Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss Read Free Book Online Page B

told Smith that he only had a single dollar. Smith told Bithorn to forget the charge, but instead Bithorn went out on the streets and tried to sell his car. He was stopped for questioning by a local cop, Ambrosio Castillo, who acted as though he were trying to inspect the car’s registration but probably wanted to confiscate it for himself. The encounter ended, in any case, in violence. Castillo fired several shots into Bithorn, who was seriously wounded and died after being driven eighty-four miles over rough roads to a hospital in Ciudad Victoria. Doctors there issued a statement saying that he might have lived had he been treated earlier. Castillo claimed that he acted in self-defense, that Bithorn struck him and tried to escape. He also claimed that Bithorn’s last words to him, after being shot, were “I am a member of a Communist cell on an important mission!” But Castillo’s story eventually collapsed and he was sent to prison on a homicide conviction.
    News of Hiram Bithorn’s death reached home on New Year’s Eve, 1951. December 31 . . . Then and later, in the history of Puerto Rico and baseball, it would be the darkest day. The Mexicans had buried him in an open grave, until Bithorn’s family and all of Puerto Rico expressed outrage at his treatment. They had his body exhumed and placed in a double-sealed casket for the trip back to Puerto Rico. Before he was reburied on January 13, 1952, his funeral bier wasplaced on the field at Sixto Escobar and thousands of fans filed past to pay their last respects, including members of his old team, the San Juan Senadores, who played the rest of the season with black patches on their sleeves. Bithorn had died alone and destitute, an unknown stranger in a strange land, but his forlorn ending was transformed once his body reached Puerto Rican soil. He became a legend, a king in the mythology of baseball on the island—and all who came after him to play in the States, including Roberto Clemente, who began his professional career at Sixto Escobar the same year that Bithorn was buried, knew his story as the first among them.
    One year after Bithorn made his debut with the Cubs, Luis Olmo was called up from the Triple-A Montreal Royals to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. As the second king on the northern pilgrimage, his experiences, too, served as context for the later coming of Clemente. Olmo joined a crowded outfield in Brooklyn, with Augie Galan, Paul Waner, Dixie Walker, Joe Medwick, and Frenchy Bordagaray, but the Puerto Rican’s talent won him more and more playing time, until by 1945 he was a team star, batting .313, leading the National League in triples with thirteen, and driving in 110 runs. Like Bithorn, Olmo grew up playing baseball in a place where skin color did not matter. But although he was considered white in the United States, and was allowed to play there before the race barrier was lifted, he was not free from the sting of prejudice. Something strange happened during the 1945 season that he would never forget. As he remembered it sixty years later, he was hitting well over .350 in July, using a heavy black bat. He considered the bat his magic wand, even though it was nothing special. He had bought it at a pharmacy near the apartment that he and his wife, Emma, rented at 55 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn. One day in the dugout at Ebbets Field, manager Leo Durocher picked up the black bat, said that it was too damn heavy, and broke it in two. Why? Durocher could be volatile but he was far from racist and was obsessed with doing whatever it took to win. Yet in retrospect Olmo could think of only one reason that made sense to him: “They didn’t want me to have a good season. They wanted Dixie Walker to beat me out and I was playing more than Dixie Walker.”
    That was not the first time Olmo felt discriminated against for beingPuerto Rican. In 1942, playing for Richmond in Triple-A, his manager, Ben Chapman, constantly made bed checks but only checked on