"I met Roberto Clemente once, after the , which he dominated with his bat, his throwing arm, his fielding, and with his presence. After the Pirates won that Series from the Orioles, Clemente flew to New York City, where the editors of a magazine had a new car to present him. The day wheeled about a luncheon in Leone's Restaurant, where a wearying procession of speakers led into a Purto Rican official, who was supposed to introduce Roberto but instead rambled on boozily for 20 minutes. When at length the man finished, Clemente strode to the microphone, and suddenly the low comedy was done. "I am 37 years old," Clemente said, "and this is the first time I have ever been asked to speak in New York." He spoke on, movingly, beautifully, about his island, his family, about his game. Someone at my table commented, "We are listening to an overflowing heart." That vibrant heart was stopped 26 months later when a time-worn DC-7 shattered in the Caribbean Sea. Clemente had organized the flight to bring food, anesthetics, sugar, and tracheotomy tubes to the broken city of Managua, Nicaragua."
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Baptists from the United StatesPresidential Medal of Freedom recipientsUnited States MarinesPeople from San Juan
Original Language: English
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Sources
Roger Kahn, from "A Requiem for Roberto" in The Chicago Tribune (Sunday, October 28, 1973), Page 2, Section 7
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roberto_Clemente
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Roberto Clemente
baseball player
1934 – 1972 · United States
Roberto Enrique Clemente Walker (August 18, 1934 – December 31, 1972) was a Puerto Rican Major League baseball player from 1955 through 1972, exclusively with the Pittsburgh Pirates. A posthumous inductee to the National Baseball Hall of Fame (following his fatal plane crash on December 31, 1972, en route to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua), Clemente became both the first Latin American and the first C
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