A Well-Paid Slave (31 page)

Before his testimony, Veeck waited in Cooper's courtroom to be called to the witness stand. He wore an open-neck, wide-collared shirt and no tie. He hated to wear ties on account of a skin condition. He ignored the No Smoking signs in the courtroom and lit a cigarette. Miller sat there bemused by Veeck's wearing an open-collared shirt and smoking in federal court. Goldberg, who had declined Topkis's and Iverson's repeated invitations to join them at breakfast, was horrified. “Bill,” Goldberg said, “you can't smoke in the courtroom.” Veeck pulled up his right pants leg and extinguished the cigarette in an ashtray carved into his wooden leg.

Fortunately for Veeck, Topkis conducted his direct examination. After reviewing Veeck's background, Topkis asked whether he had received any awards from the American League. “Well, I presume it was an award,” Veeck said. “It was a very nice citation or call it what you will. I have a feeling that maybe it was kind of in memoriam.” The crowd laughed. Topkis then read the entire resolution into the court record. The owners could not portray his witness as a kook.

Veeck set himself apart from Flood's other witnesses because of his quick wit and because, in Topkis's words, “he had thought about these issues more than anyone else.” Veeck opposed the complete elimination of the reserve clause, but phasing in a different form of the reserve clause “wouldn't dislocate baseball horrendously and wouldn't cause any chaotic conditions.” Veeck advocated seven-year contracts like the ones between movie stars and Hollywood studios, which called for automatic raises at designated option periods. He suggested a system similar to pro football's, in which the player played out his one-year option and joined a new team as long as the new team was willing to pay his former team mutually-agreed-upon financial compensation. He also endorsed signing players to a combined major league-minor league contract for a period of years.

Modifying the reserve clause, Veeck argued, would benefit management. The wealthiest teams, Veeck said, could not sign all the best players. He attributed the Yankees' dominance not to their wealth but to their scouts and added, “though it grieves me to say it, they had probably the best administrator in the game in a fellow by the name of George Weiss, with whom I did not see eye to eye on much of anything except that he is a very talented man.” Veeck believed winning was “not a questionof dollars” but “a question of the ability of the people operating and their willingness to work hard.”

Veeck also recognized the principles at stake: “Everyone should once in their business career have the right to determine their future for themselves.” He envisioned more equitable contractual negotiations and distribution of talent. Teams could not stockpile players if the players were free to negotiate with another organization where they could receive more playing time. He believed that teams recouped their investments in their players after five major league seasons.

Unlike most of the owners, Veeck understood why Flood felt like a slave and why the current system was bad for the game. “I think that it would certainly help the players and the game itself to no longer be one of the few places in which there is human bondage,” Veeck said. “I think it would be to the benefit of the reputation of the game of baseball. . . . I still think it is a game that deserves to be perpetuated and to restore it to the position of honor it once held, and I think this would be a step in that direction. At least it would be fair.”

Kuhn's lawyer, Victor Kramer, cross-examined Veeck. “I would say I found
Veeck As in Wreck
an extremely enjoyable book,” Kramer announced. “I recommend it to everyone within the sound of my voice.” Kramer then turned Veeck's literary genius against him. He adopted the same strategy that baseball's lawyers had used in the Milwaukee case: He read sentences from Veeck's books and asked Veeck whether he agreed or disagreed with them. A contrarian by nature, Veeck disagreed several times with statements from his own books.

Goldberg, in one of his few speaking roles since the beginning of the trial, stood up and objected to Kramer's marking selected pages from Veeck's books as exhibits. Goldberg wanted Veeck's entire books entered into the record. Goldberg had already been burned by the owners' selective quotation of Jackie Robinson's prior statements. Judge Cooper refused to admit the entirety of both books into evidence. Instead, they compromised on the admission of a complete chapter.

Despite a few early inconsistencies, Veeck was too quick for both Kramer and Judge Cooper on cross-examination. Cooper asked Veeck to stick to yes-or-no answers when asked yes-or-no questions on cross-examination. “I know that you are a colorful witness,” Cooper said, “and it is good to have a colorful witness, but would you remember that it is important to address yourself to the particular question.” “I'm sorry to have spoiled your morning,” Veeck replied.

Kramer asked Veeck a hypothetical question about an unhappy star shortstop who wanted just compensation and therefore wanted to leave the team. “I find that question impossible to answer,” Veeck said, “because I can't anticipate as an owner, when I was an owner, that I would have a shortstop who would be so unhappy with being with me.” Kramer also asked Veeck why he seemed to be so fond of the American League owners. “I think it is that I don't have to associate with them as directly,” Veeck replied. During a recess, however, he told a reporter that the owners have “intractable minds that respond only to necessity.” After an hour and a half, Veeck stepped down from the witness stand. He walked out of the courthouse and smiled for waiting photographers.

Only baseball's outsiders—black, Jewish, pitcher-turned-author, and maverick—had the guts to support Flood. Robinson, Greenberg, Brosnan, and Veeck brought an enormous amount of publicity to Flood's case. The American people—69 percent of them according to a September poll—believed that the reserve clause was “necessary.” But these four men reminded everyone why it needed to be modified.

John Gaherin briefly rebutted Miller's third and final appearance on the witness stand, and both the plaintiff and the defense rested. Lawyers from both sides asked Judge Cooper to decide the case in their favor; Cooper refused to rule. Instead, he ordered post-trial briefs due July 7 with replies due July 13. Cooper's decision was going to come in the form of a written opinion.

Just past 3:37 p.m. on June 11, Cooper concluded Flood's trial after 3 weeks, 15 trial days, 21 witnesses, 56 exhibits, and 2,078 pages of transcript. Cooper singled out each of the lead attorneys in the courtroom for praise. He reminded the audience that Hughes was the past president of the New York County Lawyers Association, a subtle reference to the only local bar organization that had refused to testify against him at his confirmation hearings. He praised Goldberg's “leadership” as “exemplary” and told Topkis “your hair-trigger alertness was remarkable and at times truly fascinating.”

“As to the case itself,” Cooper said, “it really is a cause in the truest classical sense. Interwoven with the rights of the litigants named in the caption of this matter is baseball itself. This is enough to compel us to proceed with utmost care. . . . It goes without saying that we are resolved to call them as we see them as they come across the plate.”

Cooper wrapped up his remarks with a quotation from Judge Jerome Frank, the famed liberal jurist who in the
Gardella
case had equated the reserve clause with slavery. Cooper quoted another of Frank's opinions:

“The law doesn't require a judge to anesthetize his emotional reflections. ‘Only death yields such complete dispassionateness, for dispassion signifies indifference. Much harm is done by the myth that merely by putting on a black robe and taking the oath of office as a judge a man ceases to be human and strips himself of all predilections and becomes a passionateless unthinking man.'

“That is the effect that this case has had on this judge,” Cooper said.

For three weeks, Cooper had tried hard to prove to the world that he was an erudite jurist and not a raving madman. He had no intention, however, of following Frank's thinking in
Gardella
. Cooper's true feelings about the case came out in the ways he bullied Flood, browbeat Brosnan, and bristled at Veeck, yet ingratiated himself with celebrities including Robinson, Kuhn, Rozelle, and Garagiola. Cooper was a prisoner of the game's establishment. And the two Supreme Court precedents in base-ball's favor did not give him much room to prove otherwise.

Flood was not present for Veeck's testimony or Cooper's closing remarks. Nor was he there June 8 for the cross-examination of the owners' economist, during NHL president Clarence Campbell's May 26 testimony, or for Topkis's stirring defense against the owners' motion to dismiss.

Flood most likely retreated to the Westchester County home of his literary collaborator, Richard Carter. For a month in early summer, he lived at Carter's home in Ossining, about 25 miles outside of New York City, ostensibly working on his book but mostly getting drunk. He admitted later that he spent most of that summer “bedding and boozing.” The boozing was more evident. He began each day with a vodka martini. Members of Flood's legal team noticed his drinking during the trial. It got worse at Carter's home.

Carter's 12-year-old son, John, idolized Flood. One afternoon, John invited several friends over to play some backyard baseball. Not believing their good fortune that they had a major leaguer in their midst, they invited Flood to join them. Flood was so drunk that he was in no condition to do anything. He uncorked a wild throw and heaved the ball into the woods behind the Carter home. The boys never found the ball. Flood retreated inside the house.

Flood's life was a mess. He had thrown away his baseball career for a lawsuit that he had little chance of winning. Even though Marvin Miller had warned him that it would be like this, Flood was unprepared to deal with the harsh realities of his daily life without baseball.

St. Louis—despite Flood's protestations about being traded from the Cardinals—no longer felt like home. The lawsuits against Curt Flood & Associates and Flood personally represented the least of his problems. The IRS was on his tail. Curt Flood & Associates owed the government $6,888.42 in unpaid withholding taxes. The IRS auctioned off a camera and camera stand from one of Flood's two St. Louis photo studios. The telephones had been disconnected. Flood's attorney, Allan Zerman, no longer knew if the corporation was even in business. Neither did Flood. He took no part, nor did he want any part, in his business affairs.

In early August, Marian Jorgensen forced Flood to confront the reality that his portrait and photography businesses were finished. Flood lacked the business sense, the desire, and the money to keep them afloat. The failure to file annual corporate disclosure forms with the state of Missouri by the end of 1970 spelled the official end of Curt Flood & Associates, Inc.

The demise of Flood's business interests in St. Louis also led to the end of his close friendship with Marian Jorgensen. Flood decided to clear his head by returning to Denmark. So Marian packed up the St. Louis apartment and moved back to Oakland. Marian's family money began to run out. She went to work for Oakland's welfare department and later moved in with her son about an hour outside Oakland. She never remarried and became reclusive, eventually severing her ties with Carl, Flood's sister, Barbara, and Flood himself. Without Marian, Flood had no support system, no way of coping, other than vodka.

Denmark helped Flood escape from reality. He initially checked into the same Copenhagen hotel as the Rolling Stones, but the groupies who pounded on the door of the band's room and bombarded it with phone calls reminded Flood of his hectic life at home. He checked out and rented a room that overlooked a harbor in Vedbaek, a suburb 15 miles north of Copenhagen. He grew a goatee, bought a sketch pad and a beret, and sat in Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens flirting with Danish women. He enjoyed the anonymity of a black expatriate artist much more than the constant celebrity of a major league ballplayer. “In Denmark, I can walk down the street and nobody recognizes me,” Flood said. “I can have a beer and nobody recognizes me. I feel free here.” He also was free from answering reporters' questions about his lawsuit against baseball.

On July 7, both sides filed massive post-trial briefs that set up their arguments for the inevitable appeal. The 88-page brief filed by Flood's legal team exposed inconsistencies in baseball's position. In
Federal Base-ball
and
Toolson
, baseball's lawyers had encouraged the Supreme Court to exempt the game from the federal antitrust laws because the state antitrust laws still applied. Flood's lawyers recognized that no trial court was going to reverse two Supreme Court precedents but that it might rule in Flood's favor on state law grounds. If baseball was not interstate commerce, as
Federal Baseball
had claimed, then it was intrastate commerce subject to state law. State antitrust law, therefore, might provide the federal court of appeals or the Supreme Court with another way of ruling in Flood's favor.

The opening of the owners' 133-page brief drove a wedge between Flood and the Players Association by asking: “Who is the real plaintiff in this action?” The owners' lawyers pointed out that the union was paying for the litigation and that the goals of the union (modifying the reserve clause) and of Flood (eliminating the reserve clause) were at odds. On appeal, they sought to make Flood and his enormous personal sacrifices irrelevant. They wanted to remove the human face from the lawsuit and expose it as a mere labor negotiation tactic. They, too, were looking ahead for ways that the Supreme Court could rule in their favor.

On July 13, Flood and the owners' lawyers filed short replies to each other's briefs. A month later, on August 12, Cooper issued his decision. Cooper's 47-page typewritten opinion said what both Cooper and everyone else already knew before Flood's trial: He could not overrule the Supreme Court's decision in
Toolson
upholding baseball's antitrust exemption. He rejected Flood's state and common law claims as preempted by federal law. He found it unnecessary to rule on whether federal labor law also thwarted Flood's antitrust claims. Finally, he dismissed Flood's claims of involuntary servitude because Flood “has the right to retire and to embark upon a different enterprise outside organized baseball.” After reading this section of Cooper's opinion, Red Smith wrote: “To the Four Freedoms of Franklin Roosevelt—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—Judge Cooper has added freedom to starve.”