A Well-Paid Slave (36 page)

Sportswriters who had known Flood for years could see that his heart was not in his comeback. “He is in baseball but not of it,”
Los Angeles Times
columnist Jim Murray wrote. “Curt Flood, quite clearly, would rather make $10,000 a year painting oils than $110,000 catching baseballs.”
Washington Daily News
columnist Jack Mann wrote that after the first week of spring training Flood did not try very hard to hide his unhappiness. “One gained an impression during spring training, from the sardonic words and themes Flood chose, that his displeasure was not so much with the game of baseball itself but the game of life in the society where it is played,” Mann wrote. “He had discovered Denmark, but it was as if in Denmark he had discovered Curt Flood, one he had never allowed himself to be before.”

Flood resented what had been written about him in the months leading up to his comeback. Bob Short referred to him as “tarnished goods”;
Sports Illustrated
called him a “stormy petrel.” The press and publiclumped him in with McLain, who had been suspended for investing in a gambling operation, as one of baseball's bad boys.

As Flood, McLain, and Williams posed for a national magazine cover, a photographer asked them not to smile.

“What's it gotta be serious for?” McLain asked.

“Don't you know, Denny?” Flood said. “We're supposed to be mad at the world.”

Reporters who had covered Flood in the National League could not believe the change in his attitude. Once a great talker, Flood had turned reluctant and shy. A former
Sports Illustrated
writer, Mann had known Flood since his rookie season. Twelve years later with the Senators, Flood met Mann at the hotel bar near the swimming pool and drank a 7UP. He complained that he and his teammates were not allowed to drink at the team hotel bar. When Mann's wife, Judy, approached them, Flood quickly got up and left. He did not want to be seen with a bikini-clad white woman. “[I] better get the hell out of here,” Flood said to Judy. “They'll think I'm with you, and I've got enough troubles.”

Flood could not understand the media's fascination with him or his lawsuit. As he had done during his instructional league stint, he turned down several requests for television interviews. “As long as he isn't hurting anybody else,” he asked Mann, “why can't a man do his own thing? Why do they care so much?”

Bernie Allen watched from the next locker as reporters swarmed around Flood. Allen could see the frustration mounting in Flood each day. “They all had Flood trapped,” Allen said.

Flood's reticence boiled over into surliness during another round of questions about his lawsuit at the Dodgers' spring training camp in Vero Beach. “Look!” Flood said. “I just don't wanna talk about it! A guy can bury himself with his own words. This game is hard enough, and I've been gone for over a year. I'm having enough trouble. I'm very sensitive about it. It's tough enough to hit the curveball when you can concentrate.”

Flood read books on the bus during spring training road trips. He kept his distance from most of his teammates. They liked and admired him, but also pitied him. They knew that he was not the player he had once been.

“I was expecting him to be the second coming of Lou Brock,” catcher Dick Billings said. “He looked like kind of a regular player, a rookie who wasn't quite sure of himself.”

“He was a speed guy, and he didn't have the speed anymore,” outfielder Del Unser said.

“You hear about guys who have lost a step or two; he lost three,” pitcher Dick Bosman said. “I'm not sure he hit four or five balls hard all spring.”

He hid his drinking from everyone but Maddox and a few close friends. The day before the season started, the Senators played an exhibition game in Richmond against the Atlanta Braves. Flood went out with a former teammate, Braves first baseman Orlando Cepeda. For the first time, Cepeda realized that Flood had a drinking problem, but Cepeda did not believe it was his place to say anything. No one else seemed to notice. “Hell, in those days,” Frank Howard said, “we all drank.”

Flood tried to acclimate himself to Washington's social scene. A month before spring training, Howard had taken Flood out to dinner at several of the city's best restaurants. He had also introduced Flood to Fran O'Brien's. Whereas politicians dined at Duke Zeibert's, athletes drank beers and chased women at Fran O'Brien's. Started by a former Redskins lineman, the restaurant-bar served as the unofficial clubhouse of the Redskins and Senators. Beautiful women flocked there and usually drank for free. Fran O'Brien's operated on the ground floor of a five-year-old apartment building-hotel at 18th and L streets known as the Anthony House. During the season, Howard and pitcher Casey Cox lived at the Anthony House, as did Flood.

Flood was not a regular at Fran O'Brien's. He sometimes ate lunch or dinner there. He also made an appearance there on Shelby Whitfield's weekly one-hour radio show, but he preferred the privacy of his room. “He didn't spend a lot of time downstairs,” Whitfield said. “He was upstairs screwing women most of the time. He was a good-looking guy. He could have any woman he wanted.”

Whitfield, who also conducted a weekly radio show with Williams after Short had fired him as the team's color commentator, was privy to Williams's side of the Williams-Flood relationship. Williams disapproved of Flood's lifestyle—drinking vodka martinis at noon and sleepingwith countless women. Williams also once spied Flood in the clubhouse smoking a pipe. Williams hated pipe smokers. He thought they were too laid-back and lacked the “piss and ginegar,” as he liked to say, to be great ballplayers.

With some reservations, Williams penciled Flood into the number two spot of the Senators' Opening Day lineup. Flood's hitting had started to come around at the end of spring training. He batted only .210 (17-for-81) that spring, but Williams knew that spring training statistics often meant nothing, especially for veteran players. “I have a feeling that Flood's the type of player who will do it during the season,” he said. Privately, he felt otherwise but knew that he could not keep Bob Short's $110,000 prize out of the lineup. At least not yet.

Opening Day marked the high point of Flood's comeback. After Master Sergeant Daniel L. Pitzer, a prisoner of war for four years in Vietnam, filled in for President Nixon and threw out the first ball, Bowie Kuhn and Joe Cronin watched with Bob Short from the presidential box as Flood helped the Senators defeat Vida Blue and the Oakland A's, 8-0. Flood walked twice, scored two runs, and laid down a perfect fourth-inning bunt in front of Oakland third baseman Sal Bando for a base hit. “He's the guy you really have to stop to stop the Washington ballclub,” Blue said. “He gets on base, and he scores runs.” Flood was nervous in his first game back and relieved that he had contributed, but he was realistic about his situation. “I'm just the same poor little colored boy,” he said. “Nothing's changed.”

Flood cautioned that he “was not out of the woods yet.” The next game, he singled in the first inning off Orioles pitcher Dave McNally, and reached on an error in the seventh and was caught stealing. The Senators lost to the World Champion Orioles, 3-2.

Before the game, Flood found out about another loss. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had denied his appeal; the three-judge panel had affirmed Judge Cooper's decision.

Judge Sterry R. Waterman, who had presided over the oral argument in Flood's case and had participated in the
Salerno
appeal, wrote a measured majority opinion. A Vermonter who never graduated from law school, Waterman rejected Flood's federal antitrust claims based on
Federal Baseball
and
Toolson
. He denied Flood's state antitrust claims because baseball was interstate commerce and therefore federal law preempted state law. “We readily acknowledge that plaintiff is caught in a most frustrating predicament,” Waterman wrote. Baseball was not subject to federal law because the game was not interstate commerce according to the Supreme Court in 1922; however, baseball was not subject to state law because the game was “so uniquely interstate commerce” according to the Second Circuit in 1971. “[W]e do not consider our decision to be internally inconsistent. . . ,” he wrote. “Any apparent inconsistency results not from faulty logic, but from the vagaries of fate and this court's subordinate role to the Supreme Court.” In other words, it would be up to the Supreme Court to clean up the mess it had made. Waterman's opinion was thorough yet concise, scholarly yet commonsensical, and above all fair. It was the way Flood and his lawyers had expected to lose.

One of the other two judges, Leonard P. Moore, felt more strongly about preserving baseball's legal monopoly. The former U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and a loyal Republican, Moore had won a fierce political battle to replace a judicial legend on the court of appeals, Jerome Frank. Frank—who in
Gardella
had declared
Federal Baseball
an “impotent zombi” and had written that “it is of no moment that [ballplayers] are well paid; only the totalitarian-minded will believe that high pay excuses virtual slavery”—died on January 13, 1957. He did not live to see if his prediction about the Supreme Court overruling
Federal Baseball
ever came true. “In my opinion,” Moore wrote in his concurring opinion about the
Flood
case, “there is no likelihood that such an event will occur.”

Moore tipped his hand with his opinion's opening sentence. “Base-ball for almost a century has been our country's ‘national' sport,” he wrote. The remainder of his first paragraph referred to A. G. Spalding and Abner Doubleday; baseball greats “Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, the remarkable Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth of home-run fame, Lou Gehrig, and more recently Ted Williams and Willie Mays”; and the Chicago Cubs' poetically famous double-play combination, “Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance.” This was not a judicial opinion; it was a glorified history of baseball.

After discussing the relevant precedents, Moore extolled the virtues of Justice Holmes's opinion in
Federal Baseball
:

Moore concluded that he had no “reservations or doubts as to the soundness of
Federal Baseball
and
Toolson
” and wrote that he “would limit the participation of the courts in the conduct of baseball's affairs to the throwing out by the Chief Justice (in the absence of the President) of the first ball of the baseball season.”

There was something about baseball that turned cerebral judges into pennant-waving schoolboys; that caused them to lose their judicial bearings, to twist precedents, and to jeopardize the dignity of the federal courts; and that made it nearly impossible for any litigant to defeat the baseball establishment. This case was about more than
Federal Baseball
and
Toolson
or Justice Holmes and
stare decisis
; it was about the grip of the national pastime on the minds of the men in black robes. This was what Flood was up against as his lawsuit made its way to the Supreme Court.

In Baltimore, Flood downplayed the news of the Second Circuit's decision. “We knew nothing would get resolved in the lower courts,” he said. “The Supreme Court chooses the cases it wants to hear. I just hope that ours will be one of them.” He sounded more like a lawyer and played less like a ballplayer.

After a 2-for-8 start, Flood managed only a bunt single in three home games against the Yankees. His bat had slowed so much, Detroit Tigers chief scout Rick Ferrell noted, that the Yankees were “not even bothering to curve him.” Williams, who noticed that Flood hit only five balls in the air during his first 20 at-bats, thought that he had lost the snap in his swing.

Flood's fielding also betrayed him during the first game of a doubleheader against the Yankees on April 11. In the second inning, he failed to pick up Curt Blefary's sinking line drive off Senators ace Dick Bosman. As the ball sliced to Flood's right, he dived instead of getting in front of it, missing the ball by three feet. It rolled all the way to the 410-foot sign on the RFK Stadium wall for an inside-the-park home run. The Senators lost, 1-0.

Williams did not yell at Flood; he humiliated him. At the end of the eighth inning, Flood grounded out for the fourth time that day. He trotted past first base, removed his batting helmet, and peered into the dugout for a teammate to bring him his cap, glove, and sunglasses. Williams sent Richie Scheinblum, a pinch hitter in the eighth, into right field and shifted Unser into center. He let Flood die out there on the field.

Few players noticed the tension between Williams and Flood, but the way Williams pulled Flood for a defensive replacement was hard to miss. “You can't handle a seven-time Gold Glove winner like Curt Flood like you handle a Tom McCraw,” Senators first baseman-outfielder Tom McCraw said. “You've got to give him a certain amount of respect, too.”

Williams again said all the right things to the press after the game but privately seethed about being stuck with a no-hit, no-field center fielder. “Syphilitic Jesus Christ,” Williams told Shelby Whitfield, “that guy can't play a lick.”