Presidential Medal Of Freedom Recipients

"Surgery is almost never indicated, Clemente argues – an opinion which may dismay his colleagues in the fellows of the American College of Surgery. But, of course, the march of medicine is no respecter of consulting fees. His clinic is strictly for the public weal. "I do not need the money – I am set for life. This is something I want to do to help humankind." The mark of a great physician is the confidence he can inspire in the patient. Clemente is as equal to this as Pasteur. “When I come to Los Angeles, I can make anyone you bring to me feel good with one treatment to the spine. I can even make you feel good.” If he can do that, he should go from the MVP to the Nobel Prize. The last fellow able to do that was the inventor of the martini. Still, you have to admit, not many people can handle curvature of the spine as well as curvature of the pitch."

"The side of Roberto that everybody missed was that he was a kind man. For all the deadpan (he rarely smiled), bluster and complaints (he never talked, he yelled), he was always available. God is getting an earful someplace today because Roberto is sure he was quick-pitched. The thing I like best is, you never heard of him doing a disreputable thing. The only thing Roberto slipped into his room at night was a book. You never found him having breakfast with a niece from Boston. The only thing he drank out of a bottle was patent medicine. I can’t believe he won’t come walking out of a clearing, bent over and holding his back and complaining that the swim was bad for his sciatica. If you see someone answering that description, throw him a bad pitch down around the ankles outside and, if he hits it screaming down the right field line, it can only be Clemente, and you’ll know reports of his condition have been grossly exaggerated once again."

"Dave Giusti was the player rep in 1972, but Roberto Clemente was the real leader of the clubhouse. He himself was known to stand up to the owners. Dave Giusti told me a Clemente story that I’ll always treasure. Pirates’ owner Dan Galbreath was in the locker room talking to the players. The club would draw better, he said, if the players signed more autographs and made more public appearances. Galbreath piled it on, claiming that the players weren’t appreciative enough of the fans. According to Giusti, the team had had enough, but nobody had the audacity to speak up. Finally, Clemente said, "Mr. Galbreath, I had a dream last night about this. I had a terrible neckache, and suddenly I had become so old and tired and injured that I could no longer play. But those wonderful fans out in right field banded together and said, ‘Even if the Great One can’t play, we can’t let him go. He belongs in right field.’ So the fans presented me with a rocking chair and said that I should sit comfortably between the stands and the right field foul line and relax all through my retirement." The rest of the Bucs didn’t know what to think. Was he buttering management up? Had he gone loco? But Clemente continued in his heavily accented English. "You know, Mr. Galbreath, what that dream is?" Galbreath hesitated. "No, what?" Clemente replied firmly, "It is boolsheet!" Everybody busted up. Except Galbreath."

"Coach Buddy Hancken, who has been in baseball 36 years, said it was the greatest catch he had ever seen."

"He was such a down-to-earth human being. Those of us in the minors would come in for dinner at 5:30 PM and leave an hour later when the big leaguers would have their meal. Roberto would stay outside the dining hall, chatting with us and sharing advice and crack a few jokes. Then we would tell Roberto the last call was made for the big leaguers to eat, but he would tell us: "The heck with the meal. I’ll eat somewhere else later in the evening. Let’s keep talking.""

"It’s sad, but there’s a myth in baseball that certain classes of players are more susceptible to fits of ‘dogging’ than others. This dread ballplayers’ palsy is widely believed to affect blacks more than whites, and Latins more than either. I have never seen anything to substantiate it, but the superstition is present in almost every locker room. For instance, Roberto Clemente did have a very capricious set of vertebral discs. He could play them for you like castanets – and would, on demand. But the grand old game was skeptical. “How can you bat .351 with a bad back?” the dugouts scoff. The point is Hemingway had to write best sellers standing up because of a bad back. John Kennedy had to run the country wearing a corset. But no one believed you could bat .351 with a bad back. Actually, Clemente himself fell into the trap one night when, speaking of Sandy Koufax’s reported sore arm, he asked a reporter irritably, “How can you strike out 15 batters a night with a sore arm?” Said the reporter gently, “Roberto, how can you bat .351 with a sore back?” Roberto got the point."

"One thing stood out – through all the outbursts and the arguments and the controversies, it was almost impossible not to like the guy. I can remember the first time as a rookie that I had to interview him. He was polite and pleasant, as though he sensed my anxiety and was trying to make it easier for me. If the question was particularly penetrating, he might sit there for a moment with that quizzical, little-boy look on his face. But always there was an answer, and always it came from the heart."

"He was over all the time, all the time! He would stand outside and playfully throw rocks at the house. Roberto would always tease me. He liked to tell me that I couldn't cook. I couldn't cook. He and Curtis would sit there and eat half-cooked food, playing cards and drinking beer, pop, lemonade, whatever. Roberto loved to joke, he was really just a big kid. [...] Roberto and Curt were very close. Roberto would stay at the house all day long until it was time to go to the ballpark. Roberto and Curt would sit around and talk and joke in Spanish. Robert [sic] would look at me with that boyish smile ... he liked to make me think they were joking about me, or talking about some other girl. But he would always break down laughing, and tell me what he and Curtis had been saying. Roberto naturally gravitated to someone who could understand him. Even though we were all kids back then, I think Roberto looked at Curtis as something of a mentor."

"He had tremendous faith in a chiropractor named Arturo Garcia, and he learned a lot from that man. Soon he was helping people himself, without publicity. One day while we were preparing the food for a special homage we gave him in the town of Corozal, a fellow whom I had known for quite some time told me, "The greatest favor of my life I owe to Roberto Clemente." I didn’t think Roberto knew him, but Roberto gave him a big abrazo and asked him how he felt. That’s when I learned that the man had been disabled and Roberto treated him for his injuries. The fellow was once a ship’s cook and he said, "I’m going to prepare this meal myself.""

"In the first two games of this Series, when the rest of the Pirates played like they were looking for a place to hide, Clemente stood out like a Cadillac in a junkyard. Everything he did was touched with class, from the way he hit the ball with authority to the way he played right field to the way he answered questions in the locker room. After Monday's humiliating 11-3 defeat on a rubbing table for half an hour surrounded by reporters and, when an equipment man came around and said, "bus leaves in 25 minutes, Bob," Clemente just said, "don't worry about it." He was ready to stay until the last writer was satisfied."

"Roberto’s carefree outlook on life began to change when the press started to misunderstand him when he talked about his injuries. When he was hurt he had trouble explaining himself because of the language problem and everyone thought he was jakin’. I don’t think he’s ever jaked. He just could do things when he was hurt as well as the rest of us could when we were healthy, and people would see this and decide he was dogging it. They thought he used the basket catch because Mays did and everything he did in the outfield was exciting, so right away to some writers he was a hot dog who jaked. Stories were written to that effect and he went through some years when he didn’t trust writers, and I don’t blame him. Some of them put words in your mouth and that’s what they did to him when he was younger. They tried to make him look like an ass by getting him to say controversial things and then they wrote how the Puerto Rican hot dog was popping off again. He was just learning to handle the language and he couldn’t express what he felt or thought and it frustrated him. Writers who couldn’t speak three words of Spanish tried to make him look silly, but he was an intelligent man who knows people and knows the game."

"If Roberto Clemente could sing, he would make Harry Belafonte wish he could hit."

"I do remember my first impressions. It was the same impression I always had of Clemente. He was a very commanding man – commanding in manner of style and appearance. Even in the way he moved, he was commanding. And I was struck immediately with the fact that he had none of the sort of reticence that ballplayers are apt to have when talking to the commissioner – not at all. He spoke to the commissioner and everybody else as equals – that’s the way he was. And I don’t say that in any sense critically. It was refreshing and it was all done with excellent style. It was his commanding character that I will always remember about him as vividly today, all these years after his death, as at the beginning – commanding of everybody, particularly the ballplayers around him. He was the leader and nobody dared to be performing at less than his best as long as Clemente was looking."

"In professional sports, there is a tendency to see something that appears less than maximum effort. That is the legacy which I think he would have wanted to leave primarily – as a great professional who gave everything. Beyond that, I’m sure he would want to leave the legacy that there is an obligation, a further obligation, to be a role model. We hadn’t used that phrase in talking, but he was a marvelous role model – not only as a player but also as a human being and what he did for people. You could not find a greater athlete in terms of what he stood for and the impact he had on people than Clemente."

"For a long time he was a loner. People would ask, "Why doesn’t he go out with the rest of you?" Well, Clemente doesn’t go out, period. He watches TV, orders room service, sleeps. He enjoys that; that’s the type of guy he is. This year he’s changed some. We took him to a Chinese restaurant in Chicago, and he looked so happy. I think he was surprised he had such a good time. I said, "Momen, you have to do this more often." But he’s the kind of guy who’ll go out when he wants to... you can’t influence him. He’s too independent."

"For the two years I was there, it was hard to get close to Clemente. He would be invited to parties after games, but never attended. But it’s not like he disliked his teammates. And he showed a good sense of humor in the clubhouse – hiding your shoes or playing other practical jokes. Joe Christopher was one of his targets. But Joe was kind of easy to egg on. [...] For the time I was there, Clemente and Murtaugh got along very well. Of course, I was there at a very good time – in 1960 when we won the Series. Everybody got along then. There might have been a few harsh words between players once in a while, but no major problems."

"I'm not Roberto Clemente, I'm your Democratic presidential candidate!"

"The biggest misunderstanding with Clemente was not that he was black, but that he was a Latin. We didn't understand Latins. Latins are a very proud people. Pride is what killed Clemente. He had such pride in everything he did. And he wanted everything h was associated with to be done right. He flew in that plane to Nicaragua because he had heard that the food and supplies were not going to the people who needed it the most. He wanted to make sure the relief effort for the earthquake victims was carried out properly. If Clemente was in charge of the relief effort, he would lead the effort. He was never an honorary chairman of anything."

"If somebody pays you a compliment in Puerto Rico, you accept it and say "thank you very much," and then you say why you are deserving of such a compliment. If someone told him "You are one of the greatest ballplayers," Roberto would smile and say, "Thank you," and then tell why he thought he was. He didn't understand that wasn't the way players in this country would handle it. In the United states, if a guy gives you a compliment, you play the humility game. "Nah, I don't deserve that kind of praise." Humble pie stuff. In Puerto Rico, you have to support what they said. He knew he was good. No one ingratiated themselves to people more than I did, so I know how to play the humble role. I had grown up in an orphanage, so I was always trying to please people and be accepted."

"The good hitters, it just steeled their resolve. I saw Henry Aaron get knocked down, maybe twice in a row, and then they’d make the perfect pitch, a low outside slider, and he’d hit the most awesome line drive homer over the right center field fence. Same thing for Willie Mays. Knock him down and you just made him a better hitter. Same for Willie Mays. Same for Roberto Clemente."

"That's really sad, isn't it? It's really sad in a lot of ways, but you know I was thinking that if he were going to die at an early age, it’s good in a sense that he died trying to help people less fortunate. You know, a lot of guys talk about how they’d like to help less fortunate people and give lip service to that. But here’s a guy leaving his family during the holiday season to try to go some place and be kind to people. I think that tells you a lot about what kind of man he was. I met him a couple of times and he was quiet but very manly, and extraordinarily nice. I try to remember people, especially people I get to know a little bit, as they were as people, not by what they did. When I think of Roberto Clemente in the future, I’ll be thinking about him as an extraordinarily nice man who died while trying to help other people."

"It's difficult to rate one great player over another. Clemente belongs in the class with the great ones."

"I watch him drift. Trapped. Or am I trapped, here in 1987, while he, through some malfunction of the universe, is borne into timelessness? What if I were to accompany him? "Wait!" I call. "There's something..." But Clemente has already drifted beyond hearing. I watch as he paddles, his back broad and strong. Just as the mist is about to engulf him, as ocean, fog, and sky merge, he waves his oar once, holding it like a baseball bat, thrusting it at the soft, white sky."

"There’s only one way to classify Bob Clemente and that’s as the strangest hitter in all baseball. Figure him out one way and he’ll kill you another. You can be having your best day against everybody else and he’ll treat you as though you had nothing. It’s so hard to say what he’s going to hit or what should be thrown to him. He’s very strong and is extremely quick with his hands. You look at him swinging sometimes on his front foot, sometimes on his rear, sometimes with both feet off the ground, and you’re inclined to think, ‘This guy can’t hit the ball.’ That’s the biggest mistake you can make and I’ve made a few of them against him."

"You were an island Alone where the three rivers meet A beautiful fury, you moved like a fish Ranging that great, green sea Un boricua You were summer in The solitary skin, the tongue The arm of God The hand of gold Puerto Rico’s son"

"In most cases I wouldn’t have felt compelled to provide a reason for knocking a batter down, but somehow Clemente brought out my soft side. It was virtually impossible to ignore him because he was always talking. Usually, it was to complain about how much his back or his shoulder or some other damn thing was hurting him. "Oh, my back," he would say, "ees keeling me." He would go on and on until you had no choice but to say, "Clemente, shut the fuck up!" Then he would step in the batter’s box and swing so hard that the flagsticks on top of the stadium would bend. He was so full of shit that you had to laugh, and you couldn’t help liking the guy."

"He came over to me and talked to me for about ten or fifteen minutes. He talked about life in general, about family, and he tried to bring out the belief that baseball wasn’t the end all in our lives – that we had to make sure we kept things in balance. He wanted to make sure you kept them in the right order; like family and your wife. He wanted us to remember that these were the most important things. He didn't have to come over and talk to me, but he did."

"He always complained about pains in his stomach. He’d come to the plate and I could see he was in pain and I’d say, "Robby, what’s wrong?" And he’d say, "Tom, I don’t feel too good." But he didn’t like to go to the doctor – he didn’t believe in doctors."

"You know, I’ve never met Mrs. Clemente, but I thought of her often ... very often."

"Roberto’s body didn't appear because God wanted us to remember him as he was: that handsome negro, so strong, so beautiful within and without."

"Everybody looked rumpled next to Roberto Clemente."

"I was crushed. You don’t want to drag your career out. You want to contribute, especially with a club like this one. It was a dumb pitch. I felt terrible. Everyone got dressed quickly – I guess they wanted to leave me with my misery. But Clemente came over and talked to me. All he did was spend 20 minutes holding my hand because he knew I was suffering. He’s a guy who’d been in baseball for so long, and he had three hits that night, and he came over to help. It’s the warmest thing anyone’s ever done for me in baseball."

"He was my middle man if I needed help, if there was a problem between management and one of the players. A lot of people thought he was moody and temperamental, but he wasn’t. He was like a kid in many ways. He had that mischievous look. I always felt he wanted to be a practical joker but that he felt he had to be restrained, the proper leader. He was a god to the Latin-American players. They’d congregate around him in the dining room. If he laughed, they laughed. If he frowned, they frowned. And he was always making appearances you wouldn’t find out about until several days later. He’d go to a hospital or an orphanage and no one would know it. I’m not sure he confided in anyone except his wife."

"If I went along with all the praise he gets, I’d be a hypocrite. Because it’s not my true feelings. I didn’t look up to him as a person. He was a great ballplayer, when he wanted to play, but as a person – from my point of view – he wasn’t my kind of guy. I’ll probably get shot for that, but that’s the way I feel."

"I don't believe if Clemente were still alive that there'd be a statue. It's the way he died. I think, in my mind, Stargell did as much for the people of Pittsburgh, for the team, for the organization. He deserves a statue as much as Clemente does for the contributions he made here. That's my feeling. Stargell mingled more with the public, and he mingled more with his teammates, and he was more of a positive influence all around."

"I asked Face if he remembered where he was when he learned that Clemente had died in an airplane crash on New Year's Eve of 1972. Again, somewhat strangely, a smile. "I was sleeping," he said. He was living in Penn Hills at the time with his first wife, Jeanne Kuran, who was from Pittsburgh and to whom he was married for 25 years, and their daughter Michelle, then 17, who woke him up to tell him the bad news about Clemente. Face remembered his reaction to Michelle's wake-up call. "I said, ‘Better him than me,’ and rolled over and went back to sleep." It sounded harsh. Face chortled at his own story."

"Well, somebody asked me if it was true that I scuffled with Roberto Clemente and he pulled a knife and cut me on the hand. Then they said and came in to break it up and Stuart threw Clemente against the wall and that's how he hurt his arm. I never had an argument with anyone, Clemente doesn't own a knife, and I doubt if Stuart, strong as he is, could pick up Clemente—an ex-Marine—and throw him against a wall."

"Both Walkers owe a debt of gratitude to the most revered player in Pirates history. Tom Walker played winter ball in Puerto Rico in 1972 and helped Roberto Clemente load a plane carrying relief supplies to earthquake survivors in Nicaragua after Christmas. He offered to accompany Clemente on the trip, but the plane was full and Clemente told him to stay behind and enjoy New Year's Eve. A few hours later, Tom Walker returned to his condo and saw the news reports that Clemente's plane had crashed off the coast of Isla Verde, Puerto Rico. Four decades later he's still awed by the notion that he would have perished without Clemente's selfless gesture, and his four children never would have been born."

"There wasn’t too much contact with Clemente off the field; just at the ballpark. He was pretty much by himself, a loner. We were never close… He didn’t hang around with us much. He was always with , or or . He had other friends. There were always people from Puerto Rico or other Latin countries wherever we traveled. He was just more of a loner."

"As we were talking, I was moving my neck around so he asked me what was the matter. I told him that my neck hurt because of an old baseball injury. In a 1958 spring training intrasquad game, I had cracked the third cervical vertebra in my neck when I had a collision with another player trying to catch a popup. Bobby told me to go take a shower with the water as hot as I could stand it. I did that and when I came out of the shower beet red all over, he had me lie on the trainer’s table for a massage. With his very strong hands, he kneaded the muscles in my neck and back and it felt wonderful. Afterwards, he told me to stand up with my back to him. He took two towels, wrapped them together into a cylindrical shape, placed them along my spine, and grabbed me in a bear hug. Then – in something similar to the Heimlich maneuver – he bent backward, pulled me toward him, lifted me off the ground, and sort of bounced me up and down for a moment. As he did, I heard a sound like a xylophone and felt my spine go into perfect alignment. He put me down and said, ‘You’ll feel better tomorrow.’ Heck, I felt better already. But the thing that really impressed me was that the next night I got a call from the visitors’ clubhouse in St. Louis. It was Bobby, and he wanted to know if my back was better. That was the act of a compassionate man, and I didn’t need the crash that ended his life to know that about Bobby."

"Bobby clearly was a good person. What he did to help those people in Nicaragua was typical of Bobby. Down deep, he was a very good person. He wanted to help people. He never felt he got his just due from the news media, and he was always trying to prove himself. But he was kinda bashful, at first, and didn’t like to talk too much. Later, he’d give the news guys a rough time a lot, hollering at them as soon as they identified themselves or started to ask him questions. It took him a long time to get the language down where he felt confident to be interviewed. When Bobby wanted to be, he could be most entertaining on the bus. Every so often, he’d get all wound up and he’d be entertaining everyone on the bus. Most of the people, though, don’t know that Bobby Clemente existed."

"Roberto was a very mature boy, even when he was ten or so. Basically, he was a good kid. He did two things, played ball and stayed home. He never got into trouble. We called him "Momen" from the time he was little. When he had grown up and become a star, no one could remember what the name meant. He was always quiet, never got whipped. We used to kid him about that."

"If anybody needed help with advice or money, he would give it. Once, when he was about 11, there was an automobile accident. The car caught fire, and he crossed the highway and took the driver out so he wouldn’t burn. In school he was a leader. When they needed to build a fence to protect the school, he organized a group of boys and, through various activities, they raised money to help build the fence."

"Roberto rarely took time for himself. His time was for others, his family, strangers. Only time he did something for himself was after the season. He'd go to a farm he owned near the rain forest. He'd just relax. If the Pirates weren't in the World Series, he'd relax on that farm and watch the World Series on television. He once spent the day with Martin Luther King in his other farm in Martín González in Carolina. They talked about everything. Roberto admired how he gave poor people a voice."

"One of the things that he really liked to do was go to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh and visit kids. That’s something that many people don’t write about. That’s where his real passion was – making other people feel important."

"This was a man who looked at the television pictures coming back from the moon and saw the world. Clemente thought of all the people who came together to put that guy there. He conceived of them as a brotherhood."

"I learned a lot about Clemente from Rod Carew, who was my hitting instructor in Milwaukee. Carew told me that when he came up to the big leagues (in 1967), Roberto had made it very clear to the Latin guys (throughout baseball), "We’re a minority here in the States. Take pride in what you do, and take care of each other and the young (Latins) coming up.""

"After Roberto passed, I was looking at some documents about Roberto, and I saw him registered as Roberto Enrique Clemente Walker. He never used the name Enrique. I didn't know that was his name. My baby has the same name – Roberto Enrique – as his dad."

"and all those different guys – they’re partying types. And if they're the partying type, would you expect a man who was a sedentary individual to get involved? No. These individuals were drinking, they were out having parties – they have fun. Clemente was not that type of individual. Clemente said, "If I’m here to do a job, the job must take precedence. Now after the season is over, I can have all the parties I want. But if I’m here to do a job, I’ve signed a contract to do a job." But the American mentality is not that way."

"I have it arranged so that Curt and Roberto and our other colored boys play in our 'home' games. The white boys competing with them for positions play our 'away' games. That way our guys are protected against the little unpleasant things like waiting in the bus while we bring sandwiches out of lunchrooms to them, and like having having to go 'across the railroad tracks' to find places to stay overnight or relax until park time. With this system, everybody gets to play about the same number of games, and it's a happier outfit all around."