Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (5 page)

The sprawl of metropolitan San Juan eventually would reach Carolina and turn much of it into a noisy jumble of auto shops and storefronts, but it was a very different place, slow and pastoral, during Roberto’s childhood in the thirties and forties. The choke of urban life seemed far away. There was an orange grove across the street from the Clemente house, and in the other direction, behind them, a lane led back to vast fields of sugarcane. Road 887 saw little traffic, so quiet that Roberto and his childhood friend Ricardo Vicenti, who lived across the way near the orange trees, spent much of their time playing improvised variations of baseball in the dusty street. Baseball was Roberto’s favorite sport, his obsession, from an early age. “
When I was a little
kid, the only thing I used to do was play ball all the time,” Clemente recalled during an interview decades later. “With a paper ball, with a rubber ball, with a tennis ball.” Sometimes the ball was a tin can, emptied of beans or tomato sauce, or a lumpy sphere made of string and old rags. Often, they hit fungoes using a broomstick as the bat and a bottle cap as the ball. But it was always baseball. Rosa Semprit, a neighbor who walked by the Clemente house on her way to school, remembered that every time she saw Roberto outside he was throwing something; even if he was alone, he would be tossing a ball against a wall.

There was not that much else for a boy to do in the barrio of San Antón. The beaches of the Atlantic were ten miles north, and El Yunque, the exotic rainforest, stood fifteen miles further east. On a clear day, the breeze carried a scent of saltwater from one direction and the mountains were visible in another, but without a car both were too far away. Many years, the lone trip to the beach as a family came on the Fourth of July, when much of the neighborhood traveled by bus caravan to Isla Verde for the day. For local entertainment, movies were projected onto a wall inside a ranch house down the street. Children attended in packs and sat on hard wooden benches, laughing at grainy movies, a few from Hollywood but most in Spanish and produced in Mexico, black-and-white short films starring the comedian Cantinflas.

The adults walked to work.
Melchor was a regular figure along the back roads, a short man with straw hat and machete, trooping miles at a time to the fields to the west or processing plant to the north, occasionally riding an old country mare. In later years, he also carried a .38 revolver and transistor radio wherever he went. Radios were a family trademark. Melchor was a man of habits, like his son. He was said to eat precisely eight hard-boiled eggs a day. He was gone from dawn until after nightfall, so his children did not see much of him, though Roberto, as an adult, spoke nostalgically of family gatherings that included Melchor. He grew up, Clemente once said, “with people who really had to struggle.” His mother never went to a show, never learned how to dance. “But even the way we used to live, I was so happy, because my brothers and my father and mother, we used to get together at night and we would sit down and make jokes and eat whatever we have to eat. And this was something that was wonderful to
me.” His older brother Justino, known to the family as Matino, had one memory less wonderful. His father was loving, but also strict, and punished the boys with a horsewhip. Melchor gave his sons this advice about nonviolence: “Don’t hit anyone, but don’t let anyone hit you, either. I’d prefer to see you in jail than in a coffin.” There was a tradition of dueling in Carolina that stretched back into the nineteenth century and was reflected in one of the town’s old nicknames,
El Pueblo de los Tumbabrazos
—the town of those who cut off arms.

The old man knew nothing about baseball. The sport had reached the island from Cuba even before U.S. Marines came ashore in July 1898, but Melchor never had time for it as a young man and had not learned the basics. Once, watching from the stands, he felt sorry for his son for having to run all the way around the bases after hitting a ball while most of the other batters were allowed to return to the bench and sit down after sprinting to first base. But Roberto was not the first or only Clemente to love the game. Matino, who was seven years older, played first base in the top amateur league, a slick fielder and feared line-drive hitter. Roberto admired his older brother, and always insisted that Matino was the best ballplayer in the family but came along too soon, just at the cusp of the segregated era in professional baseball in the States. His career was cut short in any case when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in October 1950 and served three years, including eleven months in Korea with C Company of the 10th Engineers Combat Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division. Matino was Momen’s first baseball instructor, and he maintained that role, offering advice and counsel long after his little brother became a major league star.

Baseball was the dominant sport on the island, followed by boxing, horse racing, track and field, volleyball, and basketball. Soccer, by far the most popular sport elsewhere in Latin America, had not caught on in Puerto Rico, another sign of how it was influenced by the United States. The mainland seemed remote to young Clemente, and baseball there even more unreachable, but he followed winter league baseball in Puerto Rico religiously. In the San Juan area, loyalties were divided between the San Juan Senadores (Senators) and Santurce Cangrejeros (Crabbers), a split that in many ways mirrored the one between the
Yankees and Dodgers in New York.
The Cangrejeros were grittier, beloved by cabdrivers, hotel workers, factory hands, and much like the Dodgers, they had a strong black following. Josh Gibson, star of the Negro Leagues, played for Santurce in the early years, followed by Roy Campanella, Ray Dandridge, Willard Brown, and Junior Gilliam, whose range at second prompted Cangrejeros fans to call him the Black Sea. But Clemente grew up rooting for the San Juan Senadores. His loyalties were shaped by his idolizing of Monte Irvin, San Juan’s graceful outfielder. Irvin’s color kept him out of the majors for most of his career, until 1949, when the Giants brought him up, but he was a star for the Newark Eagles in the Negro Leagues for a decade before that, and tore up the Puerto Rican winter league for several seasons in the mid-forties, when Clemente was eleven to fifteen, formative years for any baseball fan.

The Senadores and Cangrejeros played in the same stadium, Sixto Escobar (named for a bantamweight boxing champ), just off the ocean on Puerta de Tierra, the long finger of land leading to Old San Juan. The way the winter league worked, there were only three games a week, one on Saturday and a doubleheader on Sunday.
Irvin said later that he enjoyed playing there because of the beauty of the island, the leisurely schedule, the excitement of the fans, the first-rate competition, and above all, the fact that “we were treated much better there than in the States.” If a black American hit an important home run, fans might pass a hat through the stands to collect an impromptu bonus for the player. When they went out to eat in Old San Juan or the restaurant strip in Condado, they were treated as celebrities and offered meals on the house.

When he could, Momen caught the bus from Carolina on weekends to hang out at Sixto Escobar with swarms of other kids. Juan Pizarro, who lived much closer, near Loiza Avenue in Santurce, never had money to get inside, but shimmied up a palm tree to watch the games. Clemente sometimes had a quarter from his father. He used a dime for the bus and fifteen cents for a ticket. His goal was to get there early enough to watch Monte Irvin glide through the throng outside on the way to play. “I never had enough nerve, I didn’t want to even look at him straight in the face,” Clemente remembered. “But when
he passed by I would turn around and look at him because I idolized him.” Just by being there, hanging around, as shy as he was, Clemente eventually struck up a friendship with Irvin. And Irvin made sure that his young fan got in to watch the game, even without a ticket. “I used to give him my suit bag to carry into the stadium so he could get in for free,” Irvin recalled. From a seat in the bleachers, Clemente studied everything about his hero: how he looked in a uniform, how he walked, how he ran, how he hit, and especially how he threw. More than half a century later, still trim, dignified, white-haired, Irvin could bring back that mentoring relationship in his mind’s eye. “Yeah, I taught Roberto how to throw,” Irvin said. “Of course, he quickly surpassed me.”

By the time he was fifteen, Clemente was starring at shortstop in a softball league on a team sponsored by Sello Rojo, a rice-packaging firm. He was fast, had a gun for an arm, and surprising power for a lanky teenager. Sello Rojo (Red Seal) was coached by Roberto Marín, a rice salesman who became his baseball guardian. By the next year Clemente was also playing hardball, mostly outfield, for the Juncos Mules, a top amateur team in Carolina, and occasionally participated in track and field events at Julio Vizcarrando Coronado High School, running the 440 meters and throwing the javelin. The javelin, though he threw it only a few times, became an iconic symbol in the mythology of Clemente. It represented his heroic nature, since the javelin is associated with Olympian feats. On a more practical level it served to further explain his strong throwing arm.

Marín’s former wife, Maria Isabel Cáceres, taught history and physical education at the high school and also watched out for Clemente.
Cáceres developed a friendship with her student that deepened over the years, but her early impressions stayed with her. During the first day of class, when she invited students to choose seats, Roberto settled inconspicuously in the back row. He spoke quietly when called upon, not looking up. But “despite his shyness,” she later wrote, “and the sadness around his eyes, there was something poignantly appealing about him.”

While Cáceres noticed the sadness in Roberto’s eyes, Marín focused on his baseball skills. As a bird-dog scout for Santurce, he
passed the word to the owner of the Cangrejeros, Pedrin Zorrilla, known affectionately as the Big Crab. Zorrilla had grown up in Manatí, to the west of San Juan, and still spent much time there. He was always on the move around the island, looking for a ball game, searching for talent. In the fall of 1952, Marín told him that the next time the Juncos came to play Manatí, there was a kid that Zorrilla had to look at for his professional club.
Zorrilla scribbled the name on a card and stuck it in his pocket. A few days later, he was in the stands watching a game. First he saw a Juncos player smack a line shot against the fence 345 feet away and fly around first and make a perfect slide into second. Later in the game, as he was talking with friends in the stands, he took notice when the same player sprinted back to the fence, grabbed a drive in deep center field, and made a perfect throw to second to double-up a runner.

“That boy, I must have his name,” Zorrilla said.

“Roberto Clemente,” came the answer.

“Clemente?” Zorrilla fished into his shirt pocket and pulled out the card. It was the name he had written down at Roberto Marín’s suggestion.

When the 1952 season began on October 15, the youngest Cangrejero, freshly signed by the Big Crab, was Roberto Clemente, barely eighteen and still in high school. He was signed for $40 a week, and all he had to do was learn how to hit the breaking ball, low and away.

Less than a month later, on the Saturday of November 6, the Brooklyn Dodgers held a tryout at Sixto Escobar. On hand was one of Brooklyn’s top scouts, Al Campanis, who was managing the Cienfuegos Elephants in Cuba that winter. Clemente was one of about seventy players at the tryout, and the obvious standout, throwing bullets from center to third and displaying excellent time in the sixty-yard dash. “If the sonofagun can hold a bat in his hands, I’m gonna sign this guy,” Campanis said before Clemente stepped into the batter’s box. On the mound was one of Zorrilla’s crafty old pitchers, Pantalones Santiago. Clemente stroked line drives all over the field.
When Campanis filled out the official Brooklyn scouting report, this is how it read:

SCOUT REPORT

Definite Prospect?
YES
Has Chance? ____ Fill-In? ____ Follow ____

Physical Condition (Build, Size, Agility, etc.)
WELL BUILT—FAIR SIZE—

Report By:

AL CAMPANIS

Clemente was “the best free agent athlete I’ve ever seen,” Campanis would say later. Baseball was everything to Roberto then, but even though he had asked for permission to play, he was not quite ready to be signed. The phenom was still in high school, though not at Julio Vizcarrando, which would not let him attend school and practice and play for Santurce at the same time. He had transferred to the Instituto Comercial de Puerto Rico in Hato Rey, a neighborhood between his home and the stadium. It would be fifteen months between the time Campanis first scouted him and when Clemente formally signed a contract with a major league organization. By then he had earned his diploma from the technical school, and was doing a little better with the curveball low and away. And he was still only nineteen.
Life was all possibilities: the only sadness in his life involved a girlfriend who stopped seeing him because her family thought his skin was too dark.