On New Year's Eve 1972, following eighteen magnificent seasons in
the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero's death, killed in
a plane crash as he attempted to deliver food and medical supplies
to Nicaragua after a devastating earthquake. David Maraniss now
brings the great baseball player brilliantly back to life in
"Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero, " a book
destined to become a modern classic. Much like his acclaimed
biography of Vince Lombardi, "When Pride Still Mattered, " Maraniss
uses his narrative sweep and meticulous detail to capture the myth
and a real man.
Anyone who saw Clemente, as he played with a beautiful fury,
will never forget him. He was a work of art in a game too often
defined by statistics. During his career with the Pittsburgh
Pirates, he won four batting titles and led his team to
championships in 1960 and 1971, getting a hit in all fourteen World
Series games in which he played. His career ended with
three-thousand hits, the magical three-thousandth coming in his
final at-bat, and he and the immortal Lou Gehrig are the only
players to have the five-year waiting period waived so they could
be enshrined in the Hall of Fame immediately after their
deaths.
There is delightful baseball here, including thrilling accounts
of the two World Series victories of Clemente's underdog Pittsburgh
Pirates, but this is far more than just another baseball book.
Roberto Clemente was that rare athlete who rose above sports to
become a symbol of larger themes. Born near the canebrakes of rural
Carolina, Puerto Rico, on August 18, 1934, at a time when there
were no blacks or Puerto Ricans playing organized ball in the
United States, Clemente went on to become the greatest Latino
player in the major leagues. He was, in a sense, the Jackie
Robinson of the Spanish-speaking world, a ballplayer of
determination, grace, and dignity who paved the way and set the
highest standard for waves of Latino players who followed in later
generations and who now dominate the game.
The Clemente that Maraniss evokes was an idiosyncratic character
who, unlike so many modern athletes, insisted that his
responsibilities extended beyond the playing field. In his final
years, his motto was that if you have a chance to help others and
fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth. Here, in
the final chapters, after capturing Clemente's life and times,
Maraniss retraces his final days, from the earthquake to the
accident, using newly uncovered documents to reveal the corruption
and negligence that led the unwitting hero on a mission of mercy
toward his untimely death as an uninspected, overloaded plane
plunged into the sea.
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