Clemente: The Passion And Grace Of Baseball's Last Hero Part 11

16.

Out of the Sea

SECONDS AFTER N500AE DISAPPEARED FROM THE RADAR screen, San Juan's air traffic control tower activated the emergency accident notification system, a sequence of twenty telephone calls. The second call went to the U.S. Coast Guard Rescue Center located near the cruise s.h.i.+p piers in Old San Juan, nine miles west of the airport. Since the plane went down in the water, there was little the airport's fire rescue team could do beyond rush to the beachfront and beam spotlights into the dark Atlantic. The search required boats, planes, helicopters, divers-the realm of the Coast Guard and Navy. One Coast Guard vessel and two aircraft went out on the first call after ten that night, but search officers had not yet plotted the Probability of Detection Area so the rescuers were operating on guesswork, literally in the dark, and found nothing.

Not long after sunrise on New Year's Day it became obvious that this was not just a routine search. From Isla Verde to Punta Maldonado, the sh.o.r.e was lined with people who had come to bear witness. The two-lane roads leading to the water became more congested as the day progressed until by afternoon there was a b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper traffic jam of pilgrims flocking toward the place where their hero had fallen.

"That night on which Roberto Clemente left us physically, his immortality began," the Puerto Rican writer Elliott Castro later observed, and here, on Piones Beach, was the first manifestation of the transformation from man to myth. Although Governor Luis A. Ferre, in his final day in office, had declared a three-day mourning period, in effect acknowledging that Clemente was dead, many Puerto Ricans refused to believe it. The vast crowds at the beach were quiet, expectant. They waited for Roberto to come walking out of the sea. Men carried portable radios, women brought infants; a shout, a sighting of color or shape, and suddenly a line of people were holding hands wading out to take a look. A Coast Guard helicopter landed at the beach and was swarmed by citizens as the false report spread of a body aboard. Vera and her father-in-law, Melchor, returned to the beach and were treated as royalty as they sat in stoic silence, holding hands. Vera wavered between not wanting to believe the accident had happened, desperately holding on to the miracle that her husband was still alive, and more realistically hoping the searchers would find his body or some tangible evidence of his loss. Osvaldo Gil, the family friend who was among those joining Vera at the beach, remembered her saying softly two or three times, "If they could find at least a hand."

Manny Sanguillen, the Pirate catcher from Panama who adored Clemente like an older brother, showed up ready to do anything he could to help the search. He stripped down to his swimming suit and went out with a group of volunteer local divers who focused on the underwater caverns of the coral reef a hundred yards offsh.o.r.e, a likely place for a body to snag. The official Coast Guard and Navy search party included three helicopters, two fixed-wing aircraft, two smaller rescue vessels, and the cutter Sagebrush, a 180-foot buoy tender outfitted with a cranelike boom. The effort that day was slowed by rough waters, four- to six-foot swells. While finding no people or bodies, the rescue team recovered the first swath of debris, including seat cus.h.i.+ons, life vests, a deflated raft, papers, a nose wheel and strut, two other wheels, and the wallet of Angel Lozano, who had been riding in the cabin near Clemente. They also came across an oil slick under which they suspected they might find the fuselage, but it was growing dark by then so they marked the position of the oil slick to return to it the next day.

At ten on the second day of January, Hernndez Coln was sworn in as Puerto Rico's new governor. Less than a month earlier, Clemente had brought back a red and white hammock from Nicaragua as a gift for his political friend. Now the great ballplayer's loss cast a dark shadow over the inaugural ceremony. All the musical festivities that were to be held that night at La Fortaleza were canceled. Before the swearing-in began, the cutter Sagebrush, on its way out to the crash site, cruised by within sight of supporters gathering at the capital grounds. At the start of the program, there was a minute of silence in memory of Clemente. In his speech, Hernndez Coln said of him, "Our youth have lost an idol and an example; our people have lost one of their glories." The governor was following the lead of Puerto Rico's newspapers, who that morning had published their editorial eulogies. "Off the field," the San Juan Star wrote of Clemente, "he was a complicated, intense man who felt a special burden to use his fame and prestige for n.o.ble ends . . . He was a unique man, a s.h.i.+ning example for the rest of us. A man who thrilled and entertained us with his athletic exploits and enn.o.bled and inspired us with his humanism."

In the early afternoon, another rumor buzzed through the large crowd that had gathered at the beach for a second consecutive day. Someone had seen a body floating in the water fifty yards from sh.o.r.e a mile west of Punta Maldonado. But a search of the area came up with nothing. It could have been a log, a sc.r.a.p of debris, even a fish. The Coast Guard station in San Juan was being deluged with calls from people saying they could help, even from thousands of miles away. "It seemed like every psychic and seer all over the world was calling in, telling us they had heard from Roberto," remembered Captain Vincent Bogucki, then commander of the Coast Guard unit in San Juan. "They might say he was on a small island and okay but needed help. We had a lot of unasked for leads . . . that to some extent we followed."

Captain Bogucki was feeling pressure from all sides. President Nixon was interested in Clemente, and that meant top Coast Guard officials in Was.h.i.+ngton had to know about the search and were requesting constant updates from San Juan. In Puerto Rico, the plane crash had surpa.s.sed even the inauguration as the dominant news story, and every official from the governor on down wanted to make sure that everything possible was being done to find the plane and its occupants. Deep into the second day with no results, Vera contacted Captain Bogucki and asked him to come to her house in Ro Piedras. She wanted to know what he was doing, and why he wasn't doing more. He talked about the possibility of getting another plane, but did not feel he could tell Mrs. Clemente the cold truth, which was this: The Coast Guard is in the business of search and rescue, not salvage. Bogucki and his men had already privately reached the grim conclusion that there was nothing to rescue, and probably not much in the way of human remains to recover. As one of Bogucki's officers, Lieutenant John Parker, later explained, "If a plane breaks up badly and if bodies break loose, it is rare to recover them. Why? The sharks. They are hungry. It is a shark-infested area." None of this could be said to the widow. Bogucki told Mrs. Clemente that he would try to add another plane to the search and invited her to visit the Coast Guard Rescue Center to see for herself how diligently his crew was working.

As Bogucki was leaving the Clemente house, he looked across the room and noticed that Vera had brought in her own seer. "I saw the figure from the rear, and she had a robe on," Bogucki said later. "I wasn't invited to meet this person." This seer was among those claiming that Clemente was still alive. Her supernatural signs were telling her that he was dazed and walking through the streets of La Perla, a poor waterfront neighborhood nestled below Old San Juan. Fernando Gonzlez, the rookie Pirate infielder from Arecibo, happened to be at the Clemente house then and left with a scouting party of friends and relatives. "We went to La Perla to look for him," Gonzlez said later. "And we never found him."

It was not mythmaking but pure baseball that led Jack Lang's colleagues in the press corps to start calling his home in Huntington Station, Long Island, that night. "I'm way ahead of you. That's the first thing I thought of," Lang told one caller. What others wanted to suggest to him, and what he had already thought of, was that the Baseball Writers a.s.sociation of America, of which he was secretary-treasurer, should take the extraordinary step of immediately inducting Clemente into the Hall of Fame, foregoing the requirement that a player be inactive for five years before being eligible for enshrinement. Certain statistical achievements virtually ensured a place in Cooperstown, and one of those was three thousand hits. Clemente died with precisely that number, along with his .317 career average and closetful of Gold Gloves as the finest right fielder of his generation. Lang had already talked to commissioner Bowie Kuhn about waiving the waiting period. It had happened only once before in baseball history, when Lou Gehrig was chosen by acclamation in 1939 while he was dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Eleven weeks after Lang started the process, the BBWAA would overwhelmingly vote Clemente into Cooperstown, making him the first Latin American player among the game's all-time elite. Ninety-three percent of 424 writers would support him, with most of the others saying they did not want to break the five-year requirement.

Clemente had never been an easy case for baseball writers. For eighteen seasons, he had burned with resentment about being underappreciated and called a hypochondriac and quoted in broken English. His fury had helped motivate him on the diamond, even as it confused the men in the press box. Yet he was usually willing to admit when he was wrong, and was so much more earnest and committed than most ballplayers that by the end he had earned the respect of those he fought with the most. Now, after the first news cycle of stories about the plane crash, they were all writing more personal columns praising and trying to explain this complicated man. Many of them repeated the dramatic cycle of anger, understanding, and loss.

"I remember the first time I ever spoke to him, the day he shouted at me, the anger streaming out of those fierce black eyes and was.h.i.+ng over me so that I could almost feel its heat," wrote Phil Musick in the Pittsburgh Press. " 'You writers are all the same,' he yelled at Byron Yake of the AP and me, the pa.s.sion in his voice freezing the few people left in the Pirate clubhouse. 'You don't know a d.a.m.n thing about me.' I had hollered back, scared clear through at watching the fury rise in his face, afraid to back down." Musick then went on to remember a day, much later, when he had felt comfortable enough to needle Clemente as the old man-"and he laughed, and for a moment we weren't natural enemies. And when I heard he was dead, I wished that sometime I had told him I thought he was a h.e.l.l of a guy. Because he was, and now it's too late to tell him there were things he did on a ball field that made me wish I was Shakespeare."

Milton Richman of UPI, who covered Clemente's entire career, said he had seen all sides of the complex man. "You had to be around him a while to see both sides. I've seen him when he'd rail up at a newsman's perfectly innocent question, and as a guest at his home in Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico, as well as on other occasions, I've seen him when he was one of the most hospitable, helpful and cooperative individuals ever to wear a major league uniform."

"Roberto," wrote David Condon in the Chicago Tribune, "was kind, generous, considerate, and humble about his own abilities . . . Yet Roberto was a man of mighty wrath. One day in the spring training camp he cut loose with language that humbled the thunder as he berated writers for overkill in their idolatry for American-born baseball players. Because he was speaking from his heart and his argument was credible, Roberto offended no one that afternoon."

Milton Gross of the New York Post wrote that he was indeed once offended by Clemente, but then won over again. A few years earlier, Gross had conducted a long interview with Clemente at training camp in Bradenton. After his article appeared, he received a handwritten letter from Clemente. "I give you two hours of my time, and you write horses.h.i.+t story about me. I don't want to talk to you no more if you write horses.h.i.+t stories. I don't want you to write about me no more." The letter left Gross angry and confused. His column about Clemente had been "a positive one in which I attempted to correct some of the unfair raps on Clemente, particularly the tale that he was a malingerer." Gross wrote Clemente back demanding to know what he objected to in the piece. Weeks later, he encountered Clemente in the visitors locker room at Shea Stadium. Clemente said that he had based his first angry letter on what a friend from New York had told him about the story. Now that he had read the story himself, he said, "I find out that you did not write what my friend said. So now I apologize to you for the letter and I tell my friend he is no longer my friend because he does not tell me the truth."

"It was a rare moment in my years in sports; a player admitting that he may have been wrong," Gross declared in his sports page eulogy two days after the crash. "Clemente didn't need me but he felt it inc.u.mbent upon himself to tell me that he had done me an injustice."

On that night of January 2, as Jack Lang first contemplated Clemente's place in the Hall of Fame and his colleagues were writing their newspaper requiems, President Nixon mentioned in a conversation with aide Charles Colson that the White House should work with the sports world to organize a Roberto Clemente Memorial Fund. Nixon already had released a taped statement on Clemente-calling him "one of the greatest baseball players of our time" and "a generous and kind human being"-and had written a personal $1,000 check to donate to the cause. There was a n.o.bility to the Clemente story that seemed lacking in other matters Nixon and Colson were dealing with then, Vietnam and Watergate. Nixon that day was obsessed by suspicions that Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser, had been telling newspaper friends that he privately questioned the President's decision to bomb Hanoi during Christmas. Get the Secret Service to check Kissinger's telephone logs, Nixon told Colson, according to biographer Richard Reeves, and Colson came back with the delicious report that Kissinger had spent hours talking to columnist Joseph Kraft even while insisting to Colson that he would never talk to "that son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h."

The next morning, January 3, presidential aide Richard A. Moore followed up on the Clemente issue. In a memorandum to chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Moore suggested that the President meet later that day with a delegation from the Pittsburgh Pirates. Moore said that he had talked with the team president, Dan Galbreath, who told him that he liked Nixon's idea of a memorial fund. If the President had the time, Galbreath and a few players could be in the Oval Office that very afternoon. "The visit would be in time for the television news shows and would be a superb kickoff for the project," Moore noted. "In the course of telling the press about the memorial, Galbreath or a player could allude to the fact that the President already made a generous contribution himself." At the end of his memo, Moore added a special note: "Colson wholeheartedly endorses meeting with the President."

During their discussions that day, Haldeman and Nixon had Colson on their minds, but not in the context of the death of Roberto Clemente. They were discussing the role Colson and former attorney general John Mitch.e.l.l had played in the Watergate bugging. Nixon asked, "Does Mitch.e.l.l know that Colson was involved, and does Colson know that Mitch.e.l.l was involved?" and Haldeman answered, "I think the answer is yes to both," On the other matter, Haldeman liked the idea of the President seeing the Pirates delegation. He initialed a box in Moore's memo approving a ten-minute meeting at quarter to four that afternoon.

An hour beforehand, Moore was ushered into the Oval Office to brief the President. He brought in a list of talking points for Nixon: A) Clemente was chosen by the President for his postwar National League All-Star Team.

B) Apart from baseball, Clemente was known for his year-round service to good causes and his love of Puerto Rico, where he was virtually a folk hero. He was aboard the airplane because he had heard that a previous s.h.i.+pment [to Managua] had been diverted by profiteers and he wanted to make certain that the clothing and food reached the people in need. Clemente had been the chief organizer in raising $150,000 plus tons of clothing and foodstuffs. [In citing "profiteers," the memo avoided saying that these were the sons and relatives of General Somoza, a great Nixon fan who had recently sent a letter supporting the President for the n.o.bel Peace Prize.]

C) Members of the club and other Pittsburgh friends will fly to Puerto Rico in a chartered plane tomorrow for a special memorial service.

D) Clemente, thirty-eight, was National League batting champion four times in eighteen seasons, named twelve times to the All-Star team, most valuable player in NL in 1966, and MVP in 1971 World Series.

E) Daniel Galbreath's father, John Galbreath, has met the President at All-Star games and sports dinners. He named a racehorse Roberto in honor of Clemente.

At three forty-three, Galbreath was escorted into the Oval Office along with pitchers Steve Bla.s.s and Dave Giusti, who had slept little since they first received word of the plane crash. Television cameramen and the White House photographer were ushered in and out of the room. Nixon impressed everyone with his detailed knowledge of Clemente and the Pirates roster. They talked until a few minutes after four.

By that hour in the choppy Atlantic waters about a mile and half off Punta Maldonado, dragging operations by the Sagebrush had brought a body to the surface. It was identified as the pilot, Jerry Hill, and transferred to Centro Medico Hospital in Ro Piedras. The autopsy conducted by forensic pathologist Nestor A. Loynaz revealed the overwhelming corporal trauma occupants of the plane experienced when the plunging DC-7 hit the water, which was much like hitting a brick wall at two hundred miles an hour. Hill's body was broken everywhere: multiple fractures of the head and face; multiple fractures of the ribs and sternum; completely broken spinal column; multiple fractures of the tailbone; complete amputation of right leg; broken left leg; cavities in the stomach and diaphragm; ruptured aorta; ruptured bladder. Manny Sanguillen had seen the body on the recovery boat before it was flown to the hospital and the devastation of it convinced Sangy that he would never find his friend Roberto alive.

Early the next morning, a chartered jet left Pittsburgh carrying more than sixty members of the Pirates family to a memorial service for No. 21 in Puerto Rico. The contingent included manager Bill Virdon and most of the players and coaches and many wives, former managers Danny Murtaugh and Harry Walker, John and Dan Galbreath, general manager Joe L. Brown, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Marvin Miller and Richard Moss of the players a.s.sociation, and Preston Pearson, representing the Pittsburgh Steelers, who on the day Clemente died had lost an NFL playoff game to the Miami Dolphins. The plane was "real quiet going down," Richie Hebner recalled, though Pearson happened to be sitting near Dock Ellis, the irrepressible pitcher, who could not stop talking. The baseball men were all dressed in black. After they filed off the plane and a.s.sembled in San Juan International's lobby for a press conference, Joe L. Brown stepped to the microphone. Addressing the bustling throng of local writers, television crews, and onlookers, Brown showed his deep respect for Clemente, yet also sounded as though Roberto's real family had arrived at last to tell these people about him.

"We would like to get on with it, please. Ladies and gentlemen, when you are ready, we'll get started," Brown began. "I'd like to say a few words first. Gentlemen, please. I don't want your attention as far as the camera's concerned, we'd just like a little quiet, please. I'd like to say a few things first. This plane from Pittsburgh contains many of Roberto's closest and dearest friends. There is one purpose in their visit: to show their love and respect for Vera and the Clemente family. We ask your cooperation in keeping this as a family affair. There perhaps might be some questions. I will try to answer them before you ask them . . . I'm sure you are going to ask about memorial services for Roberto. They will be held at three-thirty this afternoon. . . . If you want to take pictures of friends or family entering or leaving the church, you are certainly free to do so. But no pictures inside. I think there is no way to handle a thing of this sort except to tell you that behind me are part of Roberto's family. If you care to talk to them, if you care to take their picture, I'm sure they'll be happy, not happy, but they will accommodate you."

Commissioner Kuhn followed with a brief, well-received lament: "It is a very sad event to be here in Puerto Rico for this service for Roberto. Very sad for baseball, for Puerto Rico. He was a truly great man in every way."

Dan Galbreath described his meeting in the Oval Office with President Nixon, just as the President's aides had hoped. "I thought it was going to be a perfunctory meeting but we talked with the President for twenty-five minutes," Galbreath said. "He showed a genuine concern over Clemente and displayed a remarkable knowledge of Clemente the athlete and the humanitarian. His manner was not that of a pa.s.sing gesture. He said that he and Mrs. Nixon were donating a thousand-dollar check . . . on behalf of Roberto's memorial fund."

When an island reporter told Galbreath about Clemente's interest in using some abandoned San Juan Naval Station property for his sports city dream, the team president promised to pa.s.s the information along to the White House.

Bill Virdon said these were the only circ.u.mstances he could think of that would make him return to Puerto Rico without enjoying it. Danny Murtaugh, his predecessor, was nearly at a loss for words. He recalled the first time he had seen Clemente in 1955 and had said to himself then that he was watching a kid who was going to be one of the greatest ballplayers of all time. Gene Clines said Roberto was like a big brother to him. Al Oliver said Clemente was the strongest inspiration in his baseball career. Steve Bla.s.s said he would never forget Roberto as long as he lived. The room fell quiet as Willie Stargell spoke. For nearly a decade, Stargell had been the other pillar on the Pittsburgh team. He towered over Clemente physically, but always looked up to him.

"I'll tell you, it's really hard to put into words all the feelings that I have for Robby," Stargell said. "Since I've been with him I've had a chance to know a really dynamic man who walked tall in every sense you can think of. He was proud, he was dedicated. He was in every sense you can determine a man. And I think going the way he went really typifies how he lived. Helping other people without seeking any publicity or fame. Just making sure that he could lend a hand and get the job done. . . . The greatness that he is, we all know the ballplayer that he is. For those who did not know him as a man they really missed a fine treat for not knowing this gentleman. I had the opportunity to play with him, to sit down and talk about the things that friends talk about. And I am losing a great friend. But he will always remain in my heart."

The baseball delegation filed into two buses for the short ride from the airport to the central plaza in Carolina and the memorial ma.s.s led by Archbishop Luis Aponte Martnez at San Fernando Roman Catholic Church. Crowds lined the streets into town, and thousands of carolinenses filled the plaza, much as they had only eight years earlier when Roberto and Vera had been married in the same stone chapel. Mourners entering the church were handed programs with an artist's rendering of Clemente and the words of his mother's spiritual refrain: Only G.o.d makes man happy. Life is nothing. Everything ends. Only G.o.d makes man happy. Steve Bla.s.s, speaking for his teammates at the service, read a poem that Pirates press man Bill Guilfoile gave him, a slightly reconfigured version of an ode to another baseball hero who had died young, Lou Gehrig. Bla.s.s was more afraid in the pulpit than he had ever felt on the mound. All the way down on the plane, all he thought about was whether he could do this. The poem had the sentimentalism of 1930s sports journalism, when writers often expressed themselves in rhyme, but Bla.s.s infused the words with sincerity and choked up several times during his reading. Let this be a silent token/Of Lasting friends.h.i.+p's gleam/And all that we've left unspoken/Your pals on the Pirates team. As Bla.s.s faltered, so too did many in the audience. "Bla.s.s is one of the funniest guys you'd ever want to meet," recalled trainer Tony Bartirome. "Yet it brought tears to your eyes when a guy like that was up there crying." Not a dry eye among the Pirates delegation, recalled Joe L. Brown.

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 c.o.c.kpit. 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 Piones 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 ma.s.s in Carolina. It was not a funeral or burial ma.s.s 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 Bla.s.s 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."

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 c.o.c.kpit, 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 s.h.i.+rt 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 sh.o.r.e 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 G.o.ds.

Myth and Memory

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 a.s.signment. 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 cliches 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 pa.s.sion, 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 cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.sed 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.

(1) What burned in the eyes of Roberto Clemente was the fire of dignity.

(2) While still in high school, Clemente signed with the Santurce Cangrejeros, where he became teammates with many major leaguers, including Junior Gilliam of the Dodgers (left), known in Puerto Rico as "the Black Sea." Later, Clemente played in the same outfield as Willie Mays.

(3) Clemente's early baseball patron was Pedrin Zorrilla, owner of the Cangrejeros, whose nickname was the Big Crab. Zorrilla was the son of the Puerto Rican poet Enrique Zorrilla, whose most famous poem was "Dream of Deeds."

(4) When Clemente ran, it seemed not so much that he was trying to reach a base as to escape from some unspeakable terror. He had an unusual ability to stop on a dime after racing full speed to first.

(5) The 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, with Clemente (bottom row, second from left) starring in right field, defeated the New York Yankees in seven games to win the World Series. It was a bold and extraordinary upset (they won despite losing three games by the scores of 163, 12-0, and 100), an act of rebellion at the dawn of the sixties' decade.

(6) Wedding Day, November 14, 1964. All through the slow, sweet Sat.u.r.day afternoon, the people of Carolina, Puerto Rico, celebrated as if it were the festival for a local saint. Clemente looked as princely in his black tuxedo as he did in the cool white and black of his Pittsburgh uniform.

(7) Roberto and Vera on their honeymoon in Curaao. "I can walk down to the corner and probably get ten girls," Clemente had told Vera's father, Flor Zabala, while he was courting her. "But I don't care. The one I love is here."

(8) Clemente spent his career alternately worrying about his health and complaining about being called a hypochondriac. Before leaving home for spring training in 1965, he was hospitalized with malaria and lost nearly twenty-five pounds. Here he is visited by his mother, Luisa.

(9) Vera visited Roberto at spring training, but never spent an entire preseason with him. Nothing in Puerto Rico was as overtly racist as the Jim Crow segregation Clemente experienced during his early years with the Pirates in Fort Myers.

(10) Clemente in the living room of his modernist home atop the hill in Ro Piedras. He had just won his third batting t.i.tle, but still felt overlooked, misunderstood, and underappreciated. Any conversation with a sports reporter was likely to open with a loud complaint.

(11) Roberto and Vera cross the sidewalk bridge out the front door of their house with Robert.i.to and Luisito. Clemente insisted that Vera come home to Puerto Rico for the births of their sons.

(12).

(13) Clemente ran out every ground ball, hustled on the bases, and thought he could catch any ball hit to the outfield and throw out any runner on the bases. His batting prowess, with 3,000 hits and four batting t.i.tles, was equaled by his skill in the field. He had one of the most fearsome throwing arms in baseball history and won twelve Gold Gloves. Critics noticed his less than sterling on-base percentage and home run totals; his fans said his game could not be reduced to statistics.

(14) Victor Pellot (left), known in the majors as Vic Power, came up before Clemente and helped pave the way for him as one of the Three Kings, along with Hiram Bithorn and Luis Olmo. Power and Clemente were close friends off the field and were together in Nicaragua coaching an amateur baseball team shortly before Clemente's death.

(15) In the late 1960s, Clemente wore the uniform of the San Juan Senadores, the favorite team of his childhood. Writers in Pittsburgh often questioned why Clemente would tire himself by playing winter ball, but he felt an obligation to his homeland and connected his personal history to the struggle of his people.

(16) Clemente was like a big brother to dozens of Latino players who followed him to the majors, including Orlando Cepeda (left), the slugging first baseman from Puerto Rico. Here they pose with fans during the 1967 season, when Cepeda was the National League MVP. Clemente had won the honor a year earlier.

(17) Planeloads of Puerto Ricans flew to Pittsburgh for Roberto Clemente night on July 24, 1970. Clemente choked with emotion as he began to speak. At a moment like that, he said afterward, "You can see a lot of years in a few minutes. You can see everything firm and you can see everything clear."

(18) The entire family came to Pittsburgh when Clemente was honored, including his father, Melchor (far left), who had never left Puerto Rico before and needed help to overcome his fear of flying. "I have achieved this honor for us the Latinos," Clemente said.

(19) Clemente routinely visited sick children in National League cities. The hospital visits were rarely publicized, but ailing kids seemed to know about them everywhere. Before each road trip Clemente sorted out his large pile of mail in the clubhouse and made a special stack for children in cities where the Pirates were headed next.

(20) The Pirates trainer, Tony Bartirome (left), thought Roberto Clemente was a lot like his wife. Ask Clemente how he felt and he would tell you, "Well, I've got this thing with my neck." A pregame stop at the training table was a daily appointment, another of his rituals, like not sleeping at night and complaining about sportswriters.

(21) At age thirty-eight, Clemente's body still evoked that of a world-cla.s.s ballet dancer, with muscled shoulders rippling down to a narrow waist, thirty inches-the same measurement he had as a teenager-and powerful wrists, and hands so magical they were said to have eyes at their fingertips.

(22) As the outstanding player of the 1971 World Series, Clemente was awarded a new car by Sport magazine. One of the guests at the award ceremony at Mamma Leone's restaurant said that Roberto and Vera "seemed to be unreal people, sculptured out of bronze instead of ordinary flesh and blood like those surrounding them." Clemente told the crowd that the World Series allowed him to talk to millions of people about issues that meant the most to him.

(23) Bob Prince (center), the Pirates' colorful announcer, had a nickname for everyone, and shouted Arriba! whenever Clemente strolled to the plate. Roberto felt that Prince treated him fairly, and during an offseason he decided to honor "the Gunner" at a ceremony in San Juan. Along with a carved trophy, he gave Prince the Silver Bat he had won for his first batting t.i.tle.

(24) September 30, 1972, Three Rivers Stadium, Pirates vs. Mets. New York lefty Jon Matlack on the mound. It was an outside curve going just where Matlack wanted it to go until Clemente thwacked it against the left field wall for his three-thousandth hit.

(25) When the inning was over, Clemente walked slowly out to his position in right and tipped his cap to the fans. El Nuevo Da photographer Luis Ramos followed him step by step and caught the moment forever.

(26) On December 2, 1972, the lightning-striped DC-7 that would carry Clemente to his death a few weeks later was taxied into a ditch at San Juan International Airport by its owner, Arthur Rivera. Clemente knew nothing about the plane's troubled history when he boarded the plane, overloaded with humanitarian aid, on New Year's Eve.

(27) Despite a ma.s.sive effort to a.s.sist the people of Nicaragua after the devastating earthquake that leveled Managua and killed thousands of residents two days before Christmas, 1972, much of the aid was not getting to the people. In the aftermath of the quake, the greed of Nicaraguan military leader Anastasio Somoza became apparent. Clemente decided to go to Managua to make sure that food and medical supplies from Puerto Rico reached the people who needed help.

(28) Eleven weeks after his death, Roberto Clemente was voted into the Hall of Fame. He and Lou Gehrig, the Yankees first baseman who also died a tragic early death, are the only players in major league history to be enshrined without waiting the normal five-year period after the end of their playing days. Vera represented the family at the ceremony.

(29) Memory and myth are entwined in the Clemente story. "That night on which Roberto Clemente left us physically, his immortality began," the Puerto Rican writer Elliott Castro later observed. Clemente's three sons, including Roberto Jr., here kissing his picture, lost a father, and all of Latin America lost "one of their glories."

(30) From beginning to end, there was a bond between Clemente and baseball fans, especially children. Clemente among the people was an image that burned in the memories of many of his friends. In some sense, they saw him as a prophet.

Acknowledgments.

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 b.u.ms 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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 ma.n.u.script 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. .h.i.tting 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 doc.u.ments, 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 Fernndez in Managua, Lisa Margot Johnson in Pittsburgh, Jim Shelton in Fort Myers, and Madonna Lebling in Was.h.i.+ngton were terrific in helping me track down clippings. Dale Petroskey and Bill Francis were of great a.s.sistance at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, as was Jeff Flannery, ma.n.u.script librarian at the Library of Congress, and Laura J. Brown at the Federal Aviation Administration. Ramiro Martnez in San Juan, Dwayne Rieder in Pittsburgh, Squire Galbreath in Columbus, and Mike Pangia in Was.h.i.+ngton 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 ma.n.u.script, or providing moral support were Nelson Briles (who died too young), Javier Velez-Arocho, Daniel Rolleri, Luis Ferre, 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, d.i.c.k 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 Doa 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 ma.n.u.script), 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 pa.s.sion 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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

About the Author.