Sep 9, 2020
Remembering Roberto Every Day
All these decades later, the memory is clear as day. We’re sitting in right field at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. We are just to the right of the high screen where we not only have an unobscured view of the field but also have the chance to catch a home run ball. These are always our preferred seats to watch the Pirates or, more accurately, to watch the right fielder, Roberto Clemente.
This is the late 1950s. Clemente is coming into his own as one of the greatest outfielders in baseball history. From our general admissions seats, we look down at the familiar №21 on Clemente’s back and wait for a flash of defensive brilliance that characterized his career.
On more than one occasion, we’d watch Clemente charge a hard-hit ball and throw the batter out at first base. His rifle throws from the wall in front of us all the way to home plate on the fly to catch a tagging runner were memorable. And seeing him make a perfect play on a ball that caromed off that right field screen, then spin and throw in a single motion was worth every cent of the $1.50 we paid for those seats.
Just more than a dozen years later, I was now a young sportswriter covering the Orange Bowl between Nebraska and Notre Dame in Miami. On New Year’s Day morning I had gone down to breakfast and heard a tearful voice talking about Roberto Clemente and a plane crash. In those pre-Twitter days, it took some time for the news to dribble out about how Clemente had chartered a plane from his native Puerto Rico to ferry rescue supplies to Nicaraguan earthquake victims and how the plane had crashed into the ocean the previous evening and how Clemente was missing.
Robert Clemente was 38 years old when he died.
Each September Major League Baseball observes Robert Clemente Day to recognize his excellence on and off the field.
And each year as the day approaches, I dig out my copy of David Maraniss’s splendid 2006 biography, “Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero.” I re-read several of the chapters and to recall some forgotten days that ought to be remembered, this year especially.
In particular, Maraniss discusses the Pirates spring training camp in Fort Myers, Florida, during those years when I was cheering Clemente’s on-the-field heroics, years when I was oblivious to the treatment Clemente and other Black and Latin players received off the field.
In 1960 the Pirates upset the heavily favored Yankees to win the World Series. I heard Bill Mazeroski’s dramatic game-winning home run on my transistor radio while riding the school bus home. Clemente had nine hits and was one of the heroes of the Series. As Maraniss’s account relates, even as the World Series champions were being feted in Fort Myers, Clemente was excluded. As had been the case for years, he and the other Black players on the Pirates — and on teams throughout baseball — were unwelcome in the segregated South. When the Fort Myers Booster Club held a celebratory luncheon for the team, Clemente was denied admission to the all-whites club. When a golf club held a tournament to honor the Pirates, Clemente was not invited.
That was not new. When they got to Fort Myers each spring, Clemente was not permitted to stay in the same hotel as the rest of the team or to eat in segregated restaurants with his teammates or to ride from the ballpark in cabs unless the drivers were Black.
But, as Maraniss relates, the treatment that year was particularly galling for Clemente who was justifiably irritated over the slight he suffered in the Most Valuable Player voting from 1960. While two of Clemente’s Pirate teammates, Dick Groat and Don Hoak, finished one-two in the National League MVP voting and a third, Vernon Law, was sixth, Clemente finished eighth. Eighth!
Writes Maraniss: “For Clemente, already simmering over the personal slight of the MVP vote, the second-class treatment he encountered in Florida as a star player on a World Championship team only stoked his fire.”
Back home, this was lost on us as we queued up to get our tickets and see how close we could get to the front of the section behind Clemente. It would never occur to us that he had a life outside Forbes Field, really.
Reading “Clemente” years later, though, Maraniss helped remove those blinders and introduced me to a complex, proud man, who was an admirer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and who once welcomed King to his farm in Puerto Rico. One of Clemente’s Black Pirate teammates, Al Oliver, is quoted by Maraniss as saying that Clemente thought there was no excuse for people not to get along: “He had a problem with people who treated you differently because of where you were from, your nationality, your color, also poor people how they were treated.”
Yet, here we are so many years later confronting these same challenges and facing those same divisions that seem insurmountable. Clemente was right. There is no excuse for people not to get along. None.
This year I’ll spend Roberto Clemente Day remembering his greatness, off the field and on. I’ll sit quietly and try to conjure up an image of him sprinting toward that wall. I’ll try to recall looking down as he makes a leaping catch. Then I’ll remember how he died helping others because there really are no excuses.
