Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (56 page)

This book is dedicated to my father, who died last year at age eighty-six before I could finish it. Everything I love and know about baseball, I learned from him. He was born in Boston, but taught me never to root for the Red Sox because they were the last team to integrate. He spent most of his youth on Coney Island in Brooklyn, which made him a Dodgers fan, and family legend has it that he was holding me and listening on the radio when Bobby Thomson hit
the
home run, and dropped me in disgust—or maybe he just threw some crackers. He stopped rooting for the Bums when they traded Jackie Robinson and moved West. When we lived in Detroit, he became a Tigers fan. My mother would know that he’d gone to a game when he came home with mustard on his shirt. Once he was at Briggs Stadium watching them play the Red Sox, and with Detroit winning but Boston threatening late in the game, the bases loaded and Ted Williams at the plate, he screamed, “Walk him! Walk him!” seconds before a grand slam came crashing toward his seat in the outfield bleachers. Many of my favorite adolescent memories in Wisconsin are of the two of us listening to Braves or Cubs games on the radio. He liked the soft voice of Lou Boudreau. He liked Rico Carty and Denis Menke and Felipe Alou and Adolfo Phillips and Whale No. 1 and sweet-swinging Billy Williams. He said that Henry Aaron hit the ball harder than any player he ever saw. He had absolutely no use for the Yankees, though he liked Mickey Mantle and Derek Jeter and Joe Torre. He always rooted for the underdog, which meant that he had a soft spot for teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates, which is partly why Roberto Clemente became my favorite player.

Whatever baseball mistakes are in this book, and I’m sure some earnest baseball lover will find them, my dad would have caught. My mother, Mary Maraniss, who also loves baseball—perhaps out of
necessity, though she prefers Mozart to Moe Drabowsky—read the manuscript alone this time, but with her usual editing grace. She and I both achingly wish that she could have fought over each page with my father. My son, Andrew Maraniss, learned to love baseball from his grandpa, and went on to work in the major leagues, and is the type of true blue Milwaukee Brewers fan who might never forgive Rick Manning for how he ruined Paul Molitor’s hitting streak. It was wonderful that Andrew could be at my side at times on my one baseball book. The Yankees v. Red Sox rivalry is played out in our family by my daughter, Sarah, who apparently has come to love Jeter and A-Rod and New York, and her husband, Tom Vander Schaaff, who has excellent taste in all other matters yet remains loyal to Boston.

There are many other people to acknowledge. Palmira Rojas, organizer and interpreter extraordinaire, was an amazing guide in Puerto Rico. In helping me go through scores of Spanish-language documents, I couldn’t have had a more thorough and accurate translator than Sandra Alboum. Patricia Rengel of Madison did a marvelous job translating chapters from Pedro Chamorro’s
Richter 7.
Adria Fernández in Managua, Lisa Margot Johnson in Pittsburgh, Jim Shelton in Fort Myers, and Madonna Lebling in Washington were terrific in helping me track down clippings. Dale Petroskey and Bill Francis were of great assistance at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, as was Jeff Flannery, manuscript librarian at the Library of Congress, and Laura J. Brown at the Federal Aviation Administration. Ramiro Martínez in San Juan, Dwayne Rieder in Pittsburgh, Squire Galbreath in Columbus, and Mike Pangia in Washington all were generous in opening up their incredible personal collections related to different aspects of Roberto Clemente’s life and death.

Also pointing me in the right direction, reading parts of the manuscript, or providing moral support were Nelson Briles (who died too young), Javier Velez-Arocho, Daniel Rolleri, Luis Ferré, George de Lama, Dawn Law, Chad Schmidt, Gene Collier, Scott Higham, Paul Schwartzmann, Len Coleman, Brad Snyder, Mark London, Howard Fineman, Tom Hinger, Barbara and Ned Nakles, Roy McHugh, Myron Cope, Bill Nunn Jr., Jim Warren (Yankee fan, but eagle-eyed), Michael Weisskopf (lover of Sherm Lollar and Jungle Jim Rivera), Beth and
Michael Norman (despite their Yankee bobble heads), John Feinstein, Carol Rigolot and the Henry House crew at Princeton, the sixteen students of HUM 440, Juliet Eilperin, Edith Eglin, John McPhee, Whitney Gould, scribbler pals Rick Atkinson (a Mays and Marichal man) and Anne Hull, Chip Brown, Bob Woodward, Jim Maraniss, Gigi Kaeser, Scott Garner, Jean and Mike Alexander, Dick and Maryann Porter, Jim Rowen, Paul Soglin, Kim Vergeront, and Andy Cohn. This is in no way an authorized biography, but Vera Clemente and her sons were gracious and helpful throughout the process. People often say that Doña Vera is the sweetest person in the world, and I agree. Rafe Sagalyn, my agent and fellow rotisserie baseball owner for twenty years, was supportive from the beginning. Many thanks to James Shokoff (for making some great baseball-related catches in the manuscript), Simon & Schuster’s David Rosenthal (big baseball guy), Carolyn Reidy, Victoria Meyer, Aileen Boyle, my wonderful team of Rebecca Davis and Roger Labrie, Serena Jones, Leah Wasielewski, Kathleen Rizzo, and Carolyn Schogol. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather write books for than my editor, Alice Mayhew, who brings a Clemente-like passion to her profession.

And finally, this book has been blessed by two beauties. My wife, Linda, was the first to read every chapter, her eye, wit, and love of life as sharp and clear as ever. I’m sure she appreciated the fact that unlike my last sports book, when we moved to Green Bay for a winter to research Vince Lombardi, winters this time took us to Puerto Rico. They say that writing a book is like giving birth, but of course that is ridiculous; how would I or any man know? What I do know is that as much as this book means to me it doesn’t compare with the arrival this year of our first granddaughter, the huggable redheaded bundle named Heidi. We were lucky to live nearby for the first six weeks of her life, and the reward of finishing a day of writing was doubled by the prospect of a Heidi fix. May she someday enjoy listening to a ball game on the radio like the great-grandfather she sadly missed, the sweet-swinging lefty first baseman from Coney Island’s Abraham Lincoln High, Elliott Maraniss.

Madison, Wisconsin

September 2005

David Maraniss is an associate editor at the
Washington Post
and the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling books
They Marched into Sunlight, When Pride Still Mattered,
and
First in His Class.
He won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and has been a Pulitzer finalist three other times. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, Linda. They have two grown children.

Also by David Maraniss

They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967

When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi

First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton

The Clinton Enigma

The Prince of Tennessee: Al Gore Meets His Fate
(with Ellen Nakashima)

“Tell Newt to Shut Up!”
(with Michael Weisskopf)

The Library of Congress might seem an unlikely place to conduct research for a book on a baseball player, but it was invaluable in the hunt for information on Roberto Clemente. Using its occasionally cranky microfilm machines but incomparable collection of newspapers, I was able to pore over old copies of a geographically and sociologically diverse group of papers that covered Clemente at various times, including the
San Juan Star, Montreal Gazette, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Milwaukee Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph,
and
Pittsburgh Courier,
the influential black weekly that opened up a fascinating new world to me by writing about Clemente and major league baseball from a detailed and uniquely black perspective. In addition, the papers of Branch Rickey Jr. are archived at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. The historic patina of those papers comes from Rickey’s key role in integrating baseball by bringing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, but he moved on to the Pittsburgh Pirates after that and ran the club when Clemente arrived as a rookie in 1955. Rickey was a meticulous note keeper, and his papers and records were of enormous help in providing the feel of baseball, the Pirates, and Clemente during that era.

Other important research sources included the National Baseball Hall of Fame, which maintains file cabinets of clippings, photographs, and archival material on Clemente; the National Archives at College Park, which houses the presidential papers of Richard Nixon and other materials related to the Nicaraguan earthquake that led Clemente to his death; the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library at Princeton University, for its collection of African American newspapers; the Carimar Design and Research studio in Old San Juan, for its special archive on the art and mythology of Clemente; Darby Dan farm in Columbus, Ohio, for the personal archives of former Pirates owner John W. Galbreath and his son, former team president Dan Galbreath; public libraries in Pittsburgh, Managua, and Fort Myers; the newsroom
morgues at San Juan’s
El Nuevo Día,
the
Washington Post, Chicago Tribune,
and
New York Daily News;
and the personal collections of Ramiro Martínez, the family of Pedrin Zorrilla, Duane Rieder, Caguitas Colón, Les Banos, Roy McHugh, and most of all, the home files and memorabilia of Clemente’s widow, Vera.

Tracking down records related to the fatal plane crash at times seemed like a futile effort—only the sparest documents were available at the Federal Aviation Administration and in the dockets of various courts that heard the ensuing lawsuit. Then, one day in March 2004, I visited the office of aviation lawyer Michael Pangia, who had worked for the U.S. Department of Justice in the 1970s and represented the government in the case. After talking with Pangia for several hours, he took me downstairs to a closet and hauled out two large boxes marked “Clemente”—and inside were copies of all the depositions and transcripts from the trial as well as the internal reports from the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board. Gold mine, as reporters like to say.