Still the Great One

 The man is everywhere around me now, here in our quiet den. A photograph of him standing in the on-deck circle -- poetry in repose, you might say -- hangs on the wall behind me. On a bookshelf not a foot-and-a-half beyond by left elbow, his baseball card and an action figure and a plastic-encased commemoration of his Hall of Fame induction day stare back at me.

At the opposite end of the same shelf, also encased in plastic, leans a facsimile of a ticket to his last game, when he laced a double into left-center for his 3,000th hit. The date on the ticket is Saturday, Sept. 30, 1972.

On Dec. 31, 1972 -- three months and a day later, and 50 years ago today -- Roberto Enrique Clemente Walker climbed aboard a creaky DC-7 and was never seen again. He was just 38 years old.

The ancient aircraft was loaded with supplies headed to Nicaragua, which had just been hit with a devastating earthquake. The plane, and the supplies on it, were Clemente's response to the catastrophe. And he was on that plane because he was never one to do anything halfway; if he was sending aid then he, Clemente, would be there to personally ensure it got where it needed to go.

The DC-7 labored into the air and crashed into the sea shortly after takeoff from Puerto Rico, Roberto Clemente's native soil.

At once baseball lost not just a legend but a man whose legacy extended far beyond the trim geometry of the diamond. In Puerto Rico he was revered as the Latino Jackie Robinson, the one who escaped their small island to become one of the greatest players of his or any other generation, and who paved the way for all who came after him.

He was the Great One to every kid in Puerto Rico and dozens of other places who picked up a stick and a ball and dreamed their dreams. And not just because he played the game with a grace and elegance and, yes, poetry rarely seen before or since.

He was the Great One because he kept coming back to Puerto Rico, kept giving back to his homeland by conducting clinics and building ballfields and spearheading  humanitarian causes in their hundreds. Acutely aware of who he was and what he represented, he became an outspoken advocate of civil rights for persons of color and, specifically, Latin American persons of color.

As for me, I became (much to my chagrin these past 30 years) a Pittsburgh Pirates fan because of Roberto Clemente. As a kid, I was utterly captivated by him. I'd never seen anyone play baseball the way he played baseball. Going full out all the time, but with this incredibly sublime fluidity, he patrolled right field the way Nureyev might have -- and God help you if you tried to take a base on that howitzer of a right arm.

You might argue with me when I say he was the greatest ever to play the position. But you'll lose.

A year after his death, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, baseball having taken the extraordinary step of waiving its usual five-year rule. It was a tribute not only to Clemente’s impeccable skill -- 12 Gold Gloves, 846 extra-base hits, a lifetime .317 average -- but to the way he lived his life, right up to the end.

Fifty years ago today, that life ended when the plane went down.

But, oh, how much he lifted up before it did.