Clemente: As great off the field as he was on it

I am the proof that you don’t have to know much or care deeply about baseball to be thrilled and moved by the story of Roberto Clemente, right fielder, family man, humanitarian, Pittsburgh Pirate, Puerto Rican.

Bernardo Ruiz’s lovely and exciting “Roberto Clemente,” airing tonight on PBS as part of “American Experience,” tells the story of a man who by every account was as effortlessly upright and true as if he were crafted for juvenile fiction, a man who never forgot who he was, where he came from and what mattered. He died young in a plane crash, in 1972 at age 38, delivering medical supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.

But as the footage shows, there was also something purely beautiful in his playing, something rooted in, yet also apart from the game itself, there for anyone to see -- his long, perfect throws, their velocity, arc and accuracy; the way he hurtled from base to base. It’s an aesthetic pleasure as well as an athletic performance. (The function is in the form.) And he was movie-star handsome to boot, with a dashing sense of style. “Great, gorgeous to watch, elegant, noble,” columnist George Will calls him.

Born in 1934, Clemente “grew up with people who really had to struggle to live” on an island where baseball was a fanatical passion and played with what might be called a Latin flair. He rapidly distinguished himself in the local leagues -- one scout called him “the best free-agent athlete I’ve ever seen” -- and was brought north by the Dodgers, who managed to lose him quickly to the Pirates, where he spent his whole major league career.

The United States was a shock. Puerto Rico, in baseball and in daily life, was a racially open society, but the American South was still living under Jim Crow, and the rest of the country in the mid-1950s was not exactly without prejudice. Clemente, the single black face in one team photo, was for a long time isolated by his skin and his speech, which the press took perverse delight in rendering phonetically (“I heet ball good”), even as the front office tried to anglicize him: On baseball cards he was “Bob Clemente.” “We had two strikes,” recalls fellow Puerto Rican Orlando Cepeda, who played for the San Francisco Giants around that time, “being black and being Latin.”

It wasn’t just the accent that made communication hard: In interviews, says teammate Al Oliver, Clemente “would start talking about life, and the writers just weren’t ready for that.” And sportswriter Roy McHugh (a lone negative voice here) remembers a man with a thin skin and a quick temper (“I can’t say I enjoyed talking with him”). Clemente was serious and thoughtful and political in a time when players were expected to be none of those things and talkative where others were taciturn. If something bothered him, physically or otherwise, he’d mention it, and he gained a reputation as a hypochondriac, which he refuted:

“Hypochondriacs don’t produce -- I produce.” Statistics bore him out.

Will calls him “a caldron of energy representing the upward mobility of people who had hitherto been excluded,” and the life the film describes makes a more or less unbroken upward arc, as Clemente comes into his own as a player and as a person. It climaxes in 1971, as Pittsburgh meets Baltimore in the World Series. Clemente had by this time become the inspirational leader of what was now a wholly integrated team, hustling no less at 37 than he had at 20, batting .414 for the Series and earning the most valuable player award. Interviewed in the locker room afterward, he begged to leave to address his parents, and by extension Puerto Rico, in Spanish before answering the usual questions. Director Ruiz takes this as a signal moment -- he plays it twice and frames it expertly. I am getting emotional now just writing about it.

A year later, on Sept. 30, 1972, Clemente collected his 3,000th hit. It would be his last.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘American Experience - Roberto Clemente’

Where: KCET

When: 9 tonight.

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)