Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (41 page)

“I can’t believe it. I don’t know what to say,” Blass told Prince. “The biggest thrill that could ever happen. A skinny kid from Connecticut . . .”

“Any moments when you were really worried?” Prince asked.

“There were several. One was a hanging slider to Davey Johnson, but he missed the pitch. I can’t believe it! How many people have this kind of opportunity.”

Blass, drenched in champagne, headed off to hold court with the rest of the press horde. At one point he picked up the ringing telephone and answered, “Wally’s Delicatessen,” then, going into a Bob Newhart–style routine, he continued . . . “What? You want to talk to Clemente? Spell that please. Clemente who?”

Willie Stargell came in arm-in-arm with Jackie Hernández. Clemente stood nearby. He had just been named the outstanding player in the series, finishing with a .414 average, hits in every game, extending his World Series streak to fourteen, two doubles, a triple, and two home runs, along with his stellar base running, fielding, and throwing. Roger Angell, the pitch-perfect baseball writer for the
New Yorker,
described Clemente’s performance over the seven games as “something close to the level of absolute perfection”—and no one disagreed. Prince turned to Clemente in the locker room. “And here with me now, the greatest right fielder in the game of baseball. Bobby, congratulations on a great World Series . . .”

“Thank you, Bob,” Clemente said to Prince. “And before I say anything in English, I’d like to say something in Spanish to my mother and father in Puerto Rico . . .”

An ebullient Blass stepped in and blurted out, “Mr. and Mrs. Clemente, we love him, too!” It was spontaneous and joyful, but Blass would later wince whenever he thought about his interruption.

After seventeen seasons in the major leagues, this was Clemente’s time, with the world listening and watching at last, having seen him perform at his best, carrying his team for seven games—and he made a conscious decision to speak first in Spanish. It was one of the most memorable acts of his life, a simple moment that touched the souls of millions of people in the Spanish-speaking world.
“
En el día más grande de mi vida, para los nenes la bendición mia y que mis padres me echen la bendición.
[In the most important day of my life, I give blessings to my boys and ask that my parents give their blessing] . . .”

Later, when the television cameras were off, Clemente stood on a bench in the dressing room, surrounded by reporters, and let it out one more time, a stream-of-consciousness monologue that fluctuated between pride and fury and grace. “Now people in the whole world know the way I play,” he began. “Mentally, for me, I will be a completely
different person. For the first time, I have no regrets.” Completely different? The words were the same, still evoking his underappreciated past, but there was a barely repressed smile as he continued. He wanted people to know, again, that he played this way all the time, all season, every season. And that he wasn’t a hypochondriac. And that he could pull the ball when he wanted to. And that he was tired of writers adding some qualifying “but” to their comments about him. He didn’t play for himself, he said. He was happy the Pirates won because it was a team effort all year and it was great for the Pittsburgh fans. This win was more satisfying than 1960. George Hanson of the
Montreal Star
was on the edge of the crowd, not far from Manny Sanguillen.

“He’s going pretty good, eh?” Sanguillen said. “Everything he is saying is true, you know. It’s strange that he would have to remind people. Everyone should know it.”

At the White House, President Nixon placed a call to Danny Murtaugh, the winning manager, and said he thought it was a team victory even though Roberto Clemente and Steve Blass were so outstanding. In a classic Nixon-the-sports-expert moment, he also said he was impressed with how the Pirates second baseman, Dave Cash, had played all year. Murtaugh thanked the President for taking time out from his serious duties to call. Nixon then phoned Earl Weaver in the other locker room. “Hey, Pop, I just spoke to your boss!” the Baltimore manager called out to his father, a retired parking meter collector and longtime rank-and-file Republican in St. Louis. Weaver was also visited by Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who attended the game. A short time later, Nixon and Rogers had a brief telephone conversation, recorded by the White House taping system.

NIXON:
You saw a good game, didn’t you?

ROGERS:
Great game. I went into the locker room the way you did . . . we were so pleased you called . . .

NIXON:
Two great teams and could have gone either way, but boy . . .

ROGERS:
Well, I’m sort of glad to see Pittsburgh win because that Clemente is so great.

NIXON:
Oh, my God. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Really . . .

The Pirates by then were on the charter flight back to Pittsburgh. The pitching star, Blass, and his wife, Karen, were in seats near the wing. Clemente and Vera were seated farther back. Blass was staring out the window, still trying to process what had happened, when he heard a familiar voice. Clemente was standing in the aisle. “Blass, come out here,” he said. “Let me embrace you.”

That joyous hug, Blass said later, was his deepest validation.

•   •   •

Three days later, on the afternoon of October 20, Clemente was at Mamma Leone’s restaurant in New York to accept the
Sport
magazine award as outstanding player of the series. The award was a new car, a Dodge Charger. Among the many guests and writers at the event inside the dimly lit restaurant was Stu Speiser, a plaintiffs attorney who specialized in airplane crashes. Viewing the Clementes for the first time, Speiser thought they “seemed to be unreal people, sculptured out of bronze instead of ordinary flesh and blood like those surrounding them.” Even in a business suit, Clemente “conveyed power and intensity.” He had a charisma that Speiser had seen only once before in an athlete, in Pelé, the great Brazilian soccer player. Like others in the crowd, Speiser was expecting very little beyond a few jokes and drinks and slaps on the back, all the normal sporting world pleasantries. But Clemente had a deeper purpose. He spoke with a “huge, bursting beautiful heart,” recalled Roger Kahn, the sensitive chronicler of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who might have featured Clemente in his renowned book
The Boys of Summer
had the Dodgers not failed to protect the young player.

Over the past year, Clemente’s speeches, even in his second language, had become sharper and more powerful. He had a specific goal, the creation of a sports city in Puerto Rico, but also a more urgent sensibility, one that he had first articulated at a speech in Houston back in February 1971, before the start of his championship season, when he received the Tris Speaker award. “If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on this earth,” he had said then, and the line had become his mantra. Now, at Mamma
Leone’s, he said that he was gratified by the attention he had received because he could divert it to better use, turning his sports city idea into a reality.

“The World Series is the greatest thing that ever happened to me in baseball,” he said. “Mentally it has done for me more than anything before. It give me a chance to talk to writers more than before. I don’t want anything for myself, but through me I can help lots of people. They spend millions of dollars for dope control in Puerto Rico. But they attack the problem after the problem is there. Why don’t they attack it before it starts? You try to get kids so they don’t become addicts, and it would help to get them interested in sports and give them somewhere to learn to play them. I want to have three baseball fields, a swimming pool, basketball, tennis, a lake where fathers and sons can get together . . . one of the biggest problems we have today is the father doesn’t have time for the kids and they lose control over the children . . .”

In the audience, Speiser noticed that Clemente was choking with tears as he talked about the poor kids of Puerto Rico and the need to treat all people with dignity. He did not intend to waste his time on this earth. “If I get the money to start this, if they tell me they’ll give us the money this year and I have to be there, I’ll quit right now,” Clemente continued. “It’s not enough to go to summer camp and have one or two instructors for a little time and then you go home and forget everything. You go to a sports city and have people like Mays and Mantle and Williams and kids would never forget it. I feel the United States should have something like this all over. If I was the President of the United States I would build a sports city and take in kids of all ways of life. What we want to do is exchange kids with every city in the United States and show all the kids how to live and play with other kids. I been going out to different towns, different neighborhoods. I get kids together and talk about the importance of sports, the importance of being a good citizen, the importance of respecting their mother and father. I like to get together with the fathers and sons and talk to them. Then we go to the ball field and I show them some techniques of playing baseball.”

WHEN CLEMENTE CAME HOME TO PUERTO RICO THAT
winter, he sought comfort in the rituals of his island life. He drove the family out to
la finca,
their rural retreat in the shadows of the El Yunque rainforest, and on the way home after a long weekend stopped to buy crabs from his favorite roadside vendor, Don Palito.
Momen was a fanatic about crabs, he seemed to have an insatiable appetite, and bought them by the dozens and dozens. The stop at Don Palito’s was a great adventure for Robertito, Luisito, and Ricky. They stared with fascination as the vibrating jumble of live critters scrambled around in the big caged containers. But this time, once the family returned to the house on the hill, Roberto and Vera were distracted for a few minutes, the cage opened, and the soon-to-be-boiled crabs made a mass jail break, scuttling for freedom. Most of the escapees were rounded up by the hungry ballplayer, but for a week or more afterward the boys would suddenly come across a vagrant crab as they played in the far reaches of the house.

Everyone wanted to hang around the Clemente house that winter, crustacean and human alike. His place in Río Piedras became “like a museum,” he said, with “people from town and even tourists” stopping by night and day, “walking through our rooms” or just stopping outside on the street until they sighted
El Magnífico.
The governor sent for him, the parks administrator wanted help, every civic club in San Juan had to honor him, every banquet hoped he would speak. The demands were so relentless that Clemente made it back to
la finca
only one more time. Finally, in late November, he and Vera escaped by embarking on a month-long tour of South America.
They visited Caracas, Rio
de Janeiro, São Paolo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and arrived in Lima, Peru, on an Avianca flight on the morning of December 17. When they reached the front desk of the old Gran Bolívar Hotel downtown on the historic Plaza San Martin, there was a message to call the family in Puerto Rico. Word came that Don Melchor had collapsed and was in the hospital. Without unpacking their suitcases, the Clementes returned to the airport and caught the next flight home. In his moment of triumph after the World Series, Momen had asked for the blessings of his father, but now it seemed that the baseball triumph and all the celebrations that followed were a bit much for the old man, who was approaching his eighty-seventh birthday.

As soon as Clemente returned to San Juan, he visited his father at the hospital. Deep into old age, Melchor still seemed indestructible, his body toughened by decades in the canebrake and miles of walking the dusty country roads every day. His organs were weakening, but doctors said it was not life-threatening; all he needed was medication and bed rest. On one visit, Clemente started talking to the patient in the next bed who shared a room with Melchor. The man said he was in great pain and was in the hospital to undergo a back operation. The words back and pain caught Clemente’s attention, and soon he had spread a blanket on the bathroom floor and was stretching the man’s legs and kneading his back with his magical fingers as Vera guarded the door to make sure no doctors or nurses came by. The next day, the man reported that his pain was gone and that he felt like he was walking on air. “God bless you,” he said to Clemente, and broke into tears.

The word about Roberto Clemente’s healing powers had spread throughout the San Juan area. Sick and sore friends of friends would make pilgrimages to the house on the hill at all hours of the day and night seeking his magic, and if Clemente was available he would treat them. If only he could ease his own aches and troubles so effectively. He was sleepless again, staying up through the night, every night, until four or five in the morning. Robertito, now almost seven years old, also had insomnia, and sometimes slipped downstairs to find his dad playing pool. Vera was a sound sleeper, but she stayed up many nights keeping Roberto company as he worked on his decorative arts. He had two specialties now: tables and furniture pieces crafted from driftwood
he collected on the Atlantic beach; and ceramic lamps, brightened by marbles that he heated in the oven until they exploded. But the hectic schedule and lack of sleep were taking a toll. He had lost ten pounds, down to 175, and his stomach was hurting. Vera developed sympathetic stomach pains. The requests kept coming, and Clemente had a hard time saying no.

“Since I’ve been back to Puerto Rico, I’ve been having my problems,” Clemente said one night in January 1972 at a banquet of fathers and sons in San Juan. The speech was recorded by his friend, the broadcaster Ramiro Martínez, who tailed him wherever he went that winter.

“
I think the World Series was too much for my father,” Clemente continued. He spoke of his deep love for his parents—“the most wonderful mother and father who ever lived” as an introduction to the themes of sports, competition, country, teamwork, and parenthood. Though his extemporaneous speeches had the rhythm of stream-of-consciousness, they integrated the disparate threads of his life—as a Puerto Rican and an American citizen, as a ballplayer who loved his game, as a black and Latino, as a former Marine, as a believer in the underdog, and as someone who refused to be undervalued or dismissed. “All my life I have to thank God to make me a sports figure because I love competition and I think competition is part of the way that we are living today,” he said. “I love competition because when we compete, we compete to be proud of our country. I see myself sometimes wondering why some people still have to fight for their rights. As you people know, I have been fighting for my rights all my life. I believe every human being is equal. At the same time, we also have problems because we are a great nation.” For all of Clemente’s struggles adjusting to the culture and language of his baseball life on the mainland, he felt very much a part of the United States. “I am from Puerto Rico, but I am also an American citizen,” he continued. “We have an opportunity to travel. I just came from South America. I’ve been in Europe . . . I can tell you one thing, I won’t trade this country for no one country. We, no matter what, we have the best country in the world and you can believe it.”