I found myself in Pittsburgh on an impromptu shopping trip. After the rest of the gang retired for the night, I snuck out our rental car to take a drive down to PNC Park. That was followed by a solo pub crawl. What stayed with me the following morning, was an image that repeated itself throughout my prior night’s solo adventure. That the city of Pittsburgh had so much love for this man was a new discovery for me.

When Neil Walker trots out to PNC Park, he follows the ritual he established during his seven years with the Pirates. As he approaches second base, he takes a few moments to look at the right-field wall. And then he tips his cap towards the №21 that is emblazoned on the wall. It’s his way of saying thank you to a man who, 45 years ago, took a decision, that unbeknownst to anyone at the time, would save his dad’s life long before Neil was born.

The subject of one of the most iconic and seemingly fabricated images in baseball history was born in August 1934 to Melchor and Luisa Clemente in the town of Carolina, Puerto Rico. The story behind the photograph of Roberto Clemente jumping for a fly ball at Terry Park is even more remarkable. Clouds shaped like wings of an angel appear in the background behind Clemente, the negative of which was found some thirty odd years later in a trash can. The pieces were reconstructed to display the stunningly well-timed photograph which sat in a box for a further seven years before finding its current resting place, the Clemente Museum in Pittsburgh.

When you can throw from deep center field straight to the catcher’s mitt and run a 60-yard dash at 6.4 seconds (a mere 0.3 seconds off the world record), people take notice, even if you are a teenager from an impoverished barrio. By 19, he had caught the eyes of the Dodgers, the Giants and the Braves. Milwaukee offered him $28,000. The Braves had a solid nucleus, which formed the backbone of its back-to-back pennant winning team. In little less than a decade, they signed or traded for the likes of Del Crandall, Bob Buhl, Warren Spahn, Joe Adcock, Johnny Logan, Eddie Mathews, Lew Burdette, Wes Covington and Henry Aaron. Henry Aaron and Roberto Clemente in the same outfield, blimey!

Jim Klingensmith/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Dodgers had approached him first, albeit with a lesser offer. $15,000 — $5,000 in salary and $10,000 as a signing bonus. There was no formal agreement, just a handshake. So when the Braves tabled their offer, Roberto turned to his mother for advice. “Did you give the Dodger man your word?” she asked. And when Roberto said he had, she asked him to honour his verbal agreement. The fact that New York had a large Puerto Rican population didn’t hurt either.

It is curious how only National League teams showed an interest in Clemente. The Yankees were not only the most dominant team in the American League, they were also the overwhelming power determining how baseball in the league was played. That it would still be a full year before they had a black player was a sign of the times. A dark-skinned player from Puerto Rico did not seem to be a viable option for about half the teams in baseball. Even the Dodgers, the most progressive team in baseball, the team that broke the colour barrier, would have been pushing the very limits of 1950s desegregation had they added Clemente to their big-league roster. At the time, they already had four dark skinned players in their regular lineup: Roy Campanella, Junior Gilliam, Sandy Amoros and Robinson. In addition, Don Newcombe was in their starting rotation. To put out a team where more than half the line-up were non-white players would have taken some major cajones, and this put the Dodgers between a rock and a hard place.

And remember this was 1954, SEVEN YEARS after Jackie Robinson had broken the colour barrier.

But the Dodger’s figured they were shrewd enough to gamble against the house and win. But the house always wins, and that was not about to change. Because of the amount of money Clemente was signed for, he was earmarked as a “Bonus Baby”. The peculiar rules at that time meant that Clemente could be drafted through the Rule V offseason draft the following year if he was not kept in the Major-League roster. The Dodgers assigned Clemente to their Triple-A team in Montreal, Canada. They hoped that by burying him away in another country, they could keep his skills under wraps. They didn’t give him a lot of playing time, thinking if he did not play, other teams wouldn’t see how good he was.

Getty Images/Ballpoint Illustration

It almost worked. Clemente was miserable in Montreal. It was cold and he did not speak French. He produced a batting line of .257/.286/.372 with ten extra base hits and only 17 strike outs in 155 plate appearances. It was decent for a 19-year-old with no power, and with half of baseball not watching, the Dodgers almost got away with it. “We know he can field, run and throw, the power will come.” Branch Rickey, the vice-president of the Pirates had the first pick in the draft, and wasn’t the least bit perturbed about Clemente’s skin colour. And thus, Clemente left Brooklyn without ever playing a game for them. He would not play another game in the minors either. In his first professional game (ironically against the Dodgers), Clemente would go 1-for-4 and score a run.

Later that same year, the Dodgers would sign another “Bonus Baby” for $20,000. They did keep Sandy Koufax on their major-league roster.

He ran the bases as if running down a hill too steep, like he was racing from a fire, as if he intended to swallow them whole. He would roll his sore neck round and round as he strode slowly to the plate and swung at every kind of pitch in every single location. On the field, he was an asterisk in motion, a jarring cloud of angles, elbows, knees and shoulders, all of them going in different directions. He became the undisputed leader of the Pirates, something that WAR and all other statistics utterly fail to measure. And then there was that arm. He would lope in to scoop up a single and nonchalantly loop the ball underhanded back to the second baseman. Occasionally, he’d have to scramble back to haul in a long fly, and uncork that golden arm. Something about the power of that throw just seemed a little bit off, a little bit impossible. People in the crowd would swear hearing the ball whistling through the air.

An admirer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Roberto spoke out against Jim Crow segregation and prejudice as often as he could, to anyone who would listen. Unfortunately, the only reporters who were interested would be from black newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender. When he joined the Pirates at spring training in Florida, a full decade before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the prevailing policy was that when the team stopped for lunch on the road, the black players would stay on the bus and wait for their teammates to bring food back for them. Vic Power, another black Puerto Rican, when denied service at a restaurant, would jokingly respond “That’s OK, I don’t want to eat you, I just want some rice and beans.” To Roberto however, this was not a matter to be accepted with a casual shrug of the shoulders. There was no way he was going to sit and wait on a bus. He demanded the Pirates provide the black players with a station wagon so they could drive themselves and stop at restaurants that would serve them.

To say that Clemente did not get along with the press would be an understatement. “You writers are all the same,” he shouted at the Pittsburgh Press’ Phil Musick the first time they spoke. “You don’t know a damn thing about me!” He hated the fact that sportswriters along with broadcasters and American teammates and even Topps anglicized his name and referred to him as Bob or Bobby. He complained about the treatment of Latin players, and writers mocking what they called his hypochondria. The writers in Pittsburgh took Roberto to be arrogant and disrespectful, and did not write about him often. When they did, it was to degrade him for his broken English to try to make him look foolish. They referred to him as a good “black ball player”.

In 1960, Clemente performed brilliantly on a championship team, leading the Pirates to the title over the imperial New York Yankees. He batted over .300, leading the Pirates in RBIs and game winning hits, playing right field with aplomb, his arm unsurpassed. But his strained relationship with many baseball scribes meant that he came in eighth in NL MVP voting, trailing not only teammates Dick Groat and Don Hoak, but even Lindy McDaniel, a relief pitcher from the Cardinals. Clemente felt that he was slighted for a combination of reasons: he wasn’t a homeboy like Groat, he spoke a different language and constantly talked about the prevalent racism in the country. The following year at the Midsummer Classic, played in the wind tunnel of Candlestick Park, Clemente took his position among a group of National League outfielders, that ranks as perhaps the greatest in baseball history: Willie Mays in center, Orlando Cepeda in left and Roberto Clemente in right. Frank Robinson and Hank Aaron on the bench. And Clemente outshone them all, slashing a triple, driving in a run with a sac fly, and then in extra innings, singling home Mays off knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm for the winning run. Postgame in the locker room, with the national press corps gathered around him for the first time since the World Series, he let out all his pent-up frustrations from the MVP voting. The next morning, the headline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette read “I GET HEET. I FEEL GOOD.” Not hit, but heet. The AP story carried it further with the quote: “I jus’ try to sacrifice myself, so I get runner to third. If I do, I feel good. But I get heet and Willie scores and I feel better than good. When I come to plate in lass eening…I say that I ‘ope that Weelhelm peetch me outside…”

“Anger for Roberto Clemente,” press columnist Roy McHugh once wrote, “is the fuel that makes the wheels turn in his never-ending pursuit of excellence. When the supply runs low, Clemente manufactures some more.” Needless to say, Clemente did not need to manufacture any when he saw the papers the following morning. Called a malingerer, mocked for his English and playing for an overwhelmingly white working-class fan base, Clemente fed on rage, for rage is the food for pioneers. It was what kept Charlie Sifford coming back to the golf course again and again and again even when people asked him to shine their shoes. It is what spurred Jackie Robinson on in the face of increasing death threats. Rage brought Clemente back to the park day in and day out, year after year to hit .300 and leg out doubles and triples and unleash cannon balls from right field.

18 seasons. Twelve-times an All-Star. A World Series MVP. The only player ever to hit a walk-off inside-the-park grand slam. 12 (1961–1972) Gold Gloves, tied with Willie Mays for the record by outfielders. On Sep 30, 1972, in his last regular-season at-bat, Clemente doubled off Jon Matlack of the New York Mets for his 3,000th hit. Only 10 other players had ever reached that milestone.

Tom Walker, Montreal Expo’s 24-year-old pitcher befriended his idol playing winter ball in San Juan. After the 1972 season ended, he flew over to spend Christmas with the Clemente family. Just two days before Christmas, a devastating earthquake rattled the Nicaraguan capital of Managua. Over 10,000 killed and 200,000 injured and homeless. Clemente was distressed, and felt he needed to help the city he had visited just weeks earlier. Three times he sent supplies to Nicaragua. But news soon reached Clemente that the supplies of foods, clothes and medicines were being siphoned off by corrupt government officials. Angered, he figured the best way to make sure the supplies were reaching the proper hands was to deliver them himself. And he did not want to wait until the plane he was using to deliver goods came back from its last flight. So, on New Year’s Eve, he accepted an offer to use a local man’s DC37, not aware that the owner had a litany of Federal Aviation Administration violations. He found a pilot and a flight engineer hours before the flight, loaded the plane with relief supplies and prepared to take off. As Walker walked towards the plane, Clemente stopped him, smiled and said “Young Walker, go home and party. It’s New Year’s Eve! Have fun.”

The overloaded cargo plane would go down minutes after take-off in the Caribbean Sea. Clemente’s body was never found. He was 38.

The posthumous honours were many. For only the second time after Lou Gehrig, Major League Baseball waived the mandatory five-year waiting period. Clemente was promptly voted into the Hall of Fame in 1973. For his tireless devotion to the less fortunate, the humanitarian award is called the Roberto Clemente Award. In 2002, MLB announced that September 18 would be celebrated as Roberto Clemente Day among all Major-League teams and in 2003 president George W. Bush awarded United States’ highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the great man.

The first Latin American inducted into the Hall of Fame, first to win a World Series as a starter, be named league MVP and be named World Series MVP. He was “The Great One”, long before Wayne Gretzky took over the name. As the patron saint of Latino baseball, he ranks second only behind Jackie Robinson among players whose sociological significance transcended the sport itself. One can make a strong case as to why the №21 should be retired across Baseball.

And speaking of Saints, filmmaker Richard Rossi once sent a letter to Pope Francis and the archbishop of Clemente’s native Puerto Rico which finished with the line “Through the actions in his life, Clemente exemplified the Scripture, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’” But here is the trick: for someone other than a martyr, to qualify as a saint, his/her advocates must be able to point to two miracles traceable to the candidate’s intercession. But is it not about time to abandon the miracle requirement? Should it not be sufficient to look at a person’s life and ask: Did this person live the life of a Christian in a special and extraordinary way that can be held up for admiration and imitation by other Christians? If this was indeed the standard, Roberto’s selfless humanitarian activities would be ample evidence for sainthood — and the Vatican would not even have to take account of his miraculous batting average!

I went back to PNC Park to stand in front of his statue. Blue Jays legend Roberto Alomar came to mind this time. With Alomar, one has to ignore his behavior to appreciate his greatness. Not Clemente. The greatness of the man surpassed even the greatness of the athlete. What is easy to forget however is that in death, Clemente became universally loved and admired, especially in Pittsburgh. But it wasn’t like that during his playing days. Glorification after the fact is a common condition when it comes to great athletes who prove challenging in different ways.

Many Sanguillen was the only Pirate not to attend the funeral service. Instead, he went to dive into the waters of the Caribbean Sea to look for his captain’s body. O Captain! My Captain! Indeed.

If you have a chance to make things better for people coming behind you and don’t, you are wasting your time on earth. — Roberto Clemente

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