and No. 21 jerks around—was he threatened by the approaching shadows?—and it seems as though he is about to deck a fan who is getting too close. He doesn’t, the threat passes in a split-second, and the celebration resumes all the way to the dugout, but in that moment there is a surprising intimation of unpremeditated violence.

Clemente’s edginess seemed confined to his profession. He was gentle at home, no sudden explosions. In later years, when he had three sons, he never spanked them, but could quiet them with a solemn look. In his life away from the game, he did not appear driven to affirm his manhood through the social rituals of machismo.

Random physics, an unpremeditated moment, and for better or worse a life changes forever. Bernie Heller never forgot Clemente’s blow;
Carol Brezovec would only see his kindness. The trajectory of their stories arced in opposite directions, yet both started in precisely the same spot—on the concourse outside old Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia.

Six weeks after the Heller incident, the Pirates were back in Philadelphia for another series, and among the fans attending the Sunday afternoon game were Carol and her dad, John Brezovec. They both loved baseball, and the tickets to the game were a Father’s Day present from Carol, who was then seventeen. Her parents were divorced. John, a barber and musician, lived in Bethlehem; Carol and her younger sister, Sharon, lived with their mother, Carolyn, in Allentown. They all were regulars at the stadium, known to ushers and many Phillies players. John was around so much he became virtually part of the team, able to come and go in the home clubhouse. Carol would draw sketches of her favorite players and gather with autograph hounds outside the players gate after games, but she was so shy that she often came home without any signatures. She was out there trying for autographs after the Sunday game on June 26, which the Pirates won, 2–0, when she noticed a crowd gathering around a Pittsburgh player. For some reason, the Brezovecs had never seen the Pirates before, so Carol was unfamiliar with the faces, if not the names. She
stayed in the background until the circle around the player dissolved, then approached and asked quietly, “May I please have your autograph?” He signed his name, Roberto Clemente. Carol had just started studying Spanish in high school. She thanked him by saying,
“Muchas gracias.”