American Experience

Steve Blass, teammate: It’s still chaotic and everything, we get on the airplane, and before we take off, I’m sitting by the window, Karen is in the middle seat, Roberto Clemente comes up the aisle, and looks at me, I’m sitting there, he says, “Come here Blass, let me embrace you.” And I walked up and he gave me this big hug, and I get goose bumps now thinking about it. Here’s Roberto Clemente getting up out of his seat coming up and wanting to give me a hug and it just, it validated everything that I ever thought that could happen to me in the game of baseball.

Narrator: Over a remarkable career, Clemente had converted even the skeptics. Four batting titles. National League MVP. The next season, 1972, would see him reach one of baseball’s most prestigious milestones, 3000 career hits. But the game’s best right fielder had other things on his mind.

Robert Ruck, historian: There’s something going on, with Clemente in the later years where he’s making a transition from ballplayer to a statesman, you know from somebody who is putting up Hall of Fame numbers on the field, but to somebody who you can just see what he’s becoming off the field. He’s spending a lot of his time thinking about things, planning things, beginning projects which he hoped to accomplish once he left the ball field for good.

Narrator: That winter, Clemente found corporate sponsors for baseball clinics across Puerto Rico, and worked on plans for his passion, an ambitious sports city for underprivileged kids. He traveled more widely throughout Latin America, and even coached an amateur team in Nicaragua.

Osvaldo Gil, friend [in Spanish, subtitled]: What he saw on the streets of Nicaragua — had a big impact on Roberto. It moved him.

Robert Ruck, historian: I think that Nicaragua in 1972 did remind Roberto of what Puerto Rico was like when he was a boy in the thirties and the forties. He approached kids and kids approached him and he talked to them and he went to their homes and he found out that about their lives and he identified with them.

Narrator: On December 23, 1972, the Clementes awoke in Puerto Rico to the news of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua. Roberto quickly located a ham radio operator who could provide details of the damage, and asked what help people on the ground could use. The reply was blunt, and for Clemente, heart-wrenching: Food, clothing, medical supplies. Everything. He threw himself into the relief effort, body and soul.

David Maraniss, biographer: It became his passion for the next week or so he was … that’s all he was doing, day and night, was trying to round up aid for the people of Managua.

Narrator: When he heard the news of corruption and looting, of relief supplies stolen, Clemente decided to intervene — personally. He would accompany a planeload of emergency supplies to Nicaragua.

Robert Ruck, historian: The people on the ground in Managua are calling Roberto. Roberto, you have to come. If you come here, it’ll get where it needs to go.

Narrator: Clemente wasted no time. At San Juan’s International Airport, he chartered the first plane and pilot he could find. After some frantic hours of repairs, the DC-7 was finally cleared for take off.

It was a few minutes after 9pm, December 31, 1972.

Vera Clemente, wife [in Spanish, subtitled]: We said goodbye on the tarmac, and he climbed the stairs to the plane. He gave me a very sad look. I read many things in that look. “I would like to bring you, but I can’t. I should stay, but I can’t.”

David Maraniss, biographer: The plane was sort of tipping wrong. And the front wheel was a little … almost off the ground and the back wheel was smashed, and said something, something’s wrong here. But Clemente was so determined to get to Nicaragua to do what he thought he had to do that he wasn’t really paying attention to any of that stuff. It barely got off the ground, just over the trees, over the ocean about a mile and it disappeared.

Narrator: Just as Clemente’s plane departed, Carol Brezevec and her mother were just arriving on the island. Vera had gone to the terminal to meet her.

Carol Brezovec Bass: She was explaining to us, you know, what had happened, and how, ah, she had taken Roberto to the airport, and that, um, he was on his way to Nicaragua and that he would call as soon as he got there.

Narrator: But the phone call never came. Late that night, Clemente’s niece called Vera. She had heard a radio report that a plane had crashed into the ocean just after take off.

Carol Brezovec Bass: Things just became much more serious and much more quiet. By then, there should have been a phone call from Roberto, to say he was okay, you know, I’m here, I’ll be right back.

Narrator: The following day, helicopters and a rescue fleet surveyed the waters off San Juan, to no avail, as a disbelieving crowd gathered on the beach, praying for a miracle.

Carol Brezovec Bass: You know, the reality became more clear as we would see more and more medical supplies wash up and signs that in fact this was the cargo plane and this was the plane that, um, he was on.

Narrator: Pittsburgh teammates waited anxiously for news; one even joined in the rescue effort. But Roberto Clemente’s body would never be found.

Manny Sanguillén, teammate [in Spanish, subtitled]: The tide pulled everything away. They couldn’t see anything.

Slate: Headline: “Bucs’ Clemente Killed In Crash”

Al Oliver, teammate: It knocked me off my feet. You looked at Roberto as someone who was invincible. We knew that we had lost our leader.

Juan Gonzales, writer: It was two days after his death, and I come out of my apartment in the South Bronx and people are pouring out with cans of food, blankets and other supplies uh, to give to the victims of the earthquake in Nicaragua. Here were all of these Puerto Ricans, all of them impoverished themselves, and to some degree it seemed to me their way of, like, expressing not only their sense of loss over Clemente, but their sense of continuing what he was trying to do. And that truck filled up in, in half an hour.

George Will, writer: Great athletes compress life’s trajectory — a naturally rapid ascent, glamorous apogee, slow decline. Most great athletes live most of their life after their life, as it were. Didn’t you used to be a ballplayer. Clemente was great and gorgeous to watch, elegant, noble — right until this horribly abrupt end.

Osvaldo Gil, friend [in Spanish, subtitled]: My mother gave me the only explanation that made sense. “If he had died as a player, only the sports fans would have remembered him. But by dying while helping others, he would be remembered as a humanitarian.” And she was right.

Slate: Less than three months after his death, following an unprecedented vote, Roberto Clemente became the first Latino player elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame.