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

morning. It landed at dawn, and there was another three-hour delay before the fifty-eight-minute skip to Rancho Boyeros airport in Havana. When Clemente and his exhausted teammates slogged to the registration desk at the Hotel Nacional at 9:30, Macon informed them that they had three hours to rest before the bus left for the stadium and a Sunday doubleheader. Not that it mattered much to Clemente. He couldn’t sleep anyway, and he was unlikely to play.
    “They’ll be calling us the Montreal Somnambulists,” said Dixie Howell, the Royals veteran catcher and coach. Somehow, the zombies from the North managed a split, winning the second game behind the two-hit pitching of Joe Black. Amoros, Cimoli, Whitman, and Cassini shared outfield duties, and the bonus baby never got off the bench. The crowd at Gran Stadium was large and buoyant: twenty thousand fans whistling, jeering the umpires, chanting “Sol! Sol! Sol! Sol! Baby!” to the insistent rhythm of conga drums and marimbas. In the press box, writers sipped espresso cups of Cuban coffee and downed bottles of “one-eyed Indian” (Hatuey) beer as they looked down on the field and beyond to the old city washed in faded yellow and ivory. Nothing unusual for Clemente and the Latin players, or for Anglo teammates who had played in the winter leagues. Tommy Lasorda, a born ham, would even delight the crowd by doing a little wriggle to the rhythm before he went into his windup on the mound. But for those experiencing baseball in the Caribbean for the first time, it all seemed exotic and a bit dangerous, reinforcing stereotypes. “The Cuban fan is a complete extrovert and does everything but get right into the ball game,”Dink Carroll observed after his first day at the park. “After watching them for a while, it’s easy to believe a paragraph we read in a local publication: ‘In Cuba people talk about two things: politics and baseball. These are passionate topics leading often to violent discussions.’”
    Butch Bouchard, a former Canadiens hockey player and Montreal restaurateur who came South with the team for a vacation, joked that if Cubans got into hockey “There’d be nobody alive when the game ended.”
    When Mickey McGowan, a writer for the Montreal Star, noticed a stirring in the crowd after a loudspeaker announcement, he blurted out, “What is it? A call for the militia?”
    Collier’s Tom Meany had to explain that it was merely notice of a gift giveaway for kids who attended the doubleheader the following Sunday.
    Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner, was also on the scene. After taking in Joe Black’s impressive performance, he skipped the rest of the games to go deep-sea fishing in the Gulf with Bud Holman, his pal from Eastern Airlines. Not a bad place to hang out for a few days. The Hotel Nacional, sitting on a hill overlooking the blue-green Caribbean, was all comfort and ease, the good life, with two swimming pools, sweet flowering bushes, a putting green, high-ceilinged rooms with fans and air-conditioning, rum, beer, and beautiful women. One night, after the game, Rocky Nelson strolled through the lobby chomping a Cuban cigar, rounding up teammates for poker. They hooked Max Macon and drained his wallet until he was almost broke. According to Glenn Cox, the manager pushed back from his seat at the table, held up his last $10 bill, shouted “You guys aren’t gonna get this!” and went over to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet. Then he said: No more high-stakes poker on the road.
    Havana was not home for Momen, but it was close enough. There was even a Morro Castle, jutting into the sea, a fortress much like El Morro at the tip of Old San Juan. Clemente made friends with the jack-of-all-trades for the Sugar Kings (publicist, radio announcer, promotions director, and road secretary), the gregarious Ramiro Martínez. It was Martínez who branded the logo for the Sugar Kings, a cartoon character shaped like a baseball named Beisbolito. He