By Myron Cope

	RELATED • DEFORD: Spring Has Sprung (April 10, 1978)

How good was Roberto Clemente? Though the Pirates outfielder suffered countless real and imagined ailments, Sandy Koufax said that the only way to pitch him was to roll the ball up to the plate.

The batting champion of the major leagues lowered himself to the pea-green carpet of his 48-foot living room and sprawled on his right side, flinging his left leg over his right leg. He wore gold Oriental pajama tops, tan slacks, battered bedroom slippers and -- for purposes of the demonstration he was conducting -- a tortured grimace. "Like dis!" he cried, and then dug his fingers into his flesh, just above his upraised left hip. Roberto Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates' marvelous rightfielder and their steadiest customer of the medical profession, was showing how he must greet each new day in his life. He has a disk in his back that insists on wandering, so when he awakens he must cross those legs, dig at the flesh and listen for the sound of the disk popping back where it belongs.

"I always try to lead the clean life," says Roberto Clemente. He does not smoke and rarely drinks, indulging himself only in his original milkshake recipes. Sighing and limping through his clean life, Roberto has acquired a reputation as baseball's champion hypochondriac, but his personal physician, Dr. Roberto Busó of San Juan, says, "I wouldn't call him a true hypochondriac, because he doesn't go to the extreme of just sitting down and brooding." Far from it. Roberto gallops across the outfield making acrobatic catches; with a bat in his hands he is all over the batter's box, spinning like a top when he swings. "I'm convinced of his weakness," says Dodger vice president Fresco Thompson. "Throw the best ball you've got right down the middle. If you pitch him high and outside, he'll rap a shot into rightfield. If you pitch him high and outside, he'll rap a shot into rightfield. If you throw one to him on one hop, he'll bounce it back through the mound and it'll probably take your pitcher and second baseman with it." In the past few years, alas, Roberto has become relatively orthodox. "If I have to jump three feet over my head to hit the ball, now I don't do it," he points out, deadly serious.

For all his exertions, Roberto is perpetually unfit, because, as Dr. Busó goes on to explain, he has a low threshold of pain, which causes him to take minor ailments for crippling debilitations. "If his back hurts he worries," says Dr. Busó, "and then it becomes a vicious circle, leading to more things. If he has a little diarrhea, he worries that he has a serious stomach difficulty." Roberto is endowed with an exceptionally supple musculature that enables him to race full speed into a base and then stop cold on it -- which he likes to do instead of rounding it. But even he pulls muscles, twists ligaments and generally raises hell with his supple musculature that way. "It's his natural style," sighs Dr. Busó.

Still, ballplayers wink and giggle whenever Roberto announces that something or other is killing him; his problem is that he is seldom able to come up with a good, visible injury -- say, a nice compound fracture with the bone sticking through the flesh.

By all odds, Roberto's most exotic infirmity struck him after the 1964 season, when he fell desperately ill in Puerto Rico. Dr. Busó is not certain to this day whether Roberto had contracted autumnal malaria barnstorming in Santo Domingo or had picked up a systemic paratyphoid infection from the hogs on a small farm he owns, but Roberto himself knows what he had. "Both," he says.

His condition alternated daily between delirium and stupor, says Dr. Busó, and he lost 23 pounds. Alas, none of the Pirates had been in Puerto Rico and been an eyewitness. When Roberto reported to spring camp and began cracking line drives, all hands agreed that if he'd had malaria, they wanted some ...

Issue date: March 7, 1966

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