Out of the Park

CLEMENTE

The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero

By David Maraniss

Simon & Schuster. 401 pp. $26

David Maraniss, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and an associate editor of The Washington Post, has written two of the most accomplished biographies of his time. In First in His Class, he went a long way toward defining the life and character of Bill Clinton, then in his first term as president. With artful accumulation of detail, he made a series of Rhodes scholar interviews seem as exciting as a presidential campaign and augured both Clinton's ascent and his subsequent indiscretions . When Pride Still Mattered , his biography of Vince Lombardi, the late Green Bay Packers football coach, did as good a job of evoking an era, and placing a man and his ethos in it, as any sports book I've read.

Now Maraniss has tackled baseball's Roberto Clemente, an inspired and brilliant player, and one of the game's last enigmas. The result is a perfectly good biography of the late Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder and Puerto Rican cultural icon. Maraniss dutifully charts the progress of Clemente's career, culminating in his magical performance in the 1971 World Series, when he batted .414 and put his team ahead to stay with a Game 7 home run. He portrays Clemente as by turns ebullient and brooding, selfless and self-absorbed, and records the slights against him, real and imagined, by baseball insiders and sportswriters. Clemente fans won't be disappointed.

But Maraniss fans might be. Until the end, Clemente remains opaque, inexplicable. He was "somber, reserved, cautious about letting strangers close to him, with pride bordering on arrogance," yet "if something touched him he reacted deeply, immediately, and took you in as part of his family." After reading the book, I'm still not sure why. Though Maraniss conducted interviews with Clemente's teammates and family members, the narrative feels more researched than reported -- heavy on newspaper accounts and the hagiographic memories of Pirates rooters whom the author seems to have met by happenstance along the way.

Clemente deserves the full Maraniss treatment, though today's fan paging through the record book might not understand why. In 18 years in the major leagues, all with the Pirates, Clemente drove home 100 runs only twice and never managed to hit 30 home runs in a season. A free swinger like many Latino players of the 1960s, he rarely walked, which undermined a .317 lifetime batting average, and stole just 83 bases during his 2,433-game career.

But trying to gain the man's measure through numbers, Maraniss writes, is like "trying to explain Van Gogh by analyzing the ingredients of his paint. Clemente was art, not science." His movements on the diamond are etched in a generation's memory: his neck-rolling before each at bat, his fierce swing (a "great swirling motion in blinding speed that routinely dislodged his batting helmet," in the words of one observer), his frenzied baserunning ("as [if] to escape from some unspeakable phantasmal terror") and the uncoiling of his fearsome throwing arm from right field. He was an actor who seized the stage each time he took the field.

Clemente's larger-than-life baseball was an extension of his "huge sense of self-worth," as former Pirates executive Joe Brown described it. Fans who lived through the 1960s will remember his pride and sensitivity manifesting themselves in diatribes about being underappreciated, which led to a false characterization of him as a hypochondriac and malingerer. When filmmakers offered him $100 to hit into a triple play on camera as part of a story line in "The Odd Couple ," he fulminated, not because of the ignominy of the triple play but because of the meager remuneration. "Nobody buys Roberto Clemente cheap!" he replied. "I have my pride! I am a hero to my people!"

At the other extreme, Clemente had an almost childlike kindness that would show itself in acts of extreme generosity. After one game in Philadelphia, he spent so much time talking to a shy high schooler outside the players' gate that he missed the team bus to the airport. He accepted a ride with the girl and her family, played boleros on his portable record player to introduce them to island culture, insisted they come to New York to see the Pirates play a week later, and put them up in the team hotel when they did. He and his wife, Vera, later entertained the girl and her mother in Puerto Rico.

As a dark-skinned Latino, Clemente was affected by the civil rights movement, though not precisely part of it. Defining himself as Puerto Rican, he "never wanted to be categorized or limited by race. When he talked about the issue, especially in English, his comments occasionally were seen as rebukes of blackness, which they were not." Perceived as black by the Pittsburgh community, he identified increasingly with his black teammates. The slights that he and the rest of the Pirates' non-whites endured during spring training in Florida in the late 1950s and early '60s are especially poignant, and Maraniss's study of that evolving sociology contains some of the best writing in the book. But after each season concluded in October, Clemente had an escape that Pittsburgh's other blacks didn't: He would return to Puerto Rico and his family, eat crabs on the beach, play winter baseball for one or another of the local teams, and bask in his status as a national hero whose skin color was immaterial.

As Clemente matured, his actions were shaped by a growing social conscience. He insisted that the Pirates delay their season-opening series in 1968 until after the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., made a moving appeal in support of a players' union and expressed concern about the plight of the poor and dispossessed. He dreamed of building a sports complex for underprivileged Puerto Rican youths. "If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth," he said.

Even with all that colorful detail, it is only as Maraniss describes Clemente's inexorable march toward death -- in a plane crash during a rescue mission to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua on Dec. 31, 1972 -- that the ballplayer comes alive. Maraniss documents numerous occasions on which Clemente predicted that he would die young, most likely in a plane, and that Vera would outlive him. In a masterful piece of reporting and writing, Maraniss shows why Clemente felt it necessary to personally accompany to Nicaragua the food, medical materials and other items he had raised money to buy. He follows the parallel histories of the doomed aircraft and Clemente's frantic efforts in the hours following the earthquake, foreshadowing how they intersected like the iceberg and the Titanic. Clemente's son tried to hide his father's travel documents, his wife felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding, and Clemente himself posed for pictures as if he knew it would be the last time. And then the plane -- 4,000 pounds overweight, badly in need of a new engine, loaded haphazardly with supplies, its nose barely off the ground, "a death trap even before it rolled down Runway 7" -- made an uneasy ascent. It plunged into the sea just off the island, taking this proud, talented and still enigmatic man with him. ·

Bruce Schoenfeld is the author of "The Match: Althea Gibson & Angela Buxton" and a former baseball beat reporter for the Cincinnati Post.