Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (12 page)

Far to the side, in a section cordoned off for customers who did not have white skin, Pat McCutcheon, the No. 1 baseball fan on Orange Street in Dunbar Heights, found a seat in the bleachers and began urging the team on with his foghorn voice. As it turned out, most of the cheering that day, black and white, was for Clemente. In the sixth, he fired a throw to third that would have nailed a runner if only the third baseman had been ready. Then in the seventh he made two consecutive shoestring catches, the first on a dead run, the second while sliding gracefully to his right, and two thousand fans roared and rose for a standing ovation as Clemente galloped to the dugout after the third out. “The sight of him in spring training encouraged all of us,” said Bob Friend, the pitcher. “After all the lean years, to have a player of that talent on our team was pretty heady stuff.”

Beautiful weather, buoyant crowds, good play—it all seemed so
free and easy, but of course it was not. Fort Myers in the mid-fifties might have seemed serene to the businessmen who ran it and to the visiting sportswriters from Pittsburgh (“a beautiful little Florida town,” Al Abrams wrote), but
to young Clemente the prevailing culture was an affront. At home in Puerto Rico, his family seldom talked about race. It was not an issue when he played baseball in the winter league, but here it was unavoidable. Three memories from that first Fort Myers spring stayed with him. He remembered the subdued behavior of black players who feared they might be cut or sent to the minors for the smallest act of asserting themselves. He remembered the way blacks were kept on the bus whenever the team stopped to eat on the road. And he remembered, or thought he remembered, a derogatory description of him that appeared in the local paper. Years later, in a reflective interview with Sam Nover, a Pittsburgh broadcaster he trusted, Clemente said: “When I started playing in 1955 . . . every time I used to read something about the players, about the black players, [the writers] have to say something sarcastic about it. For example, when I got to Fort Myers, there was a newspaper down there and the newspaper said,
PUERTO RICAN HOT DOG
arrives in town. Now, these people never knew anything about me, but they knew I was Puerto Rican, and as soon as I get to camp they call me a Puerto Rican hot dog.”

It is not clear where Clemente saw that derogatory reference. A study of every edition of the Fort Myers’s newspaper in 1955 from before training camp opened until the team headed North shows no story or headline where Clemente was called a hot dog. In his “Keeping Score” column, Len Harsh once called him “a fiery young Puerto Rican,” and another time said he “has some rough edges that need to be smoothed out” but Harsh liked Clemente and was invariably complimentary. The front section of the paper was indeed full of racist stereotypes. The January 22 front page, published more than a month before Clemente arrived, featured two stories that belittled Puerto Ricans.
CRAZY PUERTO RICAN GIVES COPS WILD RUN
read the headline of the first story, about a young man who led local police on a high-speed chase through town. The second story, under the headline
NUDITY BANNED FOR PUERTO RICANS,
reported on the agricultural
town of Immokalee, to the southeast of Fort Myers, where the constable announced that he was banning the practice of letting Puerto Rican toddlers run around without clothes. “In accord with the custom, brought from the island and long practiced by Spanish and Indian forebears, Puerto Rican migrant workers here have been letting their toddler-sized children play up and down the streets naked as jaybirds,” the report said. “Constable Joe Brown told parents the kids better wear pinafores, shorts or at least bikini-style diapers. He acknowledged that in his hometown of Tampa Cuban kids go without clothes but only in the Latin neighborhoods where there are no objections.” This was the social atmosphere of 1955 Florida, and Clemente hated it.

Could it have been a Pittsburgh paper that called him a hot dog? The archives show no such reference there, either, though some descriptions came close. In one of his columns, Al Abrams wrote: “From the standpoint of showmanship and crowd appeal, this Clemente will be the right Forbes Field ticket. The dusky Puerto Rican . . . played his position well and ran the bases like a scared rabbit. It seemed that every time we looked up there was Roberto showing his flashing heels and gleaming white teeth to the loud screams of the bleacher fans.” Abrams most likely was unaware of how loaded those words might seem to his subject, meaning it only as high praise, and certainly not trying to imply that he was turned off by Clemente’s flair. So it was close, but still no hot dog. Perhaps a heckler in the stands or a sportswriter after a game called Clemente a hot dog for making a basket catch and he conflated that oral account with a newspaper story he didn’t like. In any case, he was deeply troubled by the stereotypes and sought out more experienced Latin players to see how they felt. Carlos Bernier and Lino Donoso, who were trying to make the Pirates, urged him to contain his anger. His friend Vic Power, who arrived in Fort Myers with the Kansas City Athletics, told him about an incident where the team bus had been pulled over by cops and Power had been dragged off because he had taken a Coca-Cola from a Whites-only roadside service station.

The message, according to Clemente was the same. “They say, ‘
Roberto, you better keep your mouth shut because they will ship you back,’” But Clemente did not want to stay silent. His sense of fairness
overtook his innate shyness. “This is something that from the first day, I said to myself: ‘I am the minority group. I am from the poor people. I represent the poor people. I represent the common people of America. So I am going to be treated as a human being. I don’t want to be treated like a Puerto Rican, or a black, or nothing like that. I want to be treated like any person that comes for a job.’ Every person who comes for a job, no matter what type of race or color he is, if he does the job he should be treated like whites.”

•   •   •

As much as the sport itself, it was the issue of basic human dignity that drove the
Pittsburgh Courier
in its intense coverage of the Pirates camp that spring. With a vibrant sports section featuring columns by Wendell Smith and Bill Nunn Jr. and cartoon sketches by Ric Roberts, the
Courier,
Pittsburgh’s black weekly newspaper, reported on the integration of major league baseball with a depth and passion that equaled any other publication in America. Al Dunmore, the paper’s correspondent covering the Pirates in Fort Myers,
filed regular dispatches on the ups and downs of the team’s non-white prospects. In the headline jargon of black newspapers of that era, these players were often called “tans.” Along with four minor leaguers who had been in Fort Myers for Mr. Rickey’s training school earlier in February, there were six major league prospects in camp that year, the most in the team’s history: Curt Roberts, a second baseman, pitchers Lino Donoso and Domingo Rosello, and outfielders Carlos Bernier, Roman Mejias, and Roberto Clemente.

It seemed to the
Courier
correspondent that only Clemente, among the six, was secure in his position with the club. “The highly publicized Roberto Clemente must be retained a full year as a drafted player,” Dunmore stated in an early spring training report. And from his observations, the young Puerto Rican’s play merited a job in any case. “Clemente is just about everything promised, lacking only major league polish,” he wrote. The artist Ric Roberts, in his first sketch of the spring, drew “Rookies and Robins,” a collection of promising black rookies, with Clemente prime among them. There he was in Pirates uniform, charging a ball in right field at full speed, with a balloon caption
of him saying, “EXTRA BASE? NO!” Certainly no hot-dog portrayal from the
Courier.

If the Courier men were impressed,
old man Rickey remained uncertain about the prize he had snatched from the Dodgers. On the afternoon of March 23, he sat in the stands at Terry Park and kept up a running commentary as the Pirates played the Chicago White Sox on Merchant Appreciation Day. The day before, Clemente had poked his first home run of the spring, and against the White Sox he cracked out two singles and a triple. But Rickey was concerned. He thought that Clemente’s running was improving after days of tutoring from coach George Sisler, who taught the rookie how to take sharper turns around the base paths. But at the plate, Rickey observed, Clemente seemed off balance, stepping away from the ball, trying to pull it too much. It could be a fatal flaw, Rickey feared. “I will not be surprised if Mr. Clemente gets to the place where he will be permitted only to play against left-hand pitchers. When the pitchers in the National League know his terrific weakness on sidearm pitching, he will not get anything else to hit.” He asked Sisler to work his magic on Clemente at the plate.

Most of the attention in the
Courier
all spring was directed not at Clemente and the question of whether he could hang in there against sidearming righties, but on Curt Roberts and concerns about whether he could keep his job at second base.

Roberts was another of the baseball elders who paved the way for Clemente, a lineage that began with his fellow Puerto Ricans, Hiram Bithorn, Luis Olmo, and Vic Power. Only a year earlier, seven seasons after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers, Curtis Benjamin Roberts made history in Pittsburgh by becoming the first black Pirate. None other than Mr. Rickey, the engineer of baseball integration, had recruited Roberts, who like Robinson had played in the Negro American League for the Kansas City Monarchs. But Roberts was no Jackie Robinson. He was an unprepossessing middle infielder from the East Texas timber town of Pineland with a slick glove but not much of a bat. Listed at 5’8’’ but probably at least two inches shorter, Roberts played three years with the Pirates’ minor league affiliate in Denver. During his stay in the minors he was switched from shortstop to second base
and earned the admiring nickname “Little Man” from his manager, Andy Cohen, who was Jewish and sympathetic to the black ballplayer’s situation. Roberts had good range, excelled at charging slow-rolling grounders, and led minor league second basemen in fielding percentage and assists.

By the time he reached Pittsburgh in 1954, Roberts had received the Rickey tutorial on how to survive in the dominant white sports culture, advice that boiled down to three words: ignore the abuse. Easier said than done, of course. Christine Roberts, the player’s wife, told
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
writer Ed Bouchette that when she attended games at Forbes Field she heard constant shouts of “Knock the nigger down!” and “Hit him in the head.” It got so bad that she preferred sitting in the upper deck. “The people in the front were the most vicious. They wanted to make sure [Curt] heard them.” But she never turned to look at the bigots. “I had to ignore them like Branch Rickey told us,” she said.

Roberts began his major league career with a bold stroke. With a bitter April wind slicing across the diamond as the Pirates opened at home for the first time in sixty-one years, he belted a triple in his first at-bat off the accomplished Phillies right-hander Robin Roberts, leading the woeful Pirates to an unexpected victory. He went on to start 134 games that year under Fred Haney, the rookie manager, with mixed results. In the field, some local writers said he was smoother than any Pirate second baseman in decades. But at the plate his average was a meager .232. It was his inability to hit that found him fighting for his life in the spring training camp of 1955, a struggle chronicled in detail by the
Courier.

ROBERTS PLAYS BALL IN SPITE OF RUMORS,
read an early headline from spring training. “The pre-spring ballyhoo about Gene Freese with the Pirates hasn’t fazed little Curt Roberts in his bid to retain the second-base job on the club. The little fellow with the slick glove has been his usual self hounding ground balls around second,” correspondent Dunmore wrote. Freese, who came from Wheeling, West Virginia, considered Pittsburgh’s southern backyard, was nearly as short as Roberts (his common nickname was Augie, but college teammates called him the Microbe). But he had more pop in his bat. After starring
in the minors for the New Orleans Pelicans, he came to spring training with glowing publicity. As Dunmore described Freese, he seemed “desperate in his madness to take over the job.” He had also impressed the starting shortstop and quiet team leader, Dick Groat, just back from two years in the Army, who invited Freese to room with him. But Roberts was “a determined little cuss” who would not give up without a fight, Dunmore said. In his next article under the headline
NINE MORE HITS ALL HE NEEDED,
Dunmore noted that with those extra nine hits Roberts would have been a .250 hitter the previous year instead of “a wretched .232” and wouldn’t have to worry about losing his starting role. Branch Rickey himself had made the pronouncement that “all Roberts has to do is hit .250.”

What a fine line between success and failure those nine hits were, as Dunmore presented the dilemma: “Sixteen times did enemy gloves rob him of potential hits. Five times was he called a dead duck at first when in the opinion of his mates, at least, he might have been given the nod.”

In the larger scheme of baseball, the battle for the second-base job on a perennial last-place team was not much of a story. But from the perspective of the
Courier
and its readership, Curt Roberts and all his hopes and sufferings were telling drama. “Back in Pittsburgh the question of Curt, with reference to the immediate future, is household conversation,” Dunmore wrote. “Day by day the question mounts: Did Curt play yesterday?” The question mounted, if nowhere else, back at the
Courier’
s office on Centre Avenue in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and perhaps in black neighborhoods in eight other cities where editions of the influential weekly circulated. One day, Dunmore confronted manager Haney about Roberts’s lack of playing time. His report on the interview was filed under the headline
WE ASK HANEY “WHY?”
Haney explained that hitting was not the only weakness he saw in Roberts; he also questioned the strength of his arm on relay throws from the outfield. Then Dunmore went to the white sportswriters—Hernon and Biederman and Chilly Doyle—and asked them why they were ignoring Roberts: “Pittsburgh reporters, questioned about a charge that they were ‘freezing’ Roberts out”—wordplay on the last name of the second-base competition—“said they could write little
about a man they didn’t see play. They said that even during the winter the Pirates talked about Freese in discussing spring plans.” In the end, Roberts made the regular season roster, but lost his starting job.