Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero Read Free

him Old Sleepy Head.
    The hours from one to five in the morning were another matter. Sleep rarely came to him then, and if by chance he did drift off, he might be startled back into consciousness by a nightmare.In one bad dream that had haunted him recently, he was hiding under a house, feeling grave danger. In another, he was on a crashing plane. His wife, Vera, knew all about these recurring nightmares. She knew that he looked for omens and that he believed he would die young.
    On this night, November 15, 1972, Vera was home in Puerto Rico with their three young boys. She would join Roberto in Managua in a few days. Until then he was on his own at the Hotel Inter-Continental.His friend, Osvaldo Gil, had the adjacent room, and at Clemente’s insistence they kept the doors open between the two so they could come and go like family. Deep into the night, they stayed up talking, Roberto down to his boxer shorts. That was all he would wear in the hotel room, his sculpted mahogany torso at age thirty-eight still evoking a world-class 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.
    The two men would be defined by race in the United States, one black and one white, but thought of themselves only as fellow Puerto Ricans. They talked about baseball and their hopes for their team at the twentieth amateur world championships that were to begin in Nicaragua at noon that same day. A lawyer and Korean War veteran, Gil (pronounced “heel”) was president of the Puerto Rican amateur baseball federation and had persuaded Clemente to come along and manage the team. Puerto Rico had finished third last time, and Gil thought all they needed was a push to get past the favored teams from Cuba and the United States and perhaps win gold. Clemente might make the difference.
    So much had happened since Gil had first caught sight of Clemente more than twenty years earlier. Roberto was still in high school then, starring for the Juncos Mules in the top amateur baseball league in Puerto Rico. Most people who had seen him play carried some deeply ingrained memory, and Gil’s went back to the beginning: He sat in the bleachers of the park in Carolina and watched this kid hum a throw from deep center field, the ball seeming to defy physics by picking up speed as it buzzed toward the infield and sailed over the third baseman’s head into the stands. Even a wild throw by Roberto Clemente was a memorable work of art.
    From there followed eighteen seasons in the big leagues, all with the Pittsburgh Pirates, two World Series championships, four batting titles, an MVP award, twelve Gold Gloves as a right fielder, leading the league in assists five times, and—with a line double into the gap at Three Rivers Stadium in his final at-bat of the 1972 season—exactly three thousand hits. The beautiful fury of Clemente’s game hadenthralled all of baseball. More than simply another talented athlete, he was an incandescent figure who had willed himself to become a symbol of Puerto Rico and all of Latin America, leading the way for the waves of Spanish-speaking baseball players coming North to the majors. And he was not done yet. At the end of each of the previous two seasons, he had talked of retiring, but he had at least two good years left.
    Clemente would not be playing right field for this team. He was in Nicaragua only to manage. During practice sessions in Puerto Rico, he had underscored the distinction by showing up in civilian clothes. The job was not new to him, he had managed the San Juan Senadores in winter ball, but his players then had been professionals, including many major leaguers, and these were young amateurs. It was apparent to Gil that Clemente understood the potential problem. He was so skilled and brought such determination to the game that he might expect the same of