Roberto Clemente: Keeping the Dream Alive

CAROLINA, Puerto Rico

Luis Clemente swats at insects as he stands on the edge of a swimming pool filled with stagnant, murky water in this San Juan suburb of 150,000 people.

The pool had been a glistening centerpiece of Roberto Clemente Sports City. On this blistering May morning, nearly 50 years after the tragic death of the Pittsburgh Pirates legend, the run-down pool is a symbol of what’s gone wrong at the 304-acre complex in Clemente’s hometown.

WATCH THE FILM: “Roberto Clemente: Keeping the Dream Alive”

Roberto Clemente dreamed that Sports City — Ciudad Deportiva in Spanish — would use sports as a vehicle to lift up Puerto Rican children, particularly ones from broken and impoverished homes. He longed to give them purpose and direction in life.

On this day, the property is largely abandoned, overgrown and in ruins. Later in the week, about 15 miles away in Puerto Rico’s ornate Capitol Building just outside the walls of historic Old San Juan, House Majority Leader Angel Matos Garcia would call Sports City a “national embarrassment.”

Luis Clemente, the middle son of the late Roberto and Vera Clemente, points blame in one direction.

“Literally, we are at war with the Puerto Rican government,” he says.

The relationship between the Puerto Rican government and Sports City Inc., of which Luis Clemente is president and CEO, has been strained for years. Over the past year, it became toxic as the sides quarreled in a bitter, public dispute over who should control the land where the complex sits — and, ultimately, Roberto Clemente’s Sports City dream in Carolina.

Tensions boiled over in July when the government passed a law to reclaim control of the land it donated in 1973. The law rebrands it as the Roberto Clemente Sports District and turns over operations to a government agency. A clause in the agreement giving Sports City Inc. control of the land said ownership could revert back to the government if Sports City was no longer open and active.

“Literally, we are at war with the Puerto Rican government.”

— Luis Clemente, middle son of the late Roberto and Vera Clemente

Luis Clemente argues that Sports City, while not fully operational, is still being used for activities such as youth football and paintball. And Sports City Inc. remains active holding clinics and other events across Puerto Rico and beyond.

The government doesn’t see it that way.

“By signing the bill in question, I focused on making viable and speeding up the works that will honor Roberto Clemente. I do not want the obvious abandonment and deterioration of the facilities in the Ciudad Deportiva Roberto Clemente to continue,” Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi told Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Dia.

The handwriting was on the wall long before Pierluisi grabbed a pen.

When the year began, the government began selling commemorative Roberto Clemente license plates and vehicle registration stickers to raise a projected $15 million to rehab and operate Sports City.

“We are a little bit sick and tired of the excuses (from Sports City Inc.),” Matos said in May. “It’s time to move forward. It’s time after all these years that the government recoups the land and recoups the dream of Roberto Clemente.”

Matos, whose district includes Carolina, said in early August that the government hoped to complete a basic cleanup of the property by Sept. 30 and hold an event there that day commemorating the 50th anniversary of Roberto Clemente’s 3,000th hit.

But, as of mid-August, the situation remained as murky as the water in Sports City’s swimming pool.

On Aug. 5, Roberto Clemente’s three sons and two of their businesses filed a $45 million federal lawsuit against Pierluisi, three other high-ranking government officials and the Puerto Rico Convention District Authority. The brothers accuse the government of trademark infringement for using Roberto Clemente’s image and name without permission from the family’s trademark licensing company.

It’s unclear how that might affect the government’s plans for the Carolina complex.

“When your intention is to take the land away and then, on top that, you’re using our brand to raise the funds without permission to give to an entity that has nothing to do with us, do you think we’re just going to sit there with our arms crossed?” Luis Clemente said as he stood on the edge of the Sports City swimming pool, his hands defiantly on his hips.

“Absolutely not.”

The dream takes shape

Roberto Clemente began dreaming about Sports City long before he died on New Year’s Eve 1972. Rough plans were put to paper at least as far back as 1961.

“I remember I had just nine years when Roberto said to me, ‘Carmen Luisa, let’s sit down and draw a sports city.’ And we sat down and we drew what the city would look like,” Carmen Clemente, a niece of Roberto’s, said in a 1987 interview with United Press International.

Roberto Clemente, then 27, was emerging as one of the game’s great players. The year before, he helped lead the Pirates to their first World Series championship in 35 years and was named an All-Star for the first time. In 1961, he won the first of his four National League batting titles and the first of 12 consecutive Gold Glove Awards as the league’s best defensive right fielder.

“(Clemente) was aware of the world around him, not just baseball. (Sports City) was a big deal for him.”

— Steve Blass, Pirates pitcher/broadcaster

As Clemente’s stature in the game grew, so did his sense of purpose off the field.

Steve Blass, who broke into the big leagues with the Pirates in 1964, said Clemente’s Sports City dream became well known around the team.

“In the clubhouse, we knew Roberto had this dream of having a Sports City that would encompass education and sports hand-in-hand,” said Blass, who recalled being impressed but not surprised by Clemente’s plans.

“He was aware of the world around him, not just baseball,” Blass said. “(Sports City) was a big deal for him. He had the ways and means and connections to make that happen. I had no doubt that was going to happen.”

Despite being one of the game’s greatest players and a revered figure in Puerto Rico, it was difficult for Clemente to get people to do more than listen when he talked about his Sports City aspirations.

Many politicians and prominent figures who promised their support during business lunches and photo ops failed to deliver, deeply frustrating Clemente, according to Luis Rodriguez-Mayoral, a journalist and former baseball executive who became close friends with Clemente.

Clemente was at the height of his baseball powers in 1971 when he made one of his most impassioned public pleas.

“If I get the money to start this, if they tell me they’ll give us the money this year and I have to be there, I’ll quit right now,” an emotional Clemente said in October 1971 when accepting an award for being the most outstanding player in that fall’s World Series, which the Pirates won in seven games over the Baltimore Orioles.

At the time, Clemente was 118 hits shy of reaching 3,000 for his career. The milestone had been accomplished by just 10 other major-leaguers before Clemente, none of them Latin American.

Although funding didn’t materialize then, momentum for the project appeared to be building in the last year of Clemente’s life.

“He lived his life in a flash because he knew he was going to die young.”

— Roberto Clemente Jr.

After Clemente returned home to Puerto Rico following the 1971 season, Rodriguez-Mayoral said he and Clemente began meeting on Friday nights to formulate plans.

The men would retreat to the large balcony of Clemente’s hilltop home in the Rio Piedras section of San Juan. They often stayed up discussing the plans past midnight.

“He took notes and I took notes, that’s how it really began taking shape,” said Rodriguez-Mayoral, 77.

Clemente had long, sit-down discussions with his wife, Vera.

“He lived his life in a flash because he knew he was going to die young, but he always told my mother they needed to sit down so he could explain his business endeavors to her. He wanted her to understand everything he was building, including Sports City,” Roberto Clemente Jr. said.

In early 1972, Rodriguez-Mayoral said Clemente asked him for help securing the support of a major corporation. Rodriguez-Mayoral reached out to James Plinton, a former Tuskegee Airman who had become a vice president at the former Eastern Airlines the previous year, at the time making him the highest-ranking Black executive in the U.S. airline industry.

By summer, Clemente had signed a three-year deal with Eastern Airlines that allowed the company to use the baseball star’s name on promotions and have him speak at corporate events. In exchange, the airline would sponsor baseball clinics organized by Clemente.

It was somewhat of an unlikely pairing, given Clemente’s thoughts about flying.

“Dad had a premonition that he was going to die in a plane crash,” Luis Clemente said.

Yet, Rodriguez-Mayoral said Clemente viewed the deal as a step toward making Sports City a reality.

‘Such an expression of pride’

Statistically, the 1972 season was a modest one by Clemente’s standards. He batted .312, slightly below his career average of .317. Nagging injuries limited him to 102 games, the fewest games he played in a season in his career.

But Clemente, who turned 38 that season, was the undisputed leader on a team that posted the best regular-season record in baseball. And he provided one of the game’s iconic moments late in the season when he drilled a double off New York Mets rookie pitcher Jon Matlack to record the 3,000th hit of his career.

From July 24, 1970: Roberto Clemente and his family take a breather before pregame ceremonies at Three Rivers Stadium honoring the right fielder. On the right are his wife, Vera, and sons Luis and Richie (standing); on the left are his parents as Clemente bounces his son Roberto on his knee. AP file

Roberto Clemente Jr. was at home in Puerto Rico when he watched his father reach the milestone on television. As his father stood on second base, soaking in the moment, Roberto Jr. said he noticed something unusual.

“I almost never saw my dad get emotional, but the expression on his face that day was very different. It was such an expression of pride,” said Roberto Jr., now 57 and living in the South Hills.

The Pirates didn’t get a chance to defend their World Series title. Pittsburgh lost the National League Championship Series’ deciding game when a Cincinnati Reds baserunner scored on a wild pitch in the bottom of the ninth inning.

An inning earlier, with the Pirates leading 3-2, Clemente was intentionally walked on four pitches. It was the last plate appearance of his career.

‘The whole world stopped’

Clemente didn’t have time to wallow in the loss. His offseason schedule was booked.

In addition to spending time with family and friends, he led baseball clinics and continued to formulate Sports City plans. A self-taught chiropractor, he had a steady stream of people coming to his home on crutches, in wheelchairs and in pain, according to his son Roberto Jr.

He organized an event in San Juan to honor Pirates broadcaster Bob Prince during which Clemente presented Prince with the silver bat he was awarded for winning his first batting title more than a decade earlier. And most days, it seemed, someone or some organization wanted to honor Clemente.

“I remember running errands with him and people would call him out in the streets. He would stop the car to talk with them, and before you knew it, within a minute, there would be 50 to 100 people in the street,” Roberto Clemente Jr. said.

“He did all that he could possibly do in those 38 years of his life. That’s the thing that always stood out with him.”

— Al Oliver, former Pirates teammate

He also managed Puerto Rico’s national team at the Amateur World Series in Managua, Nicaragua, and planned to play winter ball for the San Juan Senators (Senadores) starting in January.

“I got it more so after he had passed away that he was trying to do as much as he could as quickly and as often as he possibly could,” said Al Oliver, 75, another former Pirates teammate. “He did all that he could possibly do in those 38 years of his life. That’s the thing that always stood out with him.”

Duane Rieder, the executive director of the Clemente Museum in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood, added: “He wanted to make an impact everywhere, every day. Every day he would do something for somebody. He didn’t want to waste one second goofing around. He wanted to impact as many people as he could.”

Said Blass: “One of his favorite sayings was, ‘I like people who suffer, I like to be around them.’ There were a lot of people who were in good shape and they could take care of themselves, but he really related to the people who were suffering.”

Clemente managed Puerto Rico’s national team in Nicaragua for three weeks, from mid-November through the first week of December. The team didn’t make much of a mark, tying for sixth place in the 16-team tournament, but Clemente did.

“He connected with the people there,” Rodriguez-Mayoral said.

About two weeks after Clemente returned to Puerto Rico, two days before Christmas, Nicaragua was rocked by an earthquake. It killed thousands and caused widespread devastation.

Clemente and wife Vera quickly sprang into action. They established a committee that would coordinate the collection of relief supplies and charter a plane to make three relief flights to Managua.

For Clemente, everything else stopped — including planning for Sports City.

Three relief flights, though, wouldn’t be enough to carry all the supplies that poured in. On Dec. 30, a chance encounter between Clemente and the owner of another plane at the Carolina airport resulted in handshake deal. The plane’s owner would assemble a crew to make a fourth relief flight, and Clemente would go along to ensure the supplies got to the people who needed them. There had been reports of government corruption and military officials diverting supplies.

From Jan. 3, 1973: Lt. Commander Guy Clark (left), the commanding officer of the USS Sagebrush, inspects the nose gear of the DC-7 that crashed into the the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Isla Verde, Puerto Rico, in San Juan. AP file

In the days after the earthquake, Clemente asked several friends to accompany him to Nicaragua. One was Jose “Palillo” Santiago, a former major-league pitcher and one of Clemente’s closest friends. Palillo is Spanish for toothpick.

“I had never said no to him before, but this time I said, ‘Momen, no, this is Christmas and I spend Christmas with my family. Now on the next trip, I might go with you, but not on this trip’,” Santiago said, referring to Clemente by his nickname.

Clemente’s family gave him the nickname Momen because as a boy he often said “momentito, momentito” — or “just a minute” — whenever he was called or asked to do something.

Santiago said he tried to persuade Clemente to postpone the trip.

“I said, ‘Why do you want to go? You have people coming to Puerto Rico to be with you, and it’s Christmastime, you’re never here with your family. He said, ‘Jose, all the things I’m sending to Nicaragua, it’s not getting to the people. I want to go there so I can see that they distribute all the things I’m sending there to the right people,’” Santiago said.

Clemente’s oldest son, Roberto Jr., then 7, said he also asked his father to stay.

After waking up on New Year’s Eve, he said he approached his parents at the dining room table and told his father, “Dad, don’t get on the plane because that plane is going to crash.”

Roberto Jr. said he doesn’t know where the premonition came from. “When I got up that morning, I didn’t even know that he was flying that day,” he said.

At 9:23 p.m. Dec. 31, 1972, the DC-7 plane carrying Clemente and four others crashed into the Atlantic Ocean about a mile offshore. Clemente’s body was never found. The Federal Aviation Administration later said the plane was at least 4,193 pounds overweight, overloaded with relief supplies.

“We were celebrating (New Year’s) with family and friends when we heard the notice of Roberto Clemente’s accident,” said Jose Aponte Dalmau, who was 7 at the time of the crash and is now the mayor of Carolina. “Everything stopped. The party stopped. The time stopped. Everything in Puerto Rico stopped. Pittsburgh stopped.

“I think the whole world stopped that night.”

‘The things big people do’

The way Roberto Clemente died cemented him as more than just a great baseball player.

Although he had a long track record of quietly helping people in need, including making regular visits to places such as Children’s Hospital and the Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children in Pittsburgh for which he sought no publicity, the crash revealed his humanitarian side to the world. It made him a national hero in Puerto Rico, a status he still holds today.

“Roberto was in between man and god. There was something about him. He just saw everything differently.”

— Duane Rieder, executive director of the Clemente Museum in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood

“It’s hard, but the way he died was perfect. I don’t want to sound like crazy, but it was perfect because he was helping another people from another country. I think he was perfect,” said Raul Centeno, 28, a third baseman for the Carolina Giants (Gigantes), an amateur team that plays its home games in a stadium named after Clemente.

“Obviously, Roberto Clemente is one of the most important things we know. Generations to come will try to follow his footsteps. For Puerto Rican ballplayers, it makes us proud to do the right things for other people,” added Giants outfielder Aldemar Burgos, 25.

On a rainy evening in early May, Centeno, Burgos and every other player in Puerto Rico’s amateur Double-A Baseball League wore No. 21 to honor Clemente on the last day of the league’s regular season.

“Roberto was in between man and god. There was something about him. He just saw everything differently,” Rieder said.

Aponte, the mayor of Carolina, said, “Every leader has two models to look for. I have two: Jesus Christ and Roberto Clemente. Both of them give their life for the human beings.”

Matos, the lawmaker who has been at odds with Sports City Inc. and Luis Clemente, becomes emotional as he tries to explain the impact Roberto Clemente has had on him: “I come from a broken family with no dad, and I start reading about a guy who kills himself helping people. That’s the most honorable way to die. And I’m sorry, but it’s a nice way to die, helping others. … That’s the things that big people do, titans do.”

Making the dream a reality

Such feelings about Clemente, combined with the tireless efforts of his wife Vera, spurred people far and wide to act in the wake of his death to make Sports City a reality.

Less than a week after Clemente died, President Richard Nixon became one of the first personal donors, writing a check for $1,000 in Clemente’s memory — to support the Nicaraguan earthquake victims and the Sports City project.

Within a year, more than $500,000 had been pledged, including $100,000 from the Pirates and $56,000 from Eastern Airlines.

Major-league exhibition games played annually in San Juan’s Hiram Bithorn Stadium — named after the first Puerto Rican to play in the major leagues — and related telethons raised millions more in the ensuing years. Until 2016, the Puerto Rican government provided annual funding to help support operations.

Less than six months after the plane crash, the government donated the land for the project.

It took several years to get the project off the ground. Much of the property was marshy wetlands, and Sports City Inc. had to spend more than $600,000 just to make it usable. Even then, the land presented problems.

“We had the fields going at an amazing pace, but if there were heavy rains, sometimes you couldn’t use the fields for two weeks after,” former Sports City executive director Bill Wilk said.

Sports City enjoyed periods of success in its first decades of operation, with more than 1 million children participating in various sports and an array of activities.

“It was a great place to play and a great opportunity,” said former Sports City-goer William De Gracia, 44, who now owns the Carolina Giants (Gigantes) amateur team. “They would teach us how to play, and we had sessions where we just talked (with current and former pro players) about life, about the sacrifices baseball players have to make.

“You got to be there and see all those baseball parks, all those softball parks, courts for volleyball and basketball, the swimming pool — they had the whole shebang over there. For us, it was just like, ‘Wow, we get to play here.’ It was a complete atmosphere there that I wish we could have back for kids coming up.”

‘Just give me the keys back, man’

Sports City continually faced challenges from the soggy land and damage from tropical storms and hurricanes such as Hugo (1989), Georges (1998) and the devastating one-two punch of Irma and Maria (2017).

As the years passed, the financial challenges also grew. Fundraising events such as the annual telethons and major-league baseball games in San Juan stopped and the cash-strapped government slashed funding.

Wilk, who left a job as an assistant vice president at JPMorgan Chase in New York to become Sports City’s executive director in 2005, said he focused his efforts on trying to reduce costs and secure corporate sponsorships.

“We had started turning things around. Everything was operational,” he said.

But the government, itself looking to cut costs, trimmed annual funding to Sports City nearly in half, to about $400,000. The complex had been operating on a budget of about $1.3 million a year at the time, according to Wilk.

“Now we were forced to make up close to $1 million to run the operations, and that wasn’t attainable,” he said.

Luis Clemente said another major blow came soon after when the government withheld funding for months because it said Sports City Inc. owed $50,000 in unpaid taxes.

“Without that money, we could not pay insurance or salaries for our employees,” he said. “Without insurance, we could not open the gates.”

Sports City closed for months while the matter was being sorted out. In the interim, news reports suggesting the complex had closed for good began to surface. That invited vandals and thieves to the property, Clemente said, and created a perception problem that was hard to shake.

“Once the government realized it was their error, that they had not credited all the monies that were paid, the funding was restored (six months into the fiscal year). But the damage had already been done,” Clemente said. “The government never issued a statement or published an article explaining what happened. This was uncalled for. We shouldn’t have had to go through any of this.”

Clemente blames the Puerto Rican government for standing in the way of the property’s redevelopment.

The government placed restrictions on how Sports City Inc. could use the land. It limited how much could be leased to other parties and barred Sports City Inc. or a related entity from having commercial endeavors such as hotels or restaurants on the property. The money generated could have gone toward keeping the complex afloat financially, Clemente said.

The government passed legislation to place two government officials — the Recreation and Sports secretary and the director of tourism — on Sports City Inc.’s board. Luis Clemente said that also has stymied redevelopment plans.

“When presented with a work plan to achieve the reopening of the facilities with private investment, the public officials that sit on Ciudad Deportiva’s board of directors blocked the initiative through a veto by omission to vote,” the Clemente brothers’ lawsuit said.

Matos dismisses such talk.

“They’ve had 45-plus years to prove their concept and it hasn’t worked,” he said. “When the dust settles, I hope they understand we respect the Clemente family, but that’s not a right to do whatever you want.”

Offering an analogy comparing the donated Carolina land to a family car, Matos said, “Sometimes you have a son and you give them a car, but they have been recklessly driving, so at some point you say, ‘Just give me the keys back, man.’”

Matos said it’s been hard for him to put faith in Sports City Inc. because he claims it has not properly accounted for how it spent $18 million to $20 million — only part of the total public money — in government funding over the years. He said he requested the Puerto Rico Comptroller’s Office to conduct an audit.

Clemente insists that Sports City Inc. has done nothing wrong and that it provided the government with records accounting for how it spent all public money, as required by law. He said Sports City Inc. has not received government funding in about six years.

What the future holds

The two strong personalities — Luis Clemente and Matos — say they are committed to keeping Roberto Clemente’s Sports City dream alive and preserving his legacy, but there is a wide chasm separating their ideas on how to do so.

“What we have entailed for the future of Sports City will put Puerto Rico on another level,” Luis Clemente said regarding what he envisions as a $1 billion makeover of the property. “It will be the pride and joy of every born and still-yet-to-be-born Puerto Rican.”

Matos thinks that’s all just talk.

The former swimming pool at Roberto Clemente Sports City in Carolina, Puerto Rico, is overgrown and filled with murky water. Sean Stipp | Tribune-Review

“I have seen proposals, conceptual designs and some kind of not well-defined promise that there is $1 billion in funding that will gush into Ciudad Deportiva,” Matos said. “I don’t know, $1 billion is just a huge amount of money, and it doesn’t make sense that if you have that kind of money available, the government is tying your hands.”

The land is still a concern at Sports City. Clemente says his $1 billion plan calls for engineers to more aggressively address the most flood-prone areas so Sports City remains usable even after it rains and buildings there remain structurally sound for years to come.

Clemente said he has corporate partners lined up who have undertaken similar projects elsewhere. If Sports City Inc. is allowed to create a “commercial spine” on a portion of the property, the revenue generated by it could support the complex without requiring government funding.

He said Sports City would continue the mission of trying to lift up Puerto Rican children from all backgrounds while also becoming a destination complex that could attract youth and adult teams for tournaments in various sports. He said he also imagines creating a “Junior ESPN” where children and ex-athletes could get hands-on training for careers in media.

Matos said a projected $15 million generated by the sales of registration stickers and commemorative license plates would cover a “basic cleanup of the property” and provide at least $150,000 a year to support operations and maintenance.

He said he has received letters of interest from four sports federations on the island that “want to adopt different pieces of the property.”

“What we have entailed for the future of Sports City will put Puerto Rico on another level.”

— Luis Clemente

“I have a down-to-earth path. Let’s clean up the land and let’s open it up,” Matos said.

On that sun-drenched morning in early May, Sports City seemed more like a sports ghost town.

When the complex about 5 miles from Luis Munoz Marin International Airport was in full swing, it routinely attracted more than 1,000 children on such days.

Many came to play sports or go swimming. Others participated in programs geared toward children with disabilities or teens at risk of dropping out of school. Schools brought students for day camps, and free sports clinics taught by current and former professional athletes attracted kids in droves.

But that was years ago. On this day, no such activities are planned.

People using what’s left of Sports City’s facilities on this quiet morning include a man and woman walking laps on a deteriorating asphalt track. They walk in the shadow of a crumbling grandstand covered with faded paint and graffiti. Restrooms and storage space beneath the bleachers have been gutted by fire, flooding and thieves. A few hundred yards away, an old man emerges from an overgrown path from the nearby San Jose Lagoon. He pulls a cart filled with PVC pipes that he rigged for crabbing.

The site’s biggest draws these days include youth football and paintball.

Luis Clemente is quick to point out that Sports City Inc. is still actively working to keep the Sports City dream alive — across Puerto Rico and in the United States — but operations are dramatically pared down here in Carolina.

A statue of Roberto Clemente stands outside a baseball stadium named in his honor in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Sean Stipp | Tribune-Review

In recent years, Clemente said the organization has hosted dozens of youth clinics across Puerto Rico and elsewhere that attracted thousands of children through its “The City in Your Town” series or, in Spanish, “La Ciudad en Tu Pueblo.” A clinic late last year at San Juan’s Hiram Bithorn Stadium attracted nearly 600 kids, he said.

“That’s the thing some people don’t seem to understand,” Clemente said. “We haven’t gone away. We are still operating. We are still keeping dad and mom’s dream, their mission, alive.”

It’s unclear where Sports City Inc. will do that in the future.

“Sports City is not just another municipal complex,” Luis Clemente said. “Sports City is not a place. It’s a concept. I can do it anywhere.”

Published Aug. 26, 2022

Tom Fontaine is a Tribune-Review news editor. You can contact Tom at tfontaine@triblive.com or via Twitter @FontainePGH.