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

everyone, which was unrealistic. Still, he was Roberto Clemente, and who wouldn’t want him leading the Puerto Ricans against the rest of the world?
    The simple life of a ballplayer is eat, sleep, fool around, play. Many athletes wander through their days unaware of anything else, but Clemente was more than that. He had a restless intelligence and was always thinking about life. He had an answer for everything, his own blend of logic and superstition.
    If you want to stay thin, he told Gil, don’t drink water until two hours after you eat rice so the food won’t expand in your stomach. If you want to keep your hair, don’t shower with hot water; why do you think they scald chickens in boiling tubs before plucking feathers at the poultry plant? If you want to break out of a slump, make sure you get at least three swings at the ball every time up. With a total of at least twelve swings in four at-bats a game, all you need is one good one to get a hit. So simple: to break a slump you have to swing at the ball. And it wasn’t all body and baseball. Clemente could also talk politics. His sentiments were populist, with the poor. His heroes were Martin Luther King Jr. and Luis Muñoz Marín, the FDR of his island. He lamented the inequitable distribution of wealth and said he did not understand how people could stash millions in banks while otherswent hungry. The team president had to beg off, exhausted, or the manager would have yakked until dawn.
    The next morning before breakfast, there was Clemente in the lobby, enacting his own modest wealth redistribution plan. He had instructed the cafeteria to give him a bagful of coins in exchange for a $20 bill and now was searching out poor people. A short old man carrying a machete reminded him of Don Melchor, his father. A boy without shoes reminded him of Martín el Loco, a character in his hometown of Carolina. When he was home, Clemente looked out for Martín and gave him rides in his Cadillac and tried to buy him shoes, but El Loco was so accustomed to going barefoot that he could not stand to have anything on his feet.Martín the Crazy is not that crazy, Puerto Ricans would sing. Of the needy strangers Clemente now encountered in Managua, he asked, What’s your name? Who do you work for? How many in your family? Then he handed them coins, two or three or four, until his bag was empty. It became another routine, every morning, like not sleeping at night.
    The Inter-Continental, a soulless modern pyramid that rose on a slope above the old Central American city, was enlivened by an unlikely alignment of visitors that week.Not only Clemente and his ballplayers were there but also squads from China and Japan, West Germany and Italy, Brazil and El Salvador, Honduras and Panama, Cuba and Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, the United States and Canada. Then there was Miss Universe, Kerry Anne Wells of Australia, who won her crown days before at the pageant in Puerto Rico and had been flown across the Caribbean to Nicaragua at the same time as Clemente, creating a stir at Las Mercedes International Airport when the “two people who are news in any part of the world,” as a report in La Prensa put it, arrived and posed for pictures in the VIP lounge. The photographs showed Clemente wearing a shirt collar the size of pterodactyl wings, while the beauty of Miss Wells, said to “exceed all words,” thrilled fans who were “looking at her from head to toe and complimenting her in the most flowery manner”—such a polite description of catcalls. Also in the same hotel then was Howard Hughes, the billionaire recluse who had chosen Managua as his latest obscure hideaway.Hughes occupied the entire seventh floorin a luxury suite, but might as well have been in another solar system. The baseball folks heard that he was around but never caught sight of him. The story was that he sequestered himself in his spooky aerie, drapes drawn, ordering vegetable soup from room service