Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (47 page)

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Clemente was determined that his own efforts would not fall victim to corruption. To several friends in those final few days of 1972, he made the same request: I’m going to Nicaragua.
Come with me. He called
his friend Les Banos, the Pittsburgh photographer, explained his distress over the corruption in Managua, and said, “Why don’t you come down and take pictures?” If not for the Immaculate Reception, Banos replied, he would be there no questions asked, but because the Steelers won he would be covering their next playoff game against the Miami Dolphins on New Year’s Eve. Clemente turned to Orlando Cepeda, who was home in Puerto Rico after the most difficult season of his career. Cepeda had been traded from the Atlanta Braves to Oakland the previous June, but underwent knee surgery after only three at-bats with the A’s and never got back on the field. After fifteen productive seasons in the big leagues and a total of 358 home runs and 1,261 runs batted in, Cepeda found himself struggling to keep his career alive. Oakland had placed him on waivers at season’s end, and not a single club had put in a claim for him. Now, after Christmas, came the deflating news that the A’s had given him his unconditional release. That often meant a career was over, but Cepeda, at age thirty-five, was not ready to give up. He wanted to exercise his troublesome legs back into shape, and in any case he loved being in Puerto Rico during the holiday season, and that is why he said, no, sorry, when his friend asked him to come along to Nicaragua. No was not an easy thing to say to Roberto Clemente. “He was angry with me for not going,” Cepeda remembered.

The earthquake relief collection site was moved after a few days from the Hiram Bithorn parking lot to a larger lot across the street at Plaza Las Americas because San Juan and Santurce were back playing at the stadium. The Senadores team was a virtual Pirates South, stocked with Clemente’s Pittsburgh teammates, including Richie Zisk, Rennie Stennett, Milt May, and Manny Sanguillen. Before a game one night that week, Clemente took a break from his volunteer work and visited the clubhouse, where he immediately fell into the comfortable routine of razzing in a mix of Spanish and English, mostly with Sanguillen, his cheery little brother from Panama.

“Sangy, what position do you play in the winter league?” Clemente asked, fixing a serious stare on Sanguillen. He knew the answer. The sports sections that week had featured stories about how the hot-hitting catcher was learning to play outfield.

“Right field,” Sanguillen said. “I play twenty games in right, one in left.”

The first crack of a smile showed on Clemente’s face. “Sangy, you play left field or go back to catching. You have no chance to take my job.”

“I play right field real good now,” Sanguillen responded. “Not as good as you, but real close. I may be the best right fielder in the league when you quit.”

Now Clemente was laughing. “You never come close, Sangy. Besides, I think I’m a better catcher than you.”

When Clemente said something like that, no one could be certain whether he was kidding. He thought he could do anything. He always insisted that he could throw a curveball better than the pitcher Steve Blass. He couldn’t, of course, nor could he catch nearly as well as Sanguillen, but that was Clemente. At least he wouldn’t feel slighted for not being universally regarded as the best pitcher or catcher in the world. But the very idea of Sangy out there in right challenging his position, that wasn’t quite a laughing matter, no more now than it was a month earlier when Edgard Tijerino, the Nicaraguan sportswriter, suggested that a young Cuban outfielder had an arm that could match
El Magnífico
’s. But the beauty of Sanguillen was that he could ease whatever tension Clemente was feeling at the moment. Now Clemente was joking with him again about the monkey that he brought back from Nicaragua after the amateur baseball tournament. At home, he called the monkey Teófilo, but when Sanguillen was around he always joked that the monkey’s name was Sangy. Sangy was acting up, he said. Sangy bit one of the kids and went wild at Don Melchor’s house and made a mess of all the fruit, fake and real. Had to give him to the zoo. Then Clemente said: I’m going back to Nicaragua, Sangy. Come with me. But Sanguillen couldn’t go, either. He had some more baseball games to play in right field.

And there was Osvaldo Gil, his compatriot on the baseball trip to Nicaragua. “Valdy, will you go with me?” Clemente asked, and Gil, without giving it a second thought, said sure. But that night, when he told his wife that he intended to go back to Managua with Roberto Clemente, she fled to the bedroom without saying a word. When
Osvaldo came in, she was crying. She was feeling sad, she told him, because they had just been married a few months when he left for Nicaragua the first time, and now he was leaving again. Gil realized that she was right. The next morning, at Plaza Las Americas, he told Clemente, “I talked to my wife, and I’m not going.”

“And you’re the one who says we shouldn’t listen to the women?” Clemente answered, recalling with a touch of sarcasm how Gil, during their earlier trip to Managua, had teased him so much for reflexively consulting with Vera before making a decision.

“But you’re right,” Clemente now said to Gil. “You shouldn’t go. I’ll go by myself.”

IN THE WIDE WORLD OF AVIATION THERE ARE DARK
little corners of desperation. One of them during the early 1970s was a back lot of Miami International Airport known as Cockroach Corner. It was said that
you could buy anything for a song at Cockroach Corner, occasionally even planes that had a decent chance of taking flight. The place looked like a mechanical graveyard, creaking with rickety old surplus DC-3s, DC-6s, Lockheed Constellations, and DC-7s, but in fact it was more of a winged bazaar. What were known in the industry as tramp operators did business there, buying, selling, and leasing planes to anyone looking for a cut-rate deal. It was at Cockroach Corner that a twenty-six-year-old operator named Arthur S. Rivera bought another old plane on July 12, 1972. This DC-7, powered by four Curtiss Wright 988 engines with Hamilton Standard propellers, would double Rivera’s cargo fleet, supplementing his twin-engine DC-3 in hauling goods between San Juan, his home base, and other Caribbean islands.

Rivera had obtained a commercial pilot rating four years earlier, but knew nothing about DC-7s, which were more than five times heavier than DC-3s, so he could not fly his plane back to Puerto Rico. It remained at Cockroach Corner until sometime in September, when he finally found a pilot. When they ferried it from Florida to the island, Rivera rode along in the right seat as copilot. They parked the aircraft at a cargo ramp at San Juan International Airport on Isla Verde, and there it remained throughout the fall. Word soon spread about Rivera’s folly, the only DC-7 at the airfield. The plane had a registration number, N500AE, but seemed anything but airworthy. Among other deficiencies, its No. 3 propeller was said to be feathered, indicating engine
malfunction. “It was never seen to fly, and everybody wondered what Mr. Rivera was going to do with the plane. That probably included Mr. Rivera,” Michael Pangia, a Justice Department aviation lawyer, observed later. What Rivera did was spruce up the exterior. He gave the fuselage a new paint job of silvery white and added the bravado touch of a lightning bolt, orange with black trim, that ran horizontally along both sides above the windows and zigzagged below the cockpit. The same color scheme was applied to the tips of the propellers, creating the effect of tiger stripes. With that superficial remodeling, Rivera placed advertisements in the local newspapers, announcing that his outfit—he called himself the American Air Express Company—had a DC-7 available for lease. The phone in his home office on Loiza Street in Santurce did not ring off the hook.

On the Saturday morning of December 2, Rivera and a relative, who knew even less about DC-7s than he did, took the plane out for what was called a run-up, meaning they would taxi around the airstrip, warming up the engines, but not try to fly.
As practice runs go, this one was a fiasco. Rivera, in the pilot’s seat, forgot to close the hydraulic pump bypass, which caused him to lose steering control. He shut down all four engines in an effort to slow the plane’s momentum, but it ended up rolling into a drainage ditch. When it came to a stop, the nose of the plane was leaning down and the wings were so low that two propellers touched the ground. It is not every day that a DC-7 plunges into a ditch. Everyone who worked at the airport knew about the “incident” (as it was called, rather than an accident), especially since it blocked the taxiway for several hours and forced air traffic controllers to reroute traffic until heavy equipment was brought in to hoist the plane out of the ditch and tow it ignominiously back to the east ramp. If Federal Aviation Administration officials in San Juan needed a reminder to keep close watch on the comings and goings of Arthur Rivera, this was it, but with his aviation history, one might assume that no further warnings would have been needed.

From the moment he came down from Atlanta and began transporting cargo out of San Juan International in November 1969, Rivera had been a constant irritant to inspectors at the FAA’s Flight Standards District Office. Day after day, he offered his DC-3 out for hire as he
made island hops from Puerto Rico to St. Thomas to St. Croix and back to San Juan, hauling leisurewear, rugs, dry goods, and luggage. But despite repeated warnings from federal aviation officials, Rivera refused to obtain the proper certification for a commercial operator, acting instead as though he were merely flying the plane for his own personal recreation. This allowed him to avoid more frequent inspections and the far stricter flight standards of commercial aviation. Acting on a complaint from a licensed competitor, the FAA finally launched a formal investigation, compiled a list of sixty-six illegal trips that Rivera had made, and issued an emergency order in August 1970 revoking his pilot’s license. In taking that step, the FAA said Rivera’s “aviation knowledge and experience was relatively limited” and that he was an “extremely independent and headstrong person who would not take advice.”

That characterization was an understatement. To Rivera, the federal regulators were enemy combatants whose sole purpose was to put him out of business. A typical run-in occurred on the Thursday afternoon of April 2, 1970, when he arrived at San Juan International from St. Thomas and parked his DC-3 at its normal spot on the east cargo ramp. Representatives from the Customs Bureau and the FAA were there waiting for him. When Rivera stepped down from the cockpit, inspector Juan L. Villafañe asked to see the papers and manuals of the airplane.

“You people are always picking on me, and on account of that I’m losing a lot of money,” Rivera snapped, according to later testimony of the customs officer, Abraham Irizarry. Then Rivera padlocked the door to his plane. When Villafañe noted that a copilot was required for this flight and asked where that person was, Rivera said that he was locked inside the plane. After much haggling, the inspectors made their way in and found 224 pieces of luggage, a load that Rivera had carried for Caribair Airlines, but no copilot. Asked to explain the disappearance, Rivera claimed the copilot “escaped through the hatch.” Then, in what the inspectors interpreted as a threat of violence, Rivera said that Villafañe had better watch out if he walked the streets of downtown San Juan.

The chief of the FAA’s flight standards office in San Juan then was
William B. Couric, a University of Miami engineering graduate and veteran fighter pilot who flew combat missions in World War II.
Couric was such a stickler that his office nickname was Deputy Dog, in honor of the little cartoon character who insisted on doing everything by the book. The Couric v. Rivera relationship took on a bit of a cartoon nature, with the inspector in constant but often frustrating battle to keep the freewheeling pilot on an acceptable course. Couric had counseled Rivera many times before moving to yank his pilot’s license, urging him to follow the rules, to no avail. During each discussion, Couric later reported, Rivera would “exhibit a temper and raise his voice.” After the emergency order was issued, Rivera simply ignored it, further frustrating Couric. One afternoon Couric confronted Rivera after watching him land his DC-3 at the airport, arriving from what was likely another illegal run. “Why do you continue to fly?” Couric asked. Rivera claimed that he knew nothing about the emergency order. When Couric handed him a copy, Rivera said that he’d worked hard to get his license and would not give it up.

Rather than reform his desperado ways,
Rivera went on the offensive. He shadowed Couric around the airfield, occasionally stopping his car to take pictures, as though he were the one doing the enforcement work. There appeared to be no “rhyme or reason” to Rivera’s behavior, Couric wrote in a memo to his superiors. “His actions appear irrational and maybe require psychological examination.” But Rivera was writing his own memos and letters higher up the chain. He penned what was later described as “a lengthy diatribe” to Alexander P. Butterfield, then FAA administrator in Washington, accusing federal aviation officials of waging a personal campaign to put him out of business. He was just a small businessman trying to follow the American dream, he claimed, while the San Juan investigators were corrupt and taking bribes from his competitors. Aiming even higher, he sent a two-page telegram to President Nixon in which he made the same arguments. There is no evidence that Butterfield or Nixon read Rivera’s rants or acted on them in any way, but something did happen in the aftermath that stunned and disappointed Couric and his crew. An appeals court judge, while ruling that Rivera had violated Federal Aviation Regulation 121.3(f) in not having proper certification for commercial
flights, nonetheless reduced his penalty from revocation to a 180-day suspension of his pilot’s license. The court bought Rivera’s argument that the government should not deprive him of his livelihood.

Couric was soon promoted and transferred to another posting in Miami, but Rivera stayed around to live out his dream, eventually expanding his fleet with the DC-7 he found at Cockroach Corner.