C. W. Clendenon was a double doctorate from Morehouse College in Atlanta; he chaired the math department and taught philosophy at Langston, the only historically black college in Oklahoma. We might know more of him had he not died of leukemia in 1936 at 32 years old. He left behind a wife, a daughter, and an infant son named Donn.
Widowed Helen soon moved her family back to Atlanta, where she’d attended college at Spelman, Morehouse’s sister school. In 1941, she married another Morehouse man, Nish Williams, a former Negro League baseball player and successful restaurateur.
Williams played in the shadow big league for 13 seasons; absent the color line he may have been good enough to have made the majors. Satchel Paige said he was the only hitter who could consistently catch up with his legendary “hummer” fastball.
Williams’ restaurant and home were frequently visited by former and current Negro League players; legends like Paige, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Sad Sam Jones were family friends. So when Donn was 10 years old he ended up in the batter’s box at a high school baseball field facing Paige and Jones in a session Williams arranged to help the kid get over his fear of the ball. (Paige had pinpoint control and kept his hummer over the plate, but Jones’ sweeping curve ball frightened Donn and caused him to wet his pants.)
“I remember the time and day,” he wrote much later, “because my mother and stepfather had a big argument because he had me miss my Tuesday violin lesson.”
Helen expected her son to achieve—she thought he’d be a doctor or a Ph.D like his father. When Donn graduated from Booker T. Washington High at 15, he wanted to accept an athletic scholarship to UCLA. But the family prevailed on him to stay home and attend Morehouse, which gave him a full academic scholarship and assigned him a “big brother” to help him adjust to college life, a 1948 Morehouse graduate named Martin Luther King Jr.
Donn Clendenon won 12 varsity letters at Morehouse—four each in baseball, basketball and football. At 6 foot 4 and 215 pounds, he ran the 100-yard-dash in 9.6 seconds. Still. when he graduated in 1956, he declined offers from both the Cleveland Browns and the Harlem Globetrotters to take a job teaching fourth grade in the Atlanta school system.
But at the urging of his stepfather he took a leave of absence in 1957 to attend an open tryout for the Pittsburgh Pirates held in Jacksonville, Fla. They gave him jersey No. 317; for nine days he hit and ran and threw for the scouts. When camp ended he packed up and came home. He told his stepfather no one from the Pirates said anything to him.
He went to work the next day and found Pirates general manager Joe Brown in his classroom. He’d left too quickly, before they’d had a chance to offer him a contract. He signed for a $500 bonus and got on a bus to New York to begin an arduous climb through the minors.
Clink, as his teammates called him, finished second in National League Rookie of the Year voting in 1962. From 1963 to 1968, he was the Pirates’ regular first baseman. Never quite an All-Star, he was a serviceable player who, in the off season, took interesting jobs, including working as a detective for the Allegheny County district attorney’s office. He enrolled in law school at Duquesne University School of Law in 1965.
In 1967, Nish Williams was diagnosed with colon cancer, so he dropped out of law school in order to manage his stepfather’s businesses. Then, just before opening day 1968, MLK was murdered in Memphis; only after Clendenon and other players threatened to strike was opening day postponed until after the funeral. Williams died on Labor Day.
After the season, the Pirates—with young first baseman Al Oliver waiting in the wings—left him unprotected in the expansion draft. Clink was selected by the brand-new Montreal Expos.
This was disappointing. He was 33 years old and had accomplished much in baseball but he’d never been in a World Series. The Pirates had a chance, with a nucleus of great players, including Roberto Clemente. It would take years for the Expos to achieve mediocrity.
But almost immediately, the Expos traded him to Houston for a charismatic young slugger named Rusty Staub who they planned on building (and marketing) their franchise around. While the Astros’ prospects of winning were much better, Clendenon believed their new manager was an inveterate racist. He decided to retire instead of reporting to the Astros.
This was a problem; the Expos really wanted Staub. And new commissioner Bowie Kuhn ruled they could keep him but had to send the Astros “additional compensation.” After some backroom negotiations, Clendenon was lured out of retirement by a lucrative and unusual three-year contract with the Expos.
Having missed spring training, he got off to a bad start in the 1969 season.
What I remember most about 1969 is not the moon landing or Woodstock or the murder of Sharon Tate, but that baseball season, which might have turned on a phone call Clink received just before the June 15 trading deadline. A voice on the line said, “We want Clendenon.”
Johnny Murphy, general manager of the New York Mets, had meant to call the number for the Expos but had been connected to Clendenon by mistake. At least that’s what he said.
At the time, the Mets were in second place, nine games back of the Chicago Cubs in the National League East. They went 70-36 the rest of the way; Clink platooned with Ed Kranepool and hit in the middle of their order. He hit two home runs against the St. Louis Cardinals in the September game that cinched the National League East title.
Those “Amazin’” Mets went on to win the World Series over the Baltimore Orioles in five games. Clendenon, last to join the team, was named World Series MVP. For that he got the keys to a 1969 Dodge Challenger. LeRoy Neiman painted a portrait of him in action, though the artist screwed up and made him left-handed.
Clendenon finally got his law degree in 1978. In the ’80s, he had some problems with cocaine, and came out of rehab a drug counselor. In 2005, he died of leukemia, like his father and his grandfather.
I met him around 1988 at some event or other—Riley Stewart, an old Negro league player who’d been Nish Williams’ teammate and a vice principal at my high school, introduced me to him.
I said the ’69 Mets broke my heart; I rooted for Baltimore—for Frank and Brooks Robinson, for Mark Belanger and Mike Cuellar. He smiled and spoke gently, more like the academic he could have become than the motor-mouthed trash talker he was reputed to be: “They were the better team, one of the best of all time, in fact.”
But his team was not a fluke. It takes luck, but effort too, and at the highest levels even journeymen possess phenomenal talents and unguessed-at depths. They are not the baseball cards we flipped and traded and stuck away in shoebox-es. They were men.
Donn Clendenon was a Morehouse man.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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