When he was awarded the Series MVP, he thanked the presenter in English, then immediately spoke in Spanish, blessing his family, thanking his parents, and asking for their blessing as well on “the most important day of my life.” It was a moment all Latinos who saw remember with pride and emotion—and still moves anyone who watches it today. “With Roberto it was always faith and family first, everything else second,” said Father Gutierrez. Just like his parents had taught him, back in Puerto Rico.

Watching Roberto Clemente play baseball was to have seen the game at its best, but to have known him as a man, and appreciate him as a leader, was even better. Forty years after his death, in a tragic plane crash on New Year’s Eve 1972, Clemente’s stature only continues to grow.

Born in Carolina, Puerto Rico on August 18, 1934, to Luisa and Melchor Clemente, Roberto was the youngest of seven siblings. At the time, the country was in a deep and prolonged depression. When Roberto turned six, “average income per person in Puerto Rico was about thirty cents a day,” notes biographer Kal Wagenheim:

The average life span was only forty-six years, as thousands of infants died of diarrhea, gastroenteritis, pneumonia, and influenza, and hundreds of thousands of adults were weakened by intestinal parasites. In Roberto’s barrio of San Anton, it was not rare to see the neighbors solemnly bearing a tiny wooden casket—a dead infant—to the cemetery.

The outbreak of Word War II provoked a blockade around the Caribbean, making the situation even worse. But it was precisely during those trying times that the future baseball star learned the value of faith, hard work, and family bonds. Luisa was a Baptist, Melchor a Catholic, and their home became a place “where sharp lines divided right and wrong,” writes Wagenheim. But it was a strictness imbued with exceptional love, designed to build character, and Roberto always appreciated that:

When I was a boy, I realized what lovely persons my father and mother were. . . . I learned the right way to live. I never heard any hate in my house. Not for anybody. I never heard my mother say a bad word to my father, or my father to my mother. During the War, when food all over Puerto Rico was limited, we never went hungry. They always found a way to feed us. We kids were first, and they were second.

His parents encouraged their children to excel in school and extra-curricular events. Roberto joined his first baseball team when he was eight, but local deprivations made his introduction to the game somewhat unusual: “His first bat was fashioned from the branch of a guava tree,” writes Wagenheim, “a glove was improvised from a coffee bean sack, and the ball was a tight knot of rags.” No matter; the youngster enjoyed the game all the more.

In fact, it became his abiding passion. His relatives and friends tried to temper his expectations, but Roberto was determined. “I wanted to be a ballplayer. I became convinced God wanted me to.”

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