Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (29 page)

Joyous organ music filled the church as the wedding party spilled out to the plaza, where the outdoor crowd, still in the thousands, broke their silence with a thunderous roar as though
El Magnífico
’s magic arm had nailed another runner at third. The caravan of sedans, led by police escort, weaved through the streets of Carolina toward the reception at the clubhouse of the Phi Eta Mu fraternity in Cupey Bajo, which overflowed with more than eight hundred guests.

A year earlier, when Vera’s father first met the famous ballplayer, he had wondered why someone who could choose from scores of women had settled on his daughter. The same question seemed to be on the minds of several women Clemente had befriended in Pittsburgh and other National League cities.
One woman in New York, not realizing that the marriage had already taken place, sent Clemente a letter that he kept and later showed to Vera. “Dear Roberto,” it began. “What do I have to do to get you to write? I waited for you to come to New York and you didn’t even try to call me. I’m going mad not knowing what you’re doing or when you’re getting married. If there’s something I could do to stop you I would. But you haven’t even given me the chance . . . You don’t understand what the whole thing is doing to me. I’ve never needed anything as much as I need you . . . Roberto, I love you as always. You know I’ll be yours no matter what happens.”

The Puerto Rican winter league had begun, but Clemente was in no rush to get back to baseball. He and Vera took a honeymoon in the Virgin Islands, then spent the Christmas season between their parents’ houses and a three-acre farm he was renting in the countryside southwest
of Carolina. Vera quickly discovered that Clemente was a home-body who was happiest when he was fiddling around the house. He liked to repair equipment, clear brush, and mow the lawn. In his role as a country squire, he proved both skilled and accident prone. One day that December while he was cutting grass, a rock flew up from his mower and struck him in his right thigh, causing a bruise so deep and persistent that by mid-January he was put in the hospital and Dr. Buso performed a minor operation to drain blood from the leg.

As he was recovering from the operation in February,
Clemente organized a group of Puerto Rican and Cuban all-stars to play a series against the best Dominicans. If nothing else, the three-game series played in Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, gave an indication of the progression of baseball hotspots in the Caribbean. First Cuba dominated, then Puerto Rico, and now the DR. Clemente put himself in center, and his team also included major leaguers Juan Pizarro, José Pagán, Cookie Rojas, and Sandy Alomar, but they were outmatched by a Dominican squad that had Juan Marichal on the mound and the three Alou brothers, Felipe, Mateo, and Jesus, in the field. For the third game, Clemente yanked himself from the starting lineup. He said that he felt tired. He entered the game in the seventh inning, only because the fans expected to see him play, and of course, as he usually did when he was feeling poorly, rapped out a hard single. That was the lone game the Puerto Ricans won. By the time they returned to San Juan, he was feeling even weaker.

In sickness and in health; during her first three months as a bride, Vera saw the strength and vulnerability of her husband. He went to bed and stayed there, his fever rising every day. At times he appeared to be in a stupor, unable to talk. At other times he seemed on the verge of delirium. The nurses gave him sleeping pills, but no medicine short of general anesthesia seemed capable of getting him to sleep.

What was wrong? At first the doctors suspected he might have picked up a paratyphoid infection from some hogs at his country farm. They put him in the hospital again. He became morbid. He would die young, he told Vera. She should remarry. God forbid, don’t talk about that. Don’t talk about sad things, she answered. His brothers Andres
and Matino came to visit and tried to lighten his mood, mocking his fatalism. When your ass becomes so skinny that the back pockets of your pants come together, then you’re dead, Andres joked. The diagnosis remained uncertain, but now it was thought he had contacted malaria during his barnstorming tour in the Dominican Republic. This was not hypochondria, or Clemente just being sensitive. He lost five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-three pounds, until finally the fever broke. By the second week in March, he was out of the hospital. He changed his diet and started drinking fruit cocktail milkshakes made with egg yolks, banana ice cream, orange juice, a peach or pear, and crumbled ice.

With the Pirates already training in Fort Myers, general manager Brown began calling Clemente every day to check on his condition and find out when he might report. Then, one evening, Brown and his wife, Virginia, who went by the nickname Din, were injured in a traffic accident as they were returning to Fort Myers from dinner in a nearby town. Din was badly hurt, with several broken bones. The next time Brown called Clemente it was from his wife’s bedside at the hospital. Din was crazy about Roberto, who always treated her with warmth and kindness.

“Din is hurt but is anxious to know how you are doing and when you’ll be able to come,” Brown told Clemente.

“I’m two or three days away, I think I can come Friday,” Clemente responded. “How is Din doing?”

“She’s right here, would you like to talk to her?”

“Yes.”

“How are you, Roberto?” Din said softly.

“Din, so sorry you had this accident,” he said.

“I’m doing better, how are you?” she answered, turning the attention away from her own battered body.

“Well,” said Clemente, “I got this touch of diarrhea.”

Din laughed when she recounted the conversation to her husband. Classic Clemente, Joe Brown thought.

A few days later, Clemente was ready to return to Florida for his twelfth baseball spring. Andres and Matino drove him to the airport, as
usual. Florida was still not the most inviting place for Clemente and his new bride, so Vera would join him later in Pittsburgh. As the boys walked toward the gate, Andres said that his little brother would be too puny to bring home another Silver Bat that year.

Momen stopped, grabbed the back pockets of his pants, and squeezed them together, laughing at the sign of death.

EVERY MOVE CLEMENTE MADE WAS STUDIED BY HIS
admiring fans at Forbes Field. Bruce Laurie, who landed in Pittsburgh in 1965 as a graduate student in history, might show up at the stadium in the fifth inning and take a freebie seat in the right-field stands, sharing his beers with the usher. For his baseball satisfaction, all Laurie needed was to observe Clemente up close, all “bone and sinew with long arms that looked longer still because of the Pirates’ sleeveless shirts.” And then, at some point, the thrill of the throw—with a motion faster than any Laurie had ever seen “and overhand, with an exaggerated follow-through, so that when he wound up . . . he looked like a dervish expelling a cannonball.” Many players have one memorable trait; Clemente’s every action on the diamond had its own singular style. The writer Michael Chabon, who grew up in Pittsburgh, said it was hard
not
to look at Clemente; he attracted one’s attention like a glint on a telephone wire. Howard Fineman, another denizen of the right-field stands, memorized his hero’s intricate routine at the plate until it was etched into his teenage brain as surely as the capitals of the fifty states or the chronological order of the Presidents. In retrospect, Fineman would think of Clemente taking a turn at-bat as “positively Iberian, a bullfighter, the great test of wills,” so serious in every detail that it was thrilling yet almost comic. And here it was:

Clemente would never smile preparing for a plate appearance. When he approached the rack inside the dugout, his attitude was that of a surgeon toward his instruments or a toreador toward his swords. He knew these bats, these Frenchy Uhalt models. He had studied them from the moment a new shipment came in during spring training.
He was as tuned to them as he was to his body, and his choice might depend on his mood, or the fitness of his lower back, or the pitcher on the mound, or something he saw in the grain of wood. Not ready yet to decide, he would haul two or three bats out to the on-deck circle, carrying them all in one hand. Then he would kneel, left knee bent at ninety degrees, right knee touching the ground, posture erect, the bats draped elegantly against his thigh. One by one, he would pick them up, heft them, as he stared at the pitcher, and wipe them with his rag. Here was the serenity of Clemente, before the storm. From his right-field perch, Fineman relished this moment, knowing what was to follow. At last it was Clemente’s turn to hit, and he would now make his final selection ceremoniously, this piece of wood, of the three, had made the cut; the others, unlucky, left behind as orphan scraps to be retrieved by the batboy. Then the famed dead man’s walk to the batter’s box.

On the way, as he approached the plate, he would rotate his neck from side to side, then twist it back, so many kinks to unloosen. Of all the sequences in the ritual, the neck move was the most regal. The poet Tom Clark would draw upon this memory above all others:

won’t forget

his nervous

habit of

rearing his

head back

on his neck

like a

proud horse

And now the care of his habitat. Like an animal preparing his ground. Or maybe fortifications, that is the metaphor that popped into one observer’s head—a French general preparing his fort. He would hold his bat with his left hand and raise the other toward the ump—
momentito, momentito
for Momen—as he rearranged dirt and dust with his polished leather shoes, spikes gleaming, until it was just right. By now the pitcher was ticked. But there was little in the way of filibustering
from then on, no constant stepping out of the box and repeating a superstitious ritual after every pitch, aside from the occasional revolving of the neck. When his workplace was ready, he would take his stance, left leg coiled, hands back, stance way off the plate, back near the line, beseeching the ball, bring it on. He would take the first pitch, almost always, in order to calculate the timing and motion, but then let it rip. And for someone not known as a slugger, what a rip it was. Jim Murray, the
Los Angeles Times
sports columnist who made his living off metaphors, wrote that Clemente “had a batting style like a man falling down a fire escape.” His swing, Bruce Laurie thought, was the mirror image of the throw—“a great swirling motion in blinding speed that routinely dislodged his batting helmet.” Both Laurie and Fineman felt this odd sensation, a ripple of joy even in a Clemente swing and miss. There was such pent-up intensity in the moment that it seemed to Fineman that Clemente’s “entire being was at stake with every pitch.” One image that stuck was of him flinging himself and the bat toward a high-outside pitch and literally leaving his feet altogether to make contact, stroking a shot down the right-field line.

Donn Clendenon and other teammates would joke that there were three great left-handed pull hitters in the National League who scared the hell out of every first baseman: Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, and Roberto Clemente, who, of course, was no lefty at all.

In repose, there was a grace and beauty to Clemente. “Compact, flawlessly sculpted, with chiseled ebony features and an air of unshakable dignity,” Roy McHugh reflected later. “He carried himself—everybody noticed this—like royalty.” At times, as Clemente posed on second after a double, McHugh thought of “Michelangelo’s statue of David—David wearing a baseball uniform.” But in action everything changed; Clemente was all fury and agitation. A writer once described Willie Mays as liquid smooth. With Clemente, there was a liquid nature to his eyes and body, but only until he ran; then it was gone. Steve Blass and his Pirates teammates took goofy joy in watching Clemente run. He ran everything out, first of all, full speed, head down, every feeble tap back to the pitcher, and he worked so hard at running. They would tell him he looked like a broken windmill, every limb rotating a different direction. Clemente didn’t actually run, they
would say, he galloped. To Richard Santry, another teenager who sat in the right-field stands at Forbes Field during those years and spent the entire game watching Clemente, he ran “like he was running away from the bulls in Spain, like a crazy man.” Fineman also was struck by Clemente’s urgency. He seemed to run as though “his pants had been set on fire by the flames of hell itself”—and that is the point. He was not running, he was fleeing. When Clemente was on the go, it seemed not so much that he was trying to get to a base as to escape from some unspeakable phantasmal terror.

•   •   •

During the first two months of the 1965 season, Clemente’s first notion was to escape Pittsburgh itself. He was still weakened from his bout with malaria, and the team seemed even punier, with Willie Stargell, the only legitimate long-ball threat in the lineup, also somehow sapped of strength. After opening the season with five wins in their first seven games, the team struck out on a brutal road trip that took them to five cities, covering 7,585 miles in planes that were in the air for a total of twenty-one and a half hours, including one particularly long and discombobulating haul on a chartered prop that took six hours and twenty-five minutes to get from Los Angeles to St. Louis. Clemente was exhausted by the trip, and needed a rest. After two losses to open the series, with the team now dropping ten of its last eleven games, the new manager, Harry Walker, went on a postgame rampage in the visiting clubhouse, flinging cups, papers, and trays around his cubicle and denouncing his players with what one writer described as “the most earthy and sulphuric language at his command.” The pitching was okay, Walker said, but the hitting was horseshit, and he was especially concerned about what he feared was a “defeatist attitude.” The whole team was playing like crap, he said, from the lowest scrub to the top star. He thought Clemente’s hands were slow, and that he needed some rest and maybe lighter bats. For the Sunday doubleheader, Walker sat Clemente on the bench and sent left-handed hitting Jerry Lynch out to right. Lynch got hot immediately, banging out four hits in seven at-bats that day, though the Pirates lost both games. Before leaving town, Walker had an interview with a St. Louis radio station during
which Clemente’s benching was mentioned. Yes, Roberto had malarial fatigue, Walker said, but great players—he said Stan Musial and Ted Williams came to mind—played even when they were ailing.