Doctor Omega
Member: Rank 10
Roberto Clemente
“O.J.: Made in America” director Ezra Edelman is set to helm a biopic about famed baseball player Roberto Clemente for Legendary Entertainment. Rowan Ricardo Phillips will adapt David Maraniss’ 2006 novel “Clemente”.
Clemente was a Puerto Rican baseball player who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1955 to 1972. In December 1972, he boarded a heavily loaded plane plane en route from Puerto Rico to Nicaragua to assist with earthquake relief. The aircraft crashed and his body was never recovered.
On New Year's Eve 1972, following eighteen magnificent seasons in the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero's death, killed in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver food and medical supplies to Nicaragua after a devastating earthquake. David Maraniss now brings the great baseball player brilliantly back to life in "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero," a book destined to become a modern classic. Much like his acclaimed biography of Vince Lombardi, "When Pride Still Mattered," Maraniss uses his narrative sweep and meticulous detail to capture the myth and a real man. Anyone who saw Clemente, as he played with a beautiful fury, will never forget him. He was a work of art in a game too often defined by statistics. During his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he won four batting titles and led his team to championships in 1960 and 1971, getting a hit in all fourteen World Series games in which he played. His career ended with three-thousand hits, the magical three-thousandth coming in his final at-bat, and he and the immortal Lou Gehrig are the only players to have the five-year waiting period waived so they could be enshrined in the Hall of Fame immediately after their deaths.