Free Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss Page A

Rico. He could understand the language better than he spoke it. Fernández had picked up enough Englishphrases during his two years playing ball in the States to serve as a go-between. When Amoros joined them in May, the job more than doubled. Amoros barely tried to speak or understand English. If Max Macon, who knew a bit of Spanish from playing one year in the Cuban winter league, had something important to convey to Amoros, he went through his shortstop, as did the sportswriters. “Helluva ballplayer,” Fernández recalled of Amoros. “But he didn’t care that much” about communicating.
    The rooming house offered beds but no meals. From the time they awoke, the players were on their own for food. Every morning, they ended up at the same breakfast joint, and ordered the same meal. Ham and eggs, said Fernández. Ham and eggs, echoed Clemente. If there were Cuban or Mexican restaurants in Montreal, they never found them. Now and then they made it downtown to clubs. On any scale measuring racial tolerance, Montreal in 1954 was closer to Puerto Rico than to Florida. With its cosmopolitan reputation, it had been the logical choice as the city where Jackie Robinson would break organized baseball’s color line. But it was by no means free from prejudice. Clemente made friends with a young French-Canadian woman and left tickets for her to come to a game, but didn’t leave them under his name because he wasn’t sure how she would be treated. After the game, when they were talking outside the stadium, an older woman criticized them for socializing. During Clemente’s first month in Montreal, several stories in the Gazette documented the frustrations of Charles Higgins, a thirty-one-year-old bricklayer, father of three, and World War II veteran of the Canadian Army, who was denied housing by forty landlords because he was black.
    Fernández had been around the cities of North America before, but for Clemente everything on the road was new. Old hotels, food, accents, what people laughed at, or took offense at, the awkwardness of being separated from teammates to sleep on the other side of town in Richmond. At the Powers Hotel in Rochester, Clemente approached the traveling secretary in the lobby and softly asked for a loan. Why do you need money? Bob Watt asked. Clemente said he wanted to buy a shaver, a Remington electric. Watt teased him, but gave him the money. Shy kid, Watt thought. Quiet. Never bothered anyone.
    For the most part, Clemente and Fernández were achingly lonesome for home, wherever they were: for chicken and plantains and black beans and sofrito and spiced pork, but only one of them was frustrated. Fernández was playing shortstop every day, making the plays. “Max was crazy about me,” he said of the manager, who had coached him in Miami two years earlier. If Macon was crazy about Clemente, he never showed it. Not playing and not earning praise were as new to him as the language and the setting. “He was good, but, like me, desperate to play,” Fernández said later. “And since he didn’t play, he was real upset about it. It is lonely. When you are in some place for six months and not playing, that is bad. And he wasn’t playing.”
    At night, Clemente would pour out his frustrations. It seemed that whenever he got a chance and played well, Macon benched him. Once they pinch hit for him with the bases loaded in the first inning. He got so disgusted he threw a bat onto the field. Fernández tried to explain. First of all, he said, there were so many good players in the Brooklyn system that it was hard for everyone. Rocky Nelson, Norm Larker, Jim Gentile, they all had been stacking up at first base because the Dodgers had Gil Hodges. At short, Fernández knew he had Pee Wee Reese blocking the way, and there was this phenom Don Zimmer out in St. Paul. Same way in the outfield, Momen, he said. And it was obvious that someone in Brooklyn didn’t want him to play. Max has gotta do what the big club tells