'American Experience: Roberto Clemente'
TELEVISION REVIEW
Documentary examines the man, the player, the legend.
I am the proof that you don't have to know much or care deeply about baseball to be thrilled and moved by the story of Roberto Clemente, right fielder, family man, humanitarian, Pittsburgh Pirate, Puerto Rican.
Bernardo Ruiz's lovely and exciting "Roberto Clemente," airing tonight on PBS as part of "American Experience," tells the story of a man who by every account was as effortlessly upright and true as if he were crafted for juvenile fiction, a man who never forgot who he was, where he came from and what mattered. He died young in a plane crash, in 1972 at age 38, delivering medical supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.
But as the footage shows, there was also something purely beautiful in his playing, something rooted in, yet also apart from the game itself, there for anyone to see -- his long, perfect throws, their velocity, arc and accuracy; the way he hurtled from base to base. It's an aesthetic pleasure as well as an athletic performance. (The function is in the form.) And he was movie-star handsome to boot, with a dashing sense of style. "Great, gorgeous to watch, elegant, noble," columnist George Will calls him.
Born in 1934, Clemente "grew up with people who really had to struggle to live" on an island where baseball was a fanatical passion and played with what might be called a Latin flair. He rapidly distinguished himself in the local leagues -- one scout called him "the best free-agent athlete I've ever seen" -- and was brought north by the Dodgers, who managed to lose him quickly to the Pirates, where he spent his whole major league career.
The United States was a shock. Puerto Rico, in baseball and in daily life, was a racially open society, but the American South was still living under Jim Crow, and the rest of the country in the mid-1950s was not exactly without prejudice. Clemente, the single black face in one team photo, was for a long time isolated by his skin and his speech, which the press took perverse delight in rendering phonetically ("I heet ball good"), even as the front office tried to anglicize him: On baseball cards he was "Bob Clemente." "We had two strikes," recalls fellow Puerto Rican Orlando Cepeda, who played for the San Francisco Giants around that time, "being black and being Latin."
