Roberto Clemente

♪ ♪ BROADCAST ANNOUNCER: That is hit well.

(spectators cheering) A Clemente home run!

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.

SPORTSCASTER: And here with me right now, the greatest right fielder in the game of baseball... NARRATOR: But it wasn't just his play on the field that day that his admirers would remember.

It was what he did afterwards.

And before I say anything in English, I would like to say something for my mother and father in Spanish.

En el día más grande de mi vida, para los nenes, la bendición mía y que mis padres me echen la bendición en Puerto Rico.

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: I cried when he did this, because that 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: 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: 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 REGALADO: 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.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (birds squawking) 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 sugarcane.

His father, Melchor, worked as a foreman in the fields near the small town of Carolina.

His mother, Doña Luisa, often rose at 1:00 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 Clemente 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, restless, Roberto was devoted to the island's favorite sport.

DAVID MARANISS: Baseball was it for Clemente from an early age.

People in his neighborhood in San Anton 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 GONZALEZ: In Puerto Rico, people argue and fight.

The fanaticism toward baseball is much greater 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.

(crowd cheers) 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.

GAME ANNOUNCER: A high pop-up back to first base.

That's second baseman Taylor scooting over near the line to make the catch for the out, and that retires the side.

MARANISS: It was so different in Puerto Rico from in the United States in that period.

If you were a Black Puerto Rican or a 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 15 cents, Clemente could watch the outfield play of his idol-- Negro League veteran Monte Irvin.

SAMUEL REGALADO: For Roberto Clemente, the Black ballplayers 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 18, Clemente got his first break, playing for the Santurce Cangrejeros for $40 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 $5,000, 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 boy who'd ever swung a bat.

He was on his way north to play baseball en las grandes ligas.

♪ ♪ NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: At Fort Myers, spring training begins for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Manager Danny Murtaugh... NARRATOR: For 20-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.

REGALADO: 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 that 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.

MARANISS: 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.

♪ ♪ GONZALEZ: 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 just didn't jibe with his reality.

REGALADO: 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.

(machinery squealing) 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 didn't quite know what to make of Pittsburgh.

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.

ORLANDO CEPEDA: He told me that it was very lonely for him, because of communication.

He couldn't communicate.

That's why, uh, we had two strikes: being black and being Latin.

NARRATOR: Clemente spent little free time with his fellow Pirates, some of whom found him guarded and aloof.

Whatever the reason, the result was obvious: besides baseball, number 21 and his teammates had little in common.

Clemente, after baseball games, has no one, really, to pal around with in terms of his teammates.

He often wanders around by himself.

And Clemente, in fact, signed autographs till the last person had his baseball signed, in large part because Clemente had really nothing else better to do that day after games.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In the days before publicists and security guards, players and fans could sometimes have a human encounter.

One day, a 17-year-old fan from rural Pennsylvania saw Clemente after a Phillies game.

CAROL BASS: I decided to approach him and I said, "May I please have your autograph?"

And I had just begun to learn some Spanish, and so I said, "Oh, gracias, Señor Clemente."

And he smiled and he looked up and he started to rattle and go off in Spanish.

And he just went on and on, and I was just like, um, you know, so nervous inside and I thought, "Oh, my gosh, you know, how do I, you know, "what do I do to tell him, you know, I don't understand what he, what he had to say?"

"Mr. Clemente, I'm so sorry."

I said, "I'm just beginning to learn Spanish, I only know a few words."

Well, he, you know, started to laugh.

He said, "You know, you're never going to get a lot of autographs being so far back."

MARANISS: An athlete's life is mostly being uprooted.

And a lot of athletes deal with that by finding superficial outlets.

Clemente mostly dealt with it by trying to find reminders of home and family wherever he was.

Carol was one part of that, and an unlikely white girl from Philadelphia becomes part of the Clemente family.

NARRATOR: Over the years, Clemente would host Carol and her parents when they visited him in Puerto Rico.

But friendships with individual fans were one thing; relations with Pittsburgh's hard-bitten press were quite another.

Theirs was an awkward dance of mutual incomprehension and often hostility.

ROY McHUGH: If Clemente wasn't approached in the right way, he would flare up.

His feelings seemed to be right on the surface.

And, uh, the wrong question or the wrong word would set him off.

I can't say that I enjoyed talking with him.

What cracked me up about Roberto was in a lot of his interviews, they would come and interview him, he would start talking about life.

And the writers just wasn't ready for that.

NARRATOR: Baseball players were supposed to be upbeat and uncomplicated.

Not Clemente.

The Pirate outfielder was often moody, haunted by chronic insomnia; a serious man, ill at ease in a boisterous locker room.

An accent didn't help.

REPORTER: You think the deals are going to help the ball club?

CLEMENTE: Uh, well, we have lots of question mark, and, uh...

I hope the deal help us.

I know that we have a young ball club.

We got lots of speed.

And we have a better pitching staff than last year.

NARRATOR: For much of the Pittsburgh press, it seemed a Latino player's background was something to be mocked or ignored.

GONZALEZ: There was an attempt to really sort of deny the Latino heritage of these ballplayers.

♪ ♪ I was, uh, just a kid then, but I remember he was always called Bobby Clemente.

They Americanized the names, and always the sportswriters and the ballplayers ridiculed their attempts to speak English.

OLIVER: Bottom line was, there wasn't a lot of knowledge of Puerto Rican players.

There wasn't a lot of knowledge of even Black players at that particular time.

And it had a lot to do with not being around.

If you're not around a certain group of people, then you form opinions.

NARRATOR: Clemente repeatedly broke an unwritten rule for professional athletes: never say what's really on your mind.

And another: never complain about injuries, aches or pains.

I wasn't feeling good last year, and I hit .312.

And I hope that with my rest and my stomach stop hurting me, I feel I think I can have a better year; I hope so anyhow.

I was underweight, underweight last year.

I was having a little trouble... NARRATOR: His stomach, his back, his legs, his neck-- everything seemed to plague him at some point.

Before long, Clemente acquired a reputation as an oversensitive hypochondriac.

One day after a game, he was sitting in front of his locker with his uniform off and Joe Brown, the general manager, told him to get into the shower and get dressed.

He said, "You'll catch cold."

He said, "I don't want you to be sick."

And Clemente said, "I feel better when I'm sick."

I don't know what he meant by that, but he knew what he meant.

WILL: We acquired a national stoicism from the '30s and our troubles in the Depression, from the '40s from the war.

Stoicism was identified with manliness.

And it was thought somehow less than manly to complain about ailments, even though real.

RUCK: White ballplayers and Black ballplayers were relatively taciturn.

They chewed tobacco.

Not too many of them had a great sense of style or flair.

Certainly if they asked these players questions about how they were feeling and the player actually talked about their feelings, that was not something they were accustomed to.

Frank, there's a lot of reasons for it.

I believe, uh, the biggest one being, uh, confidence.

Uh, the main thing, and, uh, swinging the bat.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: There was a source for some of Clemente's pain, but he seldom spoke of it.

Back in 1954, he had been in a serious car accident that damaged his spine and neck.

The injuries would plague him for the rest of his life.

Stung by what he saw as unfair criticism, Clemente lashed out at his detractors.

"Hypochondriacs don't produce," he growled.

"I produce!"

WILL: Clemente played hard all the time.

He played all the time, but he talked all the time about how hard it was to do what he did.

And I think it grated on some people who thought that the ideal ballplayer should be like Gary Cooper: tall, silent, stoical.

NARRATOR: In his first five seasons with the Pirates, Clemente hadn't exactly lit up Forbes Field with his hitting.

He'd batted over .300 only once, with seven or less homers.

ANNOUNCER: Roberto Clemente fields the ball... NARRATOR: His play in right field was something else.

He'd won over a growing number of local fans with his powerful arm and remarkable range.

Still, he was on a lackluster team and the national press barely noticed.

Until, that is, 1960.

(crowd cheering) GAME ANNOUNCER: The Rock sends one deep to right.

♪ ♪ REGALADO: In 1960, the Pittsburgh Pirates were no longer the laughingstock of baseball.

The Pittsburgh Pirates are champions of the National League.

ANNOUNCER: Roberto Clemente, one of the outstanding baseball players... NARRATOR: That year, Clemente led the team in runs batted in, was second in home runs and game-winning hits, and led the league in outfield assists.

REGALADO: By 1960, he is an all-star player in the National League.

He is becoming a real threat to opponents.

He might not be recognized by that-- by the national media-- but on the baseball diamond, clearly his opponents recognized Roberto Clemente's rising star.

NARRATOR: For the first time in 33 years, the Pirates found themselves playing in the World Series.

Unluckily, they had to face the New York Yankees, winner of five titles in the past decade and a team packed with superstars such as Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford.

RUCK: The 1960 Series was David and Goliath.

The Yankees were the franchise of professional sport, winning more titles than any team in any sport.

MARANISS: The Pittsburgh Pirates came into the World Series as massive underdogs.

They have a very good team, but no one had really heard of the Pirates players.

NARRATOR: Helped by some timely hitting from Clemente and his outfield play, the Pirates managed to win three of the first six games, despite being outscored by the powerful Yankees, 46 to 17.

The seventh and deciding game would be played in Pittsburgh, where only the most diehard Bucs fans gave the home team much of a chance.

In the bottom of the ninth, David and Goliath were tied nine to nine.

♪ ♪ As Pittsburgh held its collective breath, Pirate second baseman Bill Mazeroski came to the plate.

(music playing, spectators cheering) ANNOUNCER: There's the drive, it's hit deep into left field.

She's going way, way back.

And back goes Yogi Berra, and you can kiss it good-bye.

It's gone!

The game-winning home run!

The Bucs are the champions of the world.

(spectators cheering) NARRATOR: When Mazeroski reached home, Clemente was there, celebrating one of the greatest upsets in baseball history, proud of his contribution to the team's success.

Once off the field, he expected to make a quick exit and catch a plane to Puerto Rico.

But he hadn't counted on the scene outside the clubhouse.

(cheering, whooping) "There's Clemente!"

someone shouted.

And the crowd surged forward.

It took him an hour to make his way through.

♪ ♪ After years of feeling himself an outsider, he had won them over.

The fans of Pittsburgh, he said, had made it all worthwhile.

(birds squawking) Finally back in San Juan at the airport, Clemente received a greeting befitting a returning hero.

Proud Puerto Ricans had followed the Series closely on the radio and in the papers.

A sign in the crowd said what everyone felt about their triumphant native son.

He had barely touched ground when the crowd scooped him up and carried him away.

(cheering, applause) GONZALEZ: He was the hero of the island.

He was like a god.

The pride that Puerto Ricans felt over what he had managed to accomplish in baseball was incredible.

NARRATOR: The celebration went on for weeks.

During the day, dressed in his major league uniform, he led clinics for groups of worshipful Puerto Rican kids.

Most nights, he attended banquets held in his honor.

But Clemente had a different kind of honor in mind-- the National League's Most Valuable Player Award for the 1960 season.

On November 17, the results were finally announced.

In the vote of the nation's baseball writers for the league's top player, Clemente finished eighth.

He took it hard.

BANOS: He felt that he did the best performance in his life in the 1960 World Series.

And personally, he felt this, he should deserve the Most Valuable Player for this, but he didn't get it.

And he felt, you know, a certain amount of prejudice was involved at the time.

WILL: He was very sensitive to slights and to the sense that he was not noticed.

Clemente's resentment arose from, first, his pride; second, from the injustice of the vote.

You can't say absolutely that Clemente should have been the MVP, but there weren't seven more valuable players in the National League than Clemente that year.

MARANISS: I've heard that he never wore his World Series ring after that because he was so upset.

Whether that's apocryphal or not, it represents accurately the way he felt.

He felt that he had been done in by racism.

It was sort of a reminder that life in America was different from his life in Puerto Rico, that the way he was regarded was different, and worse... and that he would not allow that to happen again.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Roberto Clemente arrived for spring training in 1961 with a new contract worth $35,000 and something to prove.

♪ ♪ Fueled by his anger at being overlooked, the 27-year-old Pirate outfielder lifted his play to a new level.

That year he would hit a league-leading .351, while playing stellar defense.

Even as the Pirates returned to their losing ways, Clemente was emerging as one of the greatest right fielders in the game of baseball.

Over 50 years, I've watched many, many baseball games in my lifetime.

I can never remember anyone who threw a ball better than Roberto Clemente when there was a baserunner heading to third or a baserunner trying to score at home.

It was a rifle; it was an incredible arm that he had and incredibly accurate.

And so, there were some ways that he was so superior to all the other ballplayers that all of the issues of race and, and nationality, and language and, uh, all fell by the wayside once the game started.

He would gesture and move his shoulders and his neck as though we were trying to work the kinks out.

Then, he would settle himself in the batter's box, and all hell would break loose.

♪ ♪ Clemente played with abandon.

He was like a horse galloping around the bases, you know, arms flailing.

The way he handled his body was incredible.

I mean, just incredible.

It looks like he was galloping.

Looked like he was all arms, but got there quickly.

His body was a baseball machine.

WILL: In every facet of the game-- hitting, catching, hitting with power, throwing the ball-- the classic five-tool player, that was Roberto Clemente.

(spectators cheering) NARRATOR: Across the U.S., the Pirates' talented right fielder was now being cheered by a growing number of Latino fans.

Through the 1960s, a surge in immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean brought new faces to U.S. cities and to baseball dugouts as well.

When Clemente first entered the major leagues in 1955, there had only been a handful of Latino players; now, nearly a decade later, there were dozens.

But not everyone in baseball welcomed the trend.

WILL: Alvin Dark, the manager of the San Francisco Giants, forbade the speaking of Spanish in the clubhouse.

He thought that Hispanic players were somehow an alien presence and a threat to cohesion.

I don't know what the thinking was.

Orlando, you think you're going to beat this guy out?

It's going to be tough because he always hit, uh, he never hit below .350.

NARRATOR: Number 21 soon realized that he had become something more than a right fielder.

Whether he wanted it or not, he had become a role model.

I watch him every day, and I try to learn stuff from him, because he's the best hitter in baseball.

And he's the best that ever lived.

BANOS: He was very careful always, his appearance, because he felt the first impression very important, especially from him, because he felt he not representing Roberto Clemente alone.

He always told me, "I'm representing the people of Puerto Rico."

WILL: He represented impatience.

He was a cauldron of energy, representing the upward mobility of people who had hitherto been excluded.

(lively Latin jazz melody playing) NARRATOR: Each October, after the end of the baseball season, Roberto would return to Puerto Rico.

Driving the streets of San Juan in his white Cadillac, he attracted attention worthy of a movie star.

Still in his 20s, he was handsome, famous, and single.

MARANISS: He was magnetic.

There were always women writing him love letters, trying to be near him and, uh, it wasn't that he was just walking around, proudly, as a hunk, he was a very soft guy who wanted to hear other people's stories and so that added to his magnetism.

NARRATOR: After a decade on the road, Clemente was eager to settle down.

Vera Zabala was striking-- a 22-year-old college graduate who worked in a bank.

And she was from Carolina, Clemente's beloved childhood home, where her father, like his, worked in the sugarcane fields.

MARANISS: She didn't even know that Roberto Clemente was a ballplayer.

He started calling her at work, asking her for dates, and, uh, eventually, Clemente got up the nerve to sort of deal with the father.

(speaking Spanish) NARRATOR: November 14, 1964, the couple married and settled down in Carolina.

The next year, Vera gave birth to a son.

Two more boys would follow.

Vera soon discovered that her husband had some eccentricities.

MARANISS: Clemente was kind of New Age before there was New Age.

He was an incredible masseuse, he was constantly taking different proteins and odd concoctions of shakes to try to stay healthy.

He believed in mystical connections between life and death and people who were no longer around.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: His connection to the dead centered on a childhood tragedy-- the loss of his sister Anairis, burned to death in a cooking accident when Roberto was just an infant.

For the rest of his life, he would be haunted by fire, and by thoughts of his own mortality.

MARANISS: He talked for the rest of his life about feeling this sister at his side.

He had a certain melancholy to him.

You see it in his eyes.

VERA CLEMENTE: (siren blaring) (crowd clamoring) NARRATOR: In the mid-1960s, Clemente found himself engaged by events beyond the ballpark as America entered a time of unprecedented change.

(protesters chanting) NARRATOR: As Clemente watched and read about the protesters pouring into the nation's streets, he identified closely with the growing movement for civil rights.

(protesters shouting) MARANISS: Clemente was interested in more than sports.

He was very political.

And one of the people he admired most in the world was Martin Luther King.

The one time we know that Dr. King went down to Puerto Rico, Clemente sought him out and spent most of a day with him; took him to his farm.

RUCK: Because he's in the Black community, and because he's traveling around, it's clear at that time that this is a guy that's interested in what's going on around him and has opinions about that.

He's not only an observer.

He's somebody who's passionately connected to what's going on.

He's talking about those things.

He's arguing about those things.

MARANISS: It goes back to the way they were treated in spring training when they were on those buses going from one town to another, and the white guys would go into a restaurant and bring back sandwiches to the... Clemente and the few Blacks and Latinos.

That was not going to fly with Clemente.

Now we are in Florida, not too far from Puerto Rico, and you see the white players go to a restaurant and, uh... and they said, "Fellas, do you want anything to eat?"

Now, we are sitting in the back of the... We are sitting in the bus.

We weren't sitting in the back of the bus, but we were sitting inside the bus and, uh, I remember, I told a fellow, one of the players, I said, "Look, if you will accept anything "from anybody from that restaurant, "you and me, we're going at it.

"We are going to have a fight, because I think it's unfair.

"If, uh, this is the way it's going to be, "this is the way we're going to suffer.

"So now, I don't want you to... none of you fellas to eat anything."

NARRATOR: Celebrity did little to dull his sensitivity to injustice.

If anything, it only sharpened it.

Once, out shopping with Vera in a New York department store, the couple was ignored until someone recognized the famous ballplayer.

When the salespeople suddenly lavished them with attention, Clemente would have none of it.

NARRATOR: By the end of the decade, increased Latino immigration and a galvanized civil rights movement were transforming the country.

Baseball was changing, too, with the unlikely Pirates leading the way.

In 1971, Clemente found himself leader of a team unlike any other in baseball history.

BLASS: It's almost Latin, Black and white.

It sounds so trite and so contrived.

We had a bunch of guys who could play.

MANNY SANGUILLEN (speaking Spanish): MARANISS: It was a time of change and transformation that scared a lot of people, and one of the manifestations of that was that the Pirates, as they became more Black and Latino, became less popular in the city.

RUCK: Roberto is the guy they look up to-- white, Black and Latin.

They look up to him because he delivers on the field, but he's the guy that holds them together off the field.

And he's much more of a leader, much more of a clubhouse presence by 1971, which, in many ways, is his coming-out party to the world.

(spectators cheering, whistling) ANNOUNCER: The 1971 World Series being brought to you from Memorial Stadium in Baltimore.

NARRATOR: In 1971, Pittsburgh managed to reach the World Series once again.

At 37, the oldest player in the Series, Clemente had battled injuries all season.

But his intensity hadn't diminished, nor his competitive drive.

BANOS: He pulled me aside, he said, "I guarantee you, we're going to win."

And I told him, "Roberto, you cannot say anything like it, "because if it don't turn out to be, "you'll be a laughingstock, everybody make a joke out of it."

MATINO CLEMENTE: STADIUM ANNOUNCER (over P.A.

): Roberto Clemente!

(crowd cheering, applauding) MARANISS: He came up to Jose Pagan, one of his teammates, and said, "You guys just get on my back, and I'll carry you."

(crowd cheering) NARRATOR: The Baltimore Orioles had four 20-game winners on their pitching staff and were hands-down favorites in the Series.

That didn't faze number 21.

MARANISS: There was one moment that overwhelmed everything else, and it wasn't a throw or a great hit.

It was a dribbler that Clemente hit back to the Baltimore pitcher Mike Cuellar.

RUCK: That caused the pitcher to throw wildly.

He wasn't just going to assume that the pitcher was going to throw him out.

And it was his hustle that did it.

BROADCAST ANNOUNCER: He does it all; he runs, he throws... MARANISS: Everybody I've talked to on both teams said that they could just feel Clemente's overwhelming will to win dominating that Series.

BROADCAST ANNOUNCER: And he's going to beat Frank's throw.

NARRATOR: After the two teams traded wins, forcing a seventh game, Clemente reassured his teammates.

BROADCAST ANNOUNCER: That is hit well!

NARRATOR: In the fourth inning, he blasted a towering home run, breaking a scoreless tie.

Five innings later, the Pirates were World Champions.

(cheering and whooping) MARANISS: Clemente was brilliant in that World Series.

He batted .414, he got a hit in every game, he was terrific in right field, but it was more than any of that.

ANNOUNCER: Boy, how that man can run for 37 years old!

(crowd cheering and whistling) WILL: His performance was a jewel.

One of the greatest performances-- five or six or seven-- in World Series history.

(spectators cheering) NARRATOR: In the jubilant Pirate locker room, Clemente took the opportunity to speak directly to those who mattered most to him.

The greatest right fielder in the game of baseball, Roberto Clemente.

Bobby, congratulations on a great World Series.

Thank you, Bob, and before, uh...

I say anything in English, I would...

I would like to say something for my mother and father in Spanish.

GONZALEZ: Roberto was breaking the mold and saying, "Yes, I will talk to you, but first, let me talk to my family and my community."

I think that was enormously important, certainly for those Latino fans here in the United States, as well as for those, you know, in Puerto Rico and throughout Latin America who were also listening to that.

(Roberto Clemente speaking in Spanish over TV) (speaking Spanish) (cheering) ♪ ♪ BLASS: It's still chaotic and everything.

We get on the airplane, and before we take off, I'm sitting by the window, Karen's in the middle seat.

Roberto Clemente comes up the aisle, and looks at me, and 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 I 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-- 3,000 career hits.

But the game's best right fielder had other things on his mind.

RUCK: 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.

(indistinct chattering) 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.

RUCK: I think that Nicaragua in 1972 did remind Roberto of what Puerto Rico was like when he was a boy in the '30s and the '40s.

He approached kids and kids approached him and he talked to them and he went into their homes and he found out 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 needed on the ground.

The reply was immediate and, for Clemente, heart-wrenching: "Food, clothing, medical supplies-- everything."

He threw himself into the relief effort, body and soul.

MARANISS: 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.

RUCK: 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 takeoff.

It was a few minutes after 9:00 p.m., December 31, 1972.

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 Brezovec and her mother were arriving on the island.

Vera had gone to the terminal to meet them.

BASS: She was explaining to us, you know, what had happened and how she had taken Roberto to the airport and that... 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 takeoff.

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, you know, right back."

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

BASS: You know, the reality became more clear as we would see more and more... (voice quavering): ...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.

(Sanguillén speaking Spanish) ♪ ♪ OLIVER: It knocked me off my feet.

You looked at Roberto as someone who was invincible.

We knew that we had lost our leader.

♪ ♪ (train clattering on tacks, brakes squealing) GONZALEZ: 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 and blankets and other supplies 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.

Great athletes compress life's trajectory unnaturally-- rapid ascent, glamorous apogee, slow decline.

Most great athletes... live most of their life after their life, as it were.

"Didn't you use to be a ballplayer?"

Clemente was great and gorgeous to watch; elegant, noble, right until this horribly abrupt end.

(applause, whistling fade in) ♪ ♪ (applause, whistling fade out) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪