American Experience

Narrator: On October 17, 1971, the underdog Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Baltimore Orioles in game seven to win the World Series. Many players had contributed to the victory, but everyone agreed who was most responsible — their veteran right fielder from Puerto Rico, Number 21, Roberto Clemente.

Narrator: But it wasn’t just his play on the field that day that his admirers would remember. It was what he did afterwards.

[Clemente interview in Spanish]

Juan Gonzales, writer: The Latinos who were listening to that were watching the English-language TV to have someone suddenly speak to you in Spanish, reinforced a pride in your own language and culture, and in who Roberto was.

Les Banos, friend: I cried when he did this, because this was him. He loved his family, he loved his country, he loved the United States but his love was for Puerto Rico.

Narrator: He was baseball’s first Latino superstar, before America’s pastime became truly international.

Robert Ruck, historian: Clemente is the first athlete to transcend both race and nation and culture. He’s also not defined by commercialism. It’s about pride, it’s about doing what he believes is right. It’s about loyalty.

Narrator: He played with unparalleled grace during turbulent times, with passion and pride that were often misunderstood.

George Will, writer: He was a puzzle I’m sure, to a lot of the sporting press, and they were, mysterious and somewhat adversarial in his view.

Samuel O. Regalado, historian: Clemente was a complicated individual, because he stepped into some very complicated times.

Narrator: He was larger than the game he loved, until his sudden, tragic death made him larger still.

Slate: Roberto Clemente

Narrator: “I grew up with people that really had to struggle to live,” Roberto Clemente recalled. “My mother never went to a show. She didn’t know how to dance.”

Like many others in rural Puerto Rico, life for Clemente’s family revolved around sugar cane. His father, Melchor, worked as a foreman in the fields near the small town of Carolina. His mother, Dona Luisa, often rose at one a.m. to make lunches for the workers. Roberto, the youngest of seven children, started working when he was just eight years old. Life in Carolina was hard, with more than its share of tragedy, but he remembered it fondly. “We used to get together at night and make jokes and eat whatever we had to eat,” he said later. “It was something wonderful to me.”

Shy, pensive, intelligent, Roberto was devoted to the island’s favorite sport.

David Maraniss, biographer: Baseball was it for Clemente from an early age. People in his neighborhood in San Anton who said they always saw him throwing something against the wall. It could be a sock or a bottle cap or something but he always had that motion of throwing.

Baseball captured Roberto as it did thousands and thousands of young boys in Puerto Rico in that era because it was what was available. Puerto Rico was not a soccer island. It was baseball.

Juan Gonzales, writer: In Puerto Rico, people argue and fight. The fanaticism toward baseball’s much greater [laughs] than it is here in the United States.

Narrator: As a teenager in the late 1940s, Clemente would catch the bus into San Juan to watch the Puerto Rican winter leagues, dreaming of his own baseball future.

Already a talented player himself, he watched some of the game’s best, including black players from America’s Negro Leagues, attracted by the island’s open racial climate.

Sports Announcer (archival): It’s a high pop-up. Back for first base that’s second baseman, Taylor, scooting over near the line to make the catch for the out…

David Maraniss, biographer: It was so different in Puerto Rico from in the United States in that period. If you were black Puerto Rican or black American, you could eat wherever you wanted to, you could sleep wherever you wanted to, you could date whoever you wanted to, there wasn’t this constant reminder of the color of your skin.

Narrator: Following his favorite team, the San Juan Senadores, Clemente saw top ballplayers, black and white, play with the Caribbean League’s trademark swashbuckling style. For fifteen cents, Clemente could watch the outfield play of his idol, Negro league veteran Monte Irvin.

Samuel O. Regalado, historian: For Roberto Clemente, the black ball players in many respects represented a very important time in his youth. They were the standard bearers for Roberto Clemente. They were the models.

Narrator: At eighteen, Clemente got his first break, playing for the Santurce Cangrejeros for 40 dollars a week. Soon the island’s top baseball men were talking about the young outfielder with the quick bat and the rocket arm. One called him “the best free agent athlete I’ve ever seen.”

In 1954, Melchor Clemente signed a contract on behalf of his son with the Brooklyn Dodger organization, for the unimaginable sum of $5000, plus a $10,000 signing bonus. His stay with the Dodgers would be short-lived — he would soon be drafted away by the Pittsburgh Pirates — but Roberto Clemente was living the dream of every Puerto Rican kid boy who’d ever swung a bat. He was on his way north, to play baseball en las grandes ligas.

Announcer (archival): At Fort Myers, training begins for the Pittsburgh Pirates …

Narrator: For twenty-year-old Roberto Clemente, the annual ritual of spring training in Florida was both familiar and strange. He had played baseball in a warm sunny climate before. But he had never encountered Jim Crow.

Samuel O. Regalado, historian: They’re training in the south, and it’s in the south that Roberto Clemente like other Latin American blacks are introduced to the overt racism they had heard about back in their homeland but now actually see in front of them, and it’s really a concept that is very difficult for them to grasp.

David Maraniss, biographer: The whole team stayed at the Bradford Hotel downtown except for Clemente and three other black and Latino players who had to find their own lodging on the other side of the tracks, literally. In every aspect of his life there he felt segregation strongly for really the first time in his life.

Juan Gonzales, writer: He was coming here as an American, playing baseball in his country, but he was being treated as a black American, as a foreigner, the way he was being identified that just didn’t jibe with his reality.

Samuel O. Regalado, historian: You had this combination of young ballplayer, anxious to succeed, has to a certain extent delusions of grandeur, and then there’s the reality of his position as a person and in the south during the period of the 1950s, it didn’t matter whether or not you’re a professional baseball player, you’re just black.

Narrator: With the start of the regular season, the team came north to Pittsburgh, a tough, smoke-belching steel town, where Clemente took a room in a middle-class African-American neighborhood.

Pittsburgh fans loved their Bucs, as they called the team; but they didn’t quite know what to make of their lone Latino player; and Clemente did not quite know what to make of Pittsburgh.

Robert Ruck, historian: You were black or you were white in Pittsburgh. You weren’t Latin. You weren’t Puerto Rican. On the other hand I suspect that both black and white Pittsburghers had a hard time understanding Clemente. They had little experience with people from Latin America, with Latin American culture, with that sense of Latin pride. The black community saw him and physically he was black to them, but not culturally.