By Joe Posnanski
https://www.mlb.com/
December 28, 2017
Old film of athletes rarely ages well. You see black and white footage of Bob Cousy dribbling in circles or Jim Brown running over would-be tacklers half his size or Babe Ruth swinging that tree trunk of a bat in what looks like fast-forward speed, and it's hard to connect with their greatness. There's a brilliance and magic about their talents that doesn't quite translate, that does not travel through the years.
But every now and again, there's a rare athlete whose gifts are so beautiful, so pure, so timeless that the crackling video looks as modern and fresh as if it was taken yesterday. Just watch Roberto Clemente throw a baseball.
Just watch him throw in the documentary short "Remembering Roberto."
It looks as beautiful now as it ever did.
"I think it is unproductive, if not mindless, to compare athletes from different generations," says David Maraniss, author of the marvelous "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero." "Everything is different: diet, training, gene pool, equipment. … Statistics offer the illusion of an even way to judge and compare, but it's only an illusion.
"Overcoming race and language, Clemente became the undisputed leader of the Pirates, something that all the statistics utterly fail to measure, just as in the matter of joy and beauty they fail to measure the thrill of watching him go to the wall and uncork a rope to third."
Clemente's story cannot be told enough times. It is at first, as Maraniss says, "the story of a migrant worker, essentially, black, and Latino, the greatest of the first wave and someone who fought against his own pride and fears of mortality, and against the white sporting press establishment and yet somehow emerged beloved."
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