Requiem for Roberto

It was another long, sleepless winter for Roberto Clemente. A national hero in Puerto Rico, the Pittsburgh Pirates' 38-year-old rightfielder once explained that his home near San Juan was "like a museum--people flocking down the street, ringing our bell day and night, walking through our rooms."

Then there were the endless demands for public appearances that "I just couldn't say no to." Among other charitable projects, Clemente last week led Puerto Rico's efforts to aid earthquake victims in Managua, Nicaragua, a city where he had coached and played with Puerto Rican teams during the offseason. Not satisfied with merely lending his name to the mercy mission, Clemente insisted on going along to Managua to see that some 26 tons of food and $150,000 in relief money were properly distributed.

Minutes after takeoff from San Juan international airport, the cargo plane developed engine trouble and crashed into heavy seas one mile off the coast.

Rescue boats and helicopters combed the crash area, but by dawn only bits of debris had been recovered. Clemente, three crew members and another passenger had perished. Governor-elect Rafael Hernandez Colon immediately canceled the formal ball that was to have followed his inauguration last week, and three days of mourning were declared. "Roberto died serving his fellow man," Colon said. "Our youth loses an idol. Our people lose one of their glories."

Blistering .414. And baseball loses one of its few genuine superstars. In 18 storied seasons, Clemente was named the National League's Most Valuable Player once (1966), led the league in hitting four times, won a dozen Golden Glove awards for fielding and was elected to the league's All-Star team twelve times. His lifetime batting average of .317 was the highest among all active players. His finest hour came in the 1971 World Series when, with a blistering .414 average at bat and assorted marvels afield, he all but singlehanded defeated the favored Baltimore Orioles. Such seasoned managers as Dick Williams of the Oakland A's and Harry Walker of the Houston Astros say the same thing: Roberto Walker Clemente was "the greatest ballplayer I ever saw."

He was also one of the quirkiest.

Widely regarded as an unreconstructed hypochondriac, he had headaches, cramps, insomnia and a nervous stomach from worrying--largely about his headaches, cramps, insomnia and stomach. Though some of his ailments, such as slipped discs, bone chips, blood clots, pulled muscles and malaria, were undoubtedly for real, Pirate fans came to expect and even revel in the complaints of "Mr. Aches and Pains." It was almost axiomatic that the worse Roberto said he felt, the better he played. "If Clemente can walk," the New York Mets' Tommy Agee said before the 1972 season, "he can hit." Hit he did, registering a .300-plus average for the 13th time in his career. His last hit in his last regular season game--a ringing double to deep left center field--was the 3,000th of his career, a feat equaled by only ten other players in the history of the major leagues.

Hit No. 1 came his first time at bat for the Pirates in 1955. It should have come a season earlier, but Clemente was the unwitting victim of a hide-and-seek game played by the old Brooklyn Dodgers. Son of a sugar-plantation foreman in Carolina, a suburb of San Juan, Roberto was spotted by Dodger scouts when he was 19 and quickly signed for a $10,000 bonus to keep him out of the clutches of their archrivals, the New York Giants. Well aware of his potential, the Dodgers sent Clemente to their Montreal farm team where, by using him sparingly, they hoped to keep his talents under wraps until they could make room for him on their roster. The Pirates were not fooled.

Taking advantage of a complex draft rule then in effect, they snatched Clemente away for a cut-rate $4,000, and the Dodgers lost a superstar--to say nothing of untold pennants.

Sparrow. Clemente quickly became one of the most feared scatter hitters in baseball. Standing a full yard away from the plate, cocking his extra-long bat and twitching his neck like a nervous sparrow, he was a notorious bad-ball hitter who would rather swing at a wild pitch than settle for a walk. Opposing pitchers went crazy trying to figure out his weakness. In one game Cincinnati Reds' hurlers pitched him inside, down the middle and outside, and he hit successive home runs to left, right center and right field. "The big thing about Clemente," Giants' Pitcher Juan Marichal once said, "is that he can hit any pitch. I don't mean only strikes. He can hit a ball off his ankles or off his ear." Asked if he had found any effective way to pitch to Clemente, former Dodger Speedballer Sandy Koufax said, "Sure, roll the ball."

Afield, Clemente had to be seen to be believed. His circus catches and rifle arm were things of wonder. Two seasons ago, he saved a game against the Astros by making a diving, sliding catch of a humpback liner into short right. In the same inning he took off after a home-run ball, leaped, twisted backward and snared the ball as he slammed into the wall, injuring his ankle, knee and elbow. "He took it full flight and hit the wall wide open," marveled Astro Manager Walker. "It was the best catch I've ever seen." Clemente also possessed the strongest throwing arm of any outfielder: from 420 ft. away, he once fired a perfect strike to the plate to nip the runner trying to score from third. The accuracy he ascribed to his training as a high school javelin thrower, the strength to his mother. "My mother had the same kind of arm," he once explained. "She could throw a ball from second base to home with something on it. I got my arm from her."

The father of three boys, Clemente was working on his favorite project of a "sports city" foi Puerto Rican children shortly before his death. "What we want to do," he said, "is exchange kids with every city in the U.S. and show all the kids how to live and play with other kids." As for himself, he said after the 1971 World Series that "I would like to be remembered as the type of player I was." That in itself would be enough.

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