A Well-Paid Slave (19 page)

That same night, Flood and Cosell appeared together on
The Dick Cavett Show
. Zerman, who declined to appear on the program, watched in the wings as Flood told another national television audience that the Phillies had offered him “at least $100,000” to play for them in 1970. And there was no way that he was going to take it.

Judge Bonsal's two-week delay gave additional time for the media, players, and fans to take sides about Flood's lawsuit. The owners' “base-ball will cease to exist” rhetoric carried the day over Flood's “well-paid slave” comment by a wide margin—especially among the country's base-ball writers.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, members of the press were firmly on the side of management. They rode on team buses and planes, reveled in the hometown team's victories, and bonded with owners and general managers. They distrusted Marvin Miller and the Players Association. They could not get over the fact that Flood made $90,000 in 1969. And they often wrote columns about Flood that lacked any racial sensitivity or understanding.

Flood's most incisive and persistent critic was
New York Daily News
columnist Dick Young. Young had dubbed the owners “the Lords of Baseball,” but he had been decidedly promanagement ever since. He took shots at Miller and the Players Association, portrayed Flood as Miller's puppet, and denigrated Flood's slavery comparison. “Curt Flood isn't helping his case with that tired slavery line,” Young wrote. “Any guy who has to cut short his six-months vacation in Scandanavia [
sic
] to fly here and file his suit doesn't paint a bad picture for the Plantation Owners' Association.”

UPI's Milton Richman rejected any comparison between Flood and cattle. “That's where I stop feeling for Flood,” Richman wrote. “I know we're in the middle of paralyzing inflation but $90,000 for one head of cattle still staggers the imagination. . . . I don't believe his rights as a human being have been abrogated or annulled in any way by baseball, particularly when I think about the various businesses he has been able to operate both in this country and in Denmark because of the money he earned in the game.” Bill Conlin of the
Philadelphia Daily News
cracked: “Flood may become the first petitioning slave in the history of the Republic with a Swiss bank account.”

The leader of the St. Louis press corps,
Post-Dispatch
columnist Bob Broeg, epitomized the conservative breed of baseball writers. Broeg bled Cardinal red. He had begun his career working in the team's public relations department in 1939 with future general manager Bing Devine. Before the seventh game of the 1967 World Series in Boston, he had dashed off the team bus in order to buy famished Cardinals starter Bob Gibson two ham-and-egg sandwiches. And he adored Cardinals owner Gussie Busch. Broeg had bristled in 1969 when Flood demanded $100,000, and “not $99,999.” He viewed Flood's salary demands as betrayal of a team owner who had been so good to his players.

Broeg contended that Flood's lawsuit was “not a matter of principle, but of principal.” He pointed to the $3 million in damages sought by Flood's lawsuit as proof, ignoring the reality that Flood had turned down a six-figure salary with the Phillies and never expected a dime from his lawsuit. All Flood wanted to do was to stay in St. Louis and play for the Cardinals. Broeg brushed aside Flood's hometown allegiance; the St. Louis sports columnist could not get past Flood's big salary. “If the legality of the baseball reserve clause were being contested by a player less affluent than Curt Flood,” Broeg wrote, “the sympathy would be considerably greater.” He urged his readers not to “gag on” the idea that Flood and his fellow ballplayers were “the poor victims of ‘peonage and servitude.' ”

St. Louis Globe-Democrat
sports editor Bob Burnes infuriated Flood even more than Broeg. Burnes made no secret in his columns that he supported management's right to the reserve clause, but he also believed that Flood's lawsuit was “an absolutely necessary step.” On his radio show and in print, Burnes made it seem as if he knew Flood “inside and out.” In reality, however, Burnes had never even spoken to Flood. Flood had one of his friends call Burnes's radio show and ask him why Burnes had never interviewed Flood during his 12 seasons with the Cardinals. Burnes said Flood had never been available for an interview, yet continued to write and talk as if he knew him.

A few sportswriters embraced Flood's slavery argument. Red Smith wrote more supportive columns about Flood than anyone else in the business. As a columnist for the
New York Herald Tribune
, Smith captivated readers with his wit and prose. He was a favorite of Ernest Hemingway's. In his 1950 novel,
Across the River and into the Trees
, Hemingway wrote of one of his characters: “He was reading Red Smith, and he liked it very much.” Smith despised the reserve clause, blasting it as early as 1938 and referring to it in a 1957 column as “the Slave Trade.” In those days, however, Smith had not been as enlightened about racial issues. He remained silent while other white columnists advocated the integration of baseball. He later insisted on referring to Muhammad Ali as Cassius Clay in columns that Robert Lipsyte of the
New York Times
described as “borderline racist.” But in November 1968, after the death of his first wife, Smith married a younger woman with counterculture teenage children. Smith's young family helped transform him into a racial and social progressive.

The 64-year-old Smith combined his new philosophical outlook and long-standing antipathy for the reserve clause in writing about Flood. In 1970, his syndicated columns ran in many of the country's largest newspapers. He introduced readers to Judge Frank's opinion in
Gardella
, blasted his favorite punching bag, Bowie Kuhn, and articulated Flood's point of view with unmatched eloquence. “Curtis Charles Flood is a man of character and self-respect,” Smith wrote. “Being black, he is more sensitive than most white players about the institution of slavery as it exists in professional baseball.” Smith later advised the trial judge not to be fooled by the defense that “because Flood earned $90,000 a year playing center field for the St. Louis Cardinals, he could not be a slave. . . . you can't change muskrat to mink just by changing the prices.”

Los Angeles Times
syndicated sports columnist Jim Murray agreed with Smith, describing the reserve clause as “just a fancy name for slavery. The only thing it doesn't let the owners do is flog their help.” Although he often wrote with his tongue firmly in his cheek, Murray sided with Flood. “It is pretty late in history for the slave mart anyway,” Murray wrote. “If a Curt Flood wants to remain in St. Louis, baseball (and society) should let him.”

Smith and Murray represented exceptions to the rule. There were a few others: Koppett and Lipsyte of the
New York Times
, Milton Gross of the
New York Post
, Gene Ward of the
New York Daily News
, and former NFL star-turned-broadcaster Kyle Rote and, of course, Cosell on television. But the bulk of the white media blasted Flood's “well-paid slave” comment and backed the owners' contention that baseball needed the reserve system to survive. In an editorial titled “A Threat to Baseball,” the
Houston Chronicle
concluded: “We think Flood and the players association are making a mistake which can backfire against the players themselves and can seriously cripple baseball.”

Flood's most consistent supporter was the black press. Sportswriters at weekly black newspapers had led the fight to integrate Major League Baseball and played a critical role in Branch Rickey's selection of Jackie Robinson as the 20th century's first African-American player. They had also fought for the integration of spring training camps and major league hotel accommodations and had railed against the reserve clause.

Flood graced the February 15 cover of
Jet
magazine, which declared him “The Man Who Fights Power Structure of Baseball.”
Jet
's sister publication,
Ebony
, said it had been looking since 1964 for an “Abe Lincoln of Baseball” to challenge the owners' stranglehold on the players' services and had finally found one in Flood. “It will be a bit of poetic justice should it turn out that a black man finally brings freedom and democracy to baseball,”
Ebony
wrote in a March 1970 editorial. The
Pittsburgh Courier
, one of the nation's most prominent black newspapers, frequently chimed in with praise. “Even if you don't agree with Curt Flood in his fight against organized baseball concerning the reserve clause, his fortitude in fighting for what he believes to be right has to be admired,”
Courier
columnist Bill Nunn Jr. wrote. “Flood thus joins a growing list of black athletes who have placed principal [
sic
] above personal gain.” Nunn Jr. compared Flood's selflessness to that of Robinson, Ali, Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe, and Bill Russell.

One of Flood's most ardent supporters was
Baltimore Afro-American
columnist Sam Lacy. Along with the
Pittsburgh Courier
's Wendell Smith, Lacy had led the fight to integrate Major League Baseball and served as one of Jackie Robinson's traveling companions and confidants. Lacy was the social conscience of the black press. From his January 6 column “Cheers for Flood and His Compatriots” until the end of Flood's lawsuit, Lacy stood in Flood's corner. “Flood's decision last week to challenge organized baseball's reserve clause wins admiration here,” Lacy wrote on January 6. “It is high time that someone should be made to say how far baseball can go in its one-way travels.”

The most prominent black writer to come to Flood's aid was Bayard Rustin. A longtime adviser to Martin Luther King and leading organizer of the March on Washington in 1963, Rustin was relegated to the fringes of the civil rights movement because of his homosexuality, Communist ties, and steadfast belief in nonviolent social protest. He was a pacifist in a violent age, but he knew courage and possibility when he saw it. He went to Montgomery to help King with his bus boycott, and he stood up for Flood in print. “Flood stands in the tradition of such black athletes as Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali who, in addition to achieving great status within their professions, took courageous stands on issues of human rights,” Rustin wrote February 17 in the
Philadelphia Tribune
. “For these reasons, Curt Flood deserves our support and our respect.”

Dr. Harry Edwards, a black sociologist and a former member of the San Jose State basketball and track teams, had encouraged black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City to call attention to the continued struggle for racial equality in America. Edwards recognized Flood's lawsuit, like Tommie Smith's and John Carlos's black-gloved salute at the Olympics, as helping both black and white athletes regain their dignity. “Flood is fighting this master-slave relationship that exists between baseball owners and baseball players . . . ,” Edwards wrote in his 1970 book,
The Revolt of the Black Athlete
. “[I]f Flood is successful, he will have pulled off the greatest victory for justice in pro athletics since another black man turned a similar trick in the late 40s when Jackie Robinson entered professional baseball.”

Despite the support for Flood in the black press, the alphabet soup of civil rights organizations—the NAACP, SNCC, SCLC, CORE, the Urban League, and the Black Panthers—failed to make the connection between Flood's lawsuit and the freedom struggle. Many of them threw their support behind Ali and his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. Supporting Ali was understandable given that Vietnam affected the lives of thousands of black soldiers. Ali paid a heavy price. He was stripped of his heavyweight title and did not fight again competitively for 43 months. He was also convicted of evading the draft and risked going to prison. Ali's stand reflected America's growing frustration over the war and launched his career as a legendary international figure. But, as heroic as Ali was, he acted out of self-interest in not wanting to fight in an unjust war. Ali never spoke out for the rights of his fellow boxers.

Flood, by contrast, fought against the system not to enrich himself, but to benefit future generations of ballplayers. Maybe civil rights organizations were overwhelmed by the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s and therefore too busy to stand up for Flood's cause. Maybe they lacked sympathy for a small group of athletes perceived to be spoiled and overpaid, rather than subjugated and oppressed. The reserve clause was not strictly a racial issue. Flood, however, stood up for employee rights that Martin Luther King had fought for at the end of his life. King was murdered after marching with Memphis sanitation workers. King realized that the freedom struggle had grown beyond seats on buses or at lunch counters; it was about economic justice. Flood carried on King's fight for economic freedom, a fight that affected future generations of black athletes. The civil rights organizations, however, failed to see the larger implications of Flood's lawsuit.

Many fans believed what they read in the press about Flood ruining baseball. They wrote angry letters to the promanagement
Sporting News
and to daily newspapers. Most Cardinals fans shared Bob Broeg's outrage and refused to cut Flood any slack for wanting to stay in St. Louis. Soon after Flood's lawsuit became public, Ron Jacober of Channel 5 in St. Louis interviewed Flood on the street outside Flood's Central West End apartment at the Executive House. After Flood referred to himself on the air as a slave, the station received dozens of angry phone calls. Of the hundreds of letters that Flood received at home, he said, 90 percent of them were favorable. But the hate mail seemed to stick out in his mind. “Once you were compared with Willie Mays,” one fan wrote. “Now you will be compared with Benedict Arnold.”