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

and watching James Bond movies in the nude. No coins for the people from Mr. Hughes.
    On the fifteenth, late in the morning, Clemente and his Puerto Rican team left the Inter-Continental for the opening ceremonies at the Estadio Nacional. There was a confection of Olympian extravaganza, baseball delirium, and military pomp, all orchestrated by Nicaragua’s strongman, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, whose family owned much of the country and ran its institutions. For the time being, forced by the national constitution to cede the presidency to someone else, at least in title, Somoza controlled the government from his position as supreme commander of the Armed Forces. He also happened to be president of the organizing committee for the baseball tournament, which offered him an opportunity to bask in self-generated glory. Novedades, a journal that catered to his interests, declared that General Somoza’s presence “gave a formidable support and shine to the event and confirmed the popularity of the leader of the Nicaraguan majority.”
    Fans more likely were clamoring to see Clemente, and to find out whether the scrappy Nicaraguan team, with the same underdog hopes as the Puerto Ricans, could stay in there with the Cubans, a sporting rivalry intensified by Somoza and Fidel Castro, the yin and yang, right and left, of Latin American dictators. So baseball mad was Managua then that thirty thousand people filed into the stadium and overflow throngs spilled into the streets outside, just to watch the opening ceremonies and a preliminary game between Italy and El Salvador. Black marketers had snatched vast blocks of seats in all sections of the stadium and were scalping them for as much as eighty córdobas, nearly triple the established price. Somoza and his wife, Mrs. Hope Portocarrero de Somoza, watched from the presidential box, not far from Miss Universe. A torch was lit, symbolizing the hope that baseball would become an official Olympic sport, then a procession of International Amateur Baseball Federation officials marched in, and gymnasts tumbledand cartwheeled, and beautiful young women in traditional dress pushed wooden carts, and Little Leaguers flooded the field, sixteen teams of nine, each team wearing the uniform of a country in the tournament.
    After the visiting Panama National Guard military band played patriotic anthems, Somoza, wearing a light-colored sports suit and Nicaraguan baseball cap, descended from his perch and strutted onto the field. He stepped up to the pitcher’s mound at ten minutes of noon. A swarm of reporters, photographers, and television cameramen closed in as El Comandante raised high his right hand and swiveled left and right, recognizing the applause. Most of the attention was directed not at him but at home plate, where a right-handed batter had appeared from the dugout, stretching his neck and taking his stance deep in the batter’s box. It was Roberto Clemente, in full uniform. Everyone wanted a picture with him. It took fifteen minutes to clear the crowd. Finally, Somoza gripped the hardball and hurled it toward the plate. His house journal called the opening pitch “formidable.” A less-flattering account came from Edgard Tijerino, a fearless little sportswriter from Pedro Chamorro’s opposition newspaper La Prensa. “Obviously,” reported Tijerino, “it was a very bad pitch.”
    Luckily for Somoza, Clemente did not swing. He loved to hit what others would call bad balls— They’re not bad if I hit them, he would say—and had a habit in batting practice of ripping vicious line drives back through the box.
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    Clemente took to the people and sights of Nicaragua. He enjoyed strolling past the stalls in the central market and down narrow side streets where he picked out embroidered blouses and dresses for Vera made of the finest cloth. He had the hands of a craftsman and a taste for colorful art. But he never had much luck with baseball in Nicaragua. He had visited