This week PBS broadcasts Roberto Clemente, a one-hour documentary about the famed Puerto Rican baseball star and humanitarian. It’s worth watching.

Baseball’s biggest problem back then wasn’t steroids but segregation. When Clemente arrived at the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 1955 spring training in Fort Myers, Florida, he, along with other black prospects, had to stay in private homes in a historically black neighborhood while the white players lodged in a downtown hotel.

“The white players and their families relaxed at beaches and pools where black teammates could not go,” writes David Maraniss in his excellent 2006 biography, Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero. “If blacks wanted to watch the Pirates, they were penned in their own pavilion section of the bleachers at Terry Park. The bathrooms and water fountains at the ballpark were labeled Whites and Colored.”

The discrimination did not sit well with Clemente. In a 1972 interview, he recalled his early days in Florida: “From the first day, I said to myself: ‘I am the minority group. I am from the poor people. I represent the poor people. I represent the common people of America. So I am going to be treated as a human being. I don’t want to be treated like a Puerto Rican, or a black, or nothing like that. I want to be treated like any person that comes for a job.’ Every person who comes for a job he should be treated like whites.”

Clemente did not make a good first impression upon his Pirates’ manager, the famed Branch Rickey, the man who signed Robinson to the Dodgers. Rickey noted in a preseason memo that the right fielder looked good at the plate, but had poor running form, had probably never stolen a base in his life, and lacked adventure in the outfield. “So, we are stuck with him—stuck indeed, until such time as he can really help a major league club,” Rickey wrote.

The Pirates were stuck with him for eighteen seasons. He won twelve consecutive Golden Gloves awards for his prowess in the outfield, four batting titles, and was MVP of the 1971 World Series.

But statistics don’t adequately convey his game, and that’s what makes this documentary so valuable. Director Bernardo Ruiz tracked down footage of Clemente’s galloping run, his trademark basket catches, and his powerful throws from right field to third, denying an extra base to a runner.

The documentary tracks Clemente’s life off the field, too. He visited sick kids in hospitals across the United States and the Caribbean and often spoke of his dream to build a sports city for poor kids in Puerto Rico. “If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on this Earth,” he said.

This idealism eventually led him to Nicaragua in 1972. After a devastating earthquake shook that nation in December, Clemente, who had just been there, began a fundraising campaign in Puerto Rico. People donated more than $100,000 and tons of food to the relief effort.

Anastasio Somoza Debayle was in power in Managua and ordered his soldiers to lock up the international aid that was arriving at the airport in order to keep it for his kleptocratic government. When Clemente got wind of this, he became enraged and decided to deliver the aid himself. On December 31, 1972, the thirty-eight-year-old ball player boarded a broken-down plane that had no business flying. He and four others died several minutes after takeoff when the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. His body was never recovered.

Clemente was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame shortly after his death, making him the first Latin American player to reach Cooperstown.

Maraniss’s biography paints a portrait of a complicated man: temperamental, proud, sensitive, and a bit of a hypochondriac. Ruiz’s documentary hints at Clemente’s contradictions. I would’ve liked to have seen more scenes of ball playing and fewer talking heads, especially since baseball players back then still looked like normal men, rather than the beefed up body builders of today trotting around in pin stripes.

But the film delivers, in black and white and in full color, images of one of baseball’s brightest stars. “He broke racial and language barriers and achieved greatness and died a hero,” Maraniss writes. “That word can be used indiscriminately in the world of sports, but the classic definition is of someone who gives his life in the service of others and that is exactly what Clemente did.”