Momen's Final Workout?

Footage has just surfaced on YouTube that shows Momen taking some cuts during a workout held in Managua, Nicaragua on November 22, 1972, six weeks before his fatal crash. He was managing a team from Puerto Rico playing in the Amateur World Baseball Championship.

Martin Luther King RIP

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King reveals his lighter side in this 1968 appearance on The Tonight Show:

Original Momen Movie Birth Announcement

For the benefit of the movie curious among you, I am republishing the post from the June 29, 2006 blog that announced the launch of the Roberto Clemente project for the newest La Boca subsidiary, the Interesting Motion Picture Company.


Listen to how Simon & Shuster describes him:

"Anyone who saw Roberto 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, hitting safely in all fourteen World Series games he played. His career ended with exactly three thousand hits, the magical number three thousand coming in his final at bat. Only he and the immortal Yankee 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. Roberto Clemente was that rare athlete who rose above sports to become a symbol of larger themes. Born near the cane breaks of rural Carolina, Puerto Rico, on August 18, 1934, at a time when there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans playing organized ball in the United States, Clemente went on to become the greatest Latino player in the major leagues. He was, in a sense, the Jackie Robinson of the Spanish-speaking world, a ball palyer of determination and grace, dignity and honor, who paved the way and set the highest standard for waves of Latino players who followed in his wake and who now dominate the game."

Look for a La Boca Production on movie screens in winter, 2010. Or maybe earlier as a movie download.

The Interesting Motion Picture Company is a new film financing fund for independent motion pictures with budgets under ten million dollars. The fund's founders provided financing for the 2005 release "Once Upon a Wedding" starring Esai Morales and Kuno Becker.

Roberto Clemente AKA Momen

I'm having so much fun blogging on the Stanley Kubrick Napoleon project that I decided to start blogging on another movie La Boca has been developing: a biography of Roberto Clemente, the Puerto Rican player inducted into the baseball hall of fame faster than anyone else other than Lou Gehrig. He died December 31, 1972 and in a special election was voted into the hall in January of 1973. He is the patron saint of Latino major leaguers and there is a movement swirling to retire his number across every team in the major league like they did with Jackie Robinson.

He had a side to him that most fans of the Pittsburgh Pirates were unfamiliar with and that is the side of his personality that the movie will focus on. He died delivering relief supplies to earthquake victims but Clemente, better know as Momen to his family, had a history of helping out the underprivileged and promoting social causes dating back to his youth. He was an outspoken star back in the day, during the civil rights and protest movements of the 50s, 60s and 70s when politics were particularly volatile. Momen benefited by following in the wake of Muhammad Ali in using his status to promote fairness and equality, but because of his accented English his message was rarely reported in the mainstream press. In fact, the mainstream press all but ignore Momen during his first twelve years as a major leaguer, and if they did cover him they often ridiculed him by quoting him phonetically in their stories. Part of this is because Momen played for the small market city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but prejudice and stereotypes held by white writers covering the sport played a part as well. But in 1966 he reached the peak of his powers and was voted league MVP.

He was on fire when most other players his age were losing their edge and had his best years at the end of his career, culminating by leading his underdog team past the Baltimore Orioles and winning the World Series in 1971. He topped that the next year by making his 3000th hit in his final regular season game in October of 1972. He was one game away from returning to the World Series but the Pirates lost to the Reds, who went on to lose to the Oakland A's. He returned that winter to Puerto Rico to manage a team at a baseball tourney in Nicaragua that winter. He was back in Puerto Rico when the earthquake hit and immediately started a campaign to assist the survivors. But when reports got back to Moment that the supplies were being hijacked by soldiers in Nicaragua he got on a plane to make sure the supplies reached their intended destination. The plane was overloaded and not flight worthy; it aborted its initial takeoff and on the second try it took flight but crashed soon afterward into the sea, never to be recovered.

Lots of material here; hopefully we can do proper justice to his story.