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• Q & A with Mr. Maraniss
• Article by Mr. Maraniss
• Excerpt from Clemente

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Tavis: David Maraniss is an acclaimed author and journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1993 for his stories in the Washington Post about the life and career of Bill Clinton. He also serves as associate editor at 'The Washington Post.' His most recent book focuses on the life of baseball legend, Roberto Clemente. The book is called "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero.' David, nice to have you on the program.

David Maraniss: Great to be with you, Tavis.

Tavis: I'm glad to have you here. Why for you - and this is the obvious question, I guess - why a book about Clemente?

Maraniss: Well, you know, I grew up in Wisconsin with the Milwaukee Braves of the Aaron and Spahn and Burdette. But even despite that, Clemente was always my guy. I felt an incredible - he had an aura about him. It wasn't just the way he played. You know, the best throws from right field I'd ever seen. But the way he held himself. His dignity, the way he looked, everything about him, he was my favorite player from a very early age.

Tavis: Talk to me more about what it was about him that drew you beyond this statement which I appreciate because you make the point in the book that, although he was a good player, he wasn't the greatest player. But there was something about him that elevated him to a whole other realm.

Maraniss: Absolutely, and that's why I decided to write the book because I wouldn't just write about a baseball player, but Clemente represented more than that. He was the first of the great Latino players. He was a Black Latino. He had to deal with the double-barrel of race and language. He carried himself with enormous dignity that was most expressed at his finest hour in 1971 after he'd carried the Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Championship over the favored Orioles.

He'd been fighting for seventeen seasons to get the recognition he thought he deserved playing in Pittsburgh, you know, not in New York or Los Angeles. At that moment when the cameras were finally on him in the locker room afterwards, he said, "Before I say anything, I want to say something in Spanish to my parents back in Puerto Rico." I can't tell you how many people in Latin America who saw that moment cried. That solidified Clemente as something special.

Tavis: How significant were his challenges then? I raise that because today when we think of Major League Baseball, we think of, what, somewhere around a quarter of the players are Latino. But Clemente, to your point, was ushering in that wave way back in the day. So what were the unique challenges for him then?

Maraniss: Well, he knew some English, far more than any sports writer knew Spanish. They would always quote him in broken English. A very intelligent man quoted phonetically. After the 1961 All-Star game where he drove in the winning run, the big headline was, "I Get Heet,' h-e-e-t instead of hit. It just infuriated him.

Then he had to deal with race as well. Here he helped lead the Pirates to the 1960 World Championship, goes home to Puerto Rico, carried off the airplane as a hero, spends the whole winter there, treated nobly, comes back to Ft. Myers, Florida that spring, has to stay on the other side of town with a Black family, isn't invited to the celebratory spring training dinner because it's in a country club that he can't go to.

Tavis: What's the irony, in your mind, of how sports writers maltreated him then, to your point now about how he was quoted phonetically in print? Contrast for me the maltreatment he received then and the all-out tug of war, infighting; the race is on to find these players in Latin America today.

Maraniss: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, baseball is a Latino game and soon it will be Japanese and Chinese and all that. But at that point, it wasn't. There were maybe one or two on every team. They were constantly fighting the stereotypes. For instance, in another incident, a very respected sports writer and baseball player himself, Jim Brosnan, did the scouting report for the 1960 World Series. He said of Clemente, "He had the typical Latin American showboating,' describing him running an inside-the-park homerun. If it had been Pete Rose, he would have been, you know, Charlie Hustle. So he had to deal with that all the time.

Tavis: Talk about his humanitarian work because part of what makes him, for me at least, such a great person was what he did, quite frankly, off the field.

Maraniss: One of the great things about Clemente, he wasn't a saint, as I say. No human being is. But you could see his character growing in the final three or four years of his life. He didn't have an agent telling him to go to hospitals to visit sick kids. He didn't have an agent telling him to go to Nicaragua after the earthquake. He went because he'd been there a month before, managing a Puerto Rican amateur baseball team.

When he heard about the earthquake in December of 1972, he immediately in San Juan started raising funds and humanitarian aid and medical supplies and sent two airplanes over to Managua. When they got to Managua, he heard reports back that the aid was being diverted, that they'd land the airplane and they wouldn't know what happened to it. Clemente said, "If I go, it'll get to the people" and that's why he boarded that ill-fated flight.

Tavis: Let me just fast-forward, if I might. Do you think baseball has finally - that's the wrong question. How do you think baseball is doing in coming to terms with the contributions that players of color have in fact made? I ask that against a backdrop of my - I can't speak for David Maraniss - but to my disappointment certainly with Buck O'Neil still not being put into the Hall of Fame. How is baseball doing in terms of coming to terms with the contributions of players of color?

Maraniss: Well, you have to say it's getting better. I mean, they did go back and bring several Negro leaguers into the Hall of Fame who, by the way, all played in Puerto Rico before they could play in the United States. Clemente's childhood hero was Monty Irvin, one of those Negro league players who is in the Hall of Fame now. You know, Jackie Robinson's number is honored and retired. There is a movement to retire Clemente's number as well, but there's still always a lot of work to do there.

Tavis: What's the state of baseball for you right about now?

Maraniss: I loved baseball when Clemente, Henry Aaron and Willy Mays were in the same All-Star outfield (laughter). I'll always love baseball. I actually enjoyed that World Baseball Series with all the different countries playing. I like that transformation. But all sports now, you know, celebrity, money and publicity and just the twenty-four hour focus has diminished it, in my opinion, some.

Tavis: I wonder whether or not Clemente is appreciated by Latin players. It's one thing for you to write a book about - a guy from the Washington Post writing a book about Clemente. What do Latin players know or think or how do they reverence this guy Clemente?

Maraniss: That's a fascinating question. You know, most players from the United States might not even know anything about Jackie Robinson or some of the old greats. Every Latino player knows Clemente. He is their patron saint. Ozzie Guillen, the great manager of the champion White Sox, has a shrine at his home to Roberto Clemente. Tony Taylor, who played second base for the old Phillies, told me that, for years after Clemente died, whenever his team visited Pittsburgh, he would take all the Latino players out to right field and say, "This is the man you can become."

In Carolina, Puerto Rico where Clemente grew up and where I visited, you know, his body was never found in the plane crash. It was a terrible crash. But there's a cenotaph to Clemente in his hometown depicting his whole life, you know, from birth to great baseball to his plane crash. In the middle, he's standing there holding a lamb and that's sort of the reverence with which he's held in Latin America and by all Latino players.

Tavis: I could have, David, and perhaps should have asked this question a little bit earlier in our conversation, but it had to be a culture shock for a guy of his background to, of all places - not to cast aspersion on the great city of Pittsburgh - but that's a long way from Latin America.

Maraniss: You know, he was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers. He thought he was going to play in New York City which has a lot of Puerto Ricans in it. Pittsburgh had no Latino community at all. He lived in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. He actually was a boarder for a really nice middle-class Black family there for several years, but he was apart.

You know, he wasn't quite connected there either because he didn't speak that much English. Pittsburgh, you know, the quintessential blue-collar working class town, was a culture shock for Clemente and it's a testament to Clemente and to Pittsburgh that, by the end of his career, he was beloved in Pittsburgh.

Tavis: I was in a conversation the other day about something totally disparate from this. But a conversation, David, about the relationship or the lack thereof between Africans and African Americans, those who come here from the Continent and those of us who are here.

So this relationship or lack thereof, this dynamic between Africans and African Americans, I raise that only because I'm curious now to what his relationship was with the African American players because none of them were treated well. Clemente, to your point, had a double whammy because he was Latin and he was Black, but how did he interact during that time with other African Americans?

Maraniss: The Pittsburgh Pirates, over the course of Clemente's career, had more and more Black and Latino players so that they actually quietly made history in 1971 with the first all-Black and Latino team. Al Oliver, who was a great hitter for those Pirates teams, said Clemente was like his big brother. Willie Stargell loved Clemente.

All of those guys looked up to him because he transcended race and language and everything, but he was very strong on the issues of segregation and everybody getting an equal chance and on poverty. He spoke out all the time. Al Oliver would say, you know, Clemente was always delivering a sermon.

Tavis: Let me offer this as an exit question. What do you think Clemente most learned from baseball? I get in the book what it is that you want us to learn from the life and legacy of Roberto Clemente. What was it about baseball here stateside that meant so much to him that he in fact was empowered by?

Maraniss: The fans.

Tavis: The fans.

Maraniss: Absolutely. You know, he had trouble with sports writers for a lot of different reasons. He had trouble with his managers sometimes. Never had trouble with his teammates except a few in the early days when baseball was a very different proposition. But he loved the fans and they loved him and that fueled him. One of the young people who spent some time with him said he was like a prophet. When he saw him surrounded by people, he just exuded something. I've seen a little bit with Jesse Jackson or Bill Clinton. I didn't get to see it with Clemente, but I know that it must have been something.

Tavis: Well, this conversation ends where it should, as any conversation about baseball should begin and end, the fans. That was Clemente's love. The new book, "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero.' David, nice to have you on. Thanks for the work, man.

Maraniss: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: My pleasure. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time, though, on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.