Remembering Roberto : It Was 20 Years Ago That Clemente Was Killed on a Mission of Mercy

As they have done for almost two decades, members and friends of the late Roberto Clemente’s family will be on a Puerto Rican beach next Thursday, saying a rosary in memory of the extraordinary man whose plane crashed into shark-infested waters of the Atlantic Ocean on Dec. 31, 1972.

Vera Clemente, widow of the Hall of Fame right fielder, walked that same beach for days early in 1973, looking in vain for any signs of her husband.

Twenty years ago, Clemente was on a mercy mission to Nicaragua, where he had played winter league baseball, when a DC-7, carrying food and clothes to earthquake victims, ditched into the ocean less than two miles from the San Juan airport. Clemente’s remains were never found, nor were his clothes.

Four days after the crash, his teammates on the Pittsburgh Pirates and other mourners gathered for a memorial service in a small church in Carolina, the village just west of San Juan where Clemente grew up in a barrio.

One of those in attendance, a Panamanian catcher named Manny Sanguillen, announced that he was going to dive into the ocean to look for his father figure. One of the last people to see Clemente alive, Sanguillen had had a horrible premonition about the flight. That New Year’s eve, car trouble prevented him from reaching the airport in time to make a last-ditch attempt to dissuade Clemente from taking off.

A determined Sanguillen did go diving for Clemente, although his teammates and Joe Brown, then the general manager of the Pirates, warned him about the dangers.

Everyone wanted proof that Clemente, whose derring-do on the field had sometimes been described as miraculous, was really gone. Vera Clemente, picking up their three young sons at her parents’ home after she had dropped off her husband at the airport, heard the phone ringing as she was coming into the house. It was her niece calling with the preliminary news about the crash.

The phone stopped ringing, though, before Vera Clemente reached it. In times of tragedy, people sometimes say unusual things, and later Vera Clemente said: “If only I could have picked up the phone for that first call. I would have said that it was not possible.”

The phone rang again after midnight.

“It is Roberto,” the niece said through tears. “His plane has crashed. He is dead.”

“Oh, no,” Vera Clemente said. “It is not possible. He is in Nicaragua.”

THE EARTHQUAKE

Two days before Christmas in 1972, a series of earthquakes shook Nicaragua. The worst of them measured 6.2 on the Richter scale, and about 5,000 people were killed.

On Christmas Eve, Clemente was named chairman of the Nicaraguan earthquake-relief drive in Puerto Rico. Henry and Pearl Kantrowitz, close friends of the Clementes from Pittsburgh, were visiting in Puerto Rico at the time.

“Roberto was putting in 14 hours a day on the Nicaraguan campaign,” Pearl Kantrowitz said. “He was so busy that he wasn’t even eating.”

Clemente knocked on doors of the wealthiest people in San Juan. In less than a week, the campaign had filled the old Santurce ballpark with clothing and food. In all, it weighed 150 tons and was valued at $150,000.

THE CONVERSATIONS

On Dec. 29, 1972, Clemente ran into Sanguillen in San Juan. Strong, gap-toothed and ingenuous, Sanguillen was a Bible-quoting catcher with undisciplined skills.

Ten years younger than Clemente, who was 38, Sanguillen had come up to the Pirates to stay in 1969. Refusing to accept walks, much like Clemente, the free-swinging Sanguillen batted .298 or higher in his first four years. Sanguillen had 11 hits--only Clemente, with 12, had more--in Pittsburgh’s 4-3 World Series victory over the Baltimore Orioles in 1971.

Sanguillen was playing in the Puerto Rican Winter League.

“Sangy,” Clemente said. “What position you playing?”

“Right field,” Sanguillen said. “One game, I play in left.”

Clemente smiled.

“Sangy, you play left field or go back to catching. You got no chance to take my job.”

“I play right field pretty good now,” Sanguillen said. “Not as good as you, but pretty close. I may be the best right fielder in the game when I quit.”

“You never come close, Sangy,” Clemente said. “Besides, I think I am a better catcher than you.”

Before they parted, Clemente said: “I bought a monkey yesterday. I will call him Sangy for you. Adios, amigo .”

Jose Pagan, a Puerto Rican nearing the end of his career, was a valuable utility player for the ’71 Pirates. He saw Clemente the day after Sanguillen did and questioned the safety of the flight to Nicaragua.

“You know everything about baseball,” Pagan said. “But you know nothing about airplanes.”

“The people in charge know what they’re doing,” Clemente said. “They will not let us take off if we can’t make it. If you are supposed to die, you are going to die.”

THE FLIGHT

In mid-December, that same four-engine cargo plane had overshot the runway coming into San Juan. The old aircraft landed in a bog and had to be pulled out of the mud. No one was injured.

Aboard on Dec. 31 were Clemente, a pilot, a co-pilot, a flight engineer and a radio broadcaster from San Juan.

The plane had been loaded haphazardly, with no thought given to balancing the weight.

The original flight schedule called for a 4 a.m. departure on Dec. 31, but the loading did not go as planned, and the takeoff came more than 17 hours later, after 9 p.m.

Something untoward, something no one will ever know, happened shortly after the plane was airborne. The pilot, Jerry Hill, apparently tried to make a sharp left bank. The aircraft plunged into the dark waters.

Hill’s body was the only one found. The cockpit, split in half, was retrieved. So were pieces of a propeller, the wheels and an oxygen mask. Manny Sanguillen said he spotted at least one large shark when he dived several days later.

Willie Montanez was back at the airport, seeing his parents off for a vacation in the Dominican Republic.

Montanez, then a 24-year-old outfielder for the Philadelphia Phillies, had met Clemente nine years earlier. The day after the 1963 National League season ended, there was a knock on the Montanez family’s door.

“Hey, Willie,” Julio Montanez nonchalantly said to his brother. “Roberto Clemente’s here.”

Hearing from Pirate scouts that they were interested in Montanez, Clemente had come unannounced.

“You are a good player, good enough to play in the United States,” Clemente said. “I do not think they are going to offer you the money you are worth. You can get more if you want to wait or maybe talk to other teams. Do not make the mistake of settling for less than you are worth.”

In 1954, at 19, Clemente had signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers for $10,000. After Clemente had made an oral commitment to the Dodgers’ Al Campanis, the Milwaukee Braves came by with a bonus that might have been four times that much.

“If you gave your word to one team, then you keep your word,” Luisa Clemente told her son.

Clemente spent one season as a part-time player for the Dodgers’ Montreal farm club, then was drafted by the Pirates for $4,000. From 1955 on, he played only for Pittsburgh, getting his 3,000th hit in his final big league at-bat in 1972.

Willie Montanez was among those who rushed to the scene of the plane crash.

THE REACTION

Paul New, a Pittsburgh-born Chicago entertainer, was driving home from a club date at 4:30 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1973, when he heard the shocking bulletin from San Juan on the radio. Before going to bed, New sat down and wrote what became “The Ballad of Roberto Clemente.” The lyrics, in part:

I’ve got a tear in my eye From pacing the floor, Searching for things to say. I’ve just lost my hero On a cold New Year’s day. I called the local papers To verify the news. I’ve been watching all the channels But they all gave me the blues. I saw him play his first game Back in 1955. Eighteen years have come between, But he still had the same great drive. The first words my daughter would say Were his first and his last name. When I’d come home from workin’ late, She’d say, “Daddy, they won the game.” He made it home, He made it home. Oh, dear God, He brought Roberto home. In suburban Pittsburgh at 4 a.m. on Jan. 1, Pirate pitchers Steve Blass and Dave Giusti had gone from a New Year’s eve party to the home of Joe Brown, the general manager. They drank coffee until dawn.

“It’s too bad that Pittsburgh never understood him,” Blass said that morning.

Giusti said: “Another shame is that it took the the 1971 World Series before people said, ‘Hey, this guy is one of the greatest ever to put on a uniform.’ ”

What Blass meant was that Clemente was long the humanitarian before his fatal flight to Nicaragua.

He was sometimes considered a malingerer and a player who wouldn’t play hurt. No question, Clemente suffered from a bad back; he had a chiropractor in every port. Perhaps what escaped many, though, was that Roberto Clemente at 75% was better than almost anyone at 100%.

Clemente averaged 135 games a season for 18 years, finishing with a batting average of .317.

“He wasn’t God and he wasn’t the devil,” said his Pittsburgh friend, Phil Dorsey. “But I’d like everybody to know that he was much closer to one than the other.”

Dorsey once gave Clemente a pair of combat boots, left over from the Korean War. While friends gathered at the Clemente home on the day of the memorial service, Dorsey noticed those old boots, standing against a wall in the basement.

“Might as well leave them,” Dorsey said. “There’s nobody around who can even come close to filling them.”

THE WIDOW

Vera Clemente, who hasn’t remarried, was chatty on the telephone. It was easier talking to her than it will be next week, as the 20th anniversary draws near. Nicaragua wanted her to visit on the 15th anniversary, and she did. Earlier this year, Tom Monaghan, who then owned the Detroit Tigers, wanted her to participate in a fund-raiser for a cathedral in Nicaragua, and she did.

She is a grandmother, five times over. When their father died, the oldest of the Clementes’ three sons was 6. Two of the boys signed professional contracts but never advanced beyond the minor leagues. They had a name to be measured against, which might have been two strikes against them.

“They were never pushed to play baseball,” Vera said. “They did what they wanted to do. Roberto Jr. had knee surgery, and it held him back for almost three years. He was a right fielder and he had a very good arm. That much was in his blood.”

THE LEGACY

The day she talked on the phone, Vera Clemente was helping with an early Christmas dinner for dozens of youngsters at the Roberto Clemente Sports City complex. The 600-acre project was already on the drawing board before Clemente died. It was designed to give the underprivileged youth of Puerto Rico a chance to learn baseball and other games and was built at a cost of more than $13 million.

Roberto Clemente Jr. is a director of the Sports City. One of his younger brothers works for the port authority in Puerto Rico, the other for an airline in Miami.

Vera Clemente spends six days a week at the Sports City. There are two hospitals in Nicaragua named after her husband. In Pittsburgh, a statue of Clemente has been commissioned and will be dedicated on Aug. 18, 1994, which would have been his 60th birthday.

It is unlikely that Clemente would have ever managed a team. He had the know-how, but not the inclination.

“I love to work with ballplayers, especially the kids,” he said in 1971, after the Pirates had won the World Series. “So I might stay in baseball in some capacity. If I’m going to stay, it would be as a batting coach.

“I don’t think about managing because being a manager involves too many things. I’m too old to start breaking my head again.”