A Well-Paid Slave (38 page)

“Where's Curt?” Short asked Cox.

“I don't know,” Cox said. “We were supposed to meet at 3:30. I thought he was already at the ballpark.”

Short called the Anthony House; Flood had checked out.

He then spoke with McLain. “You've got to know where Curt is,” Short said.

McLain did not know. He lamely suggested that Flood had changed hotels.

Maddox was worried that Flood had overslept. The Senators' batting practice came and went. As the Twins began to take their batting practice,Maddox went into the clubhouse and checked Flood's locker. He thought that Flood might miss the game.

A
New York Daily News
photographer found Flood first. Wearing sunglasses, a tan leather jacket, and beige bell-bottoms, Flood had purchased a one-way first-class ticket on an 8 p.m. Pan Am flight from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Barcelona, Spain.

“I'll throw you and your blinking camera out that window,” Flood reportedly snapped at the
Daily News
photographer who tried to take his picture.

Someone at the
Daily News
tipped Short off that Flood was at JFK and had purchased a one-way ticket to Barcelona. Short hastily called a press conference and alerted the media that Flood had left the team. He was trying to catch up with Flood in New York.

At 4:55 p.m., Flood sent Short a telegram from JFK Airport:

Short posted the telegram on the clubhouse wall. Almost all of Flood's teammates and coaches were shocked. Only Maddox, McCraw, McLain, and Riddleberger were not surprised. They knew that Flood's problems went beyond baseball and that his heart was no longer in the game.

Maddox felt guilty as he started the next night in center field in Flood's place, but he was relieved to see his troubled friend go. He would not have tried to talk him into coming back. He was sorry that he never had the chance to say good-bye.

Short, however, was not giving up so easily. He first tried, unsuccessfully, to reach Arthur Goldberg. He learned the next day that Goldberg was vacationing in Hawaii. Then, between 6:15 and 6:30 on the night of Flood's departure, Short called Joe Reichler, the assistant to commissioner Bowie Kuhn. A longtime AP reporter, Reichler had printed Bill White's remarks in 1961 about the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce breakfast and the Cardinals' segregated spring training facilities. Short asked Reichler to go to Kennedy Airport to talk Flood out of leaving.

Reichler arrived at Kennedy Airport at 7:15 p.m. and found Flood sitting at an airport bar. Flood said he was in a hurry to catch an 8 p.m. flight back to Washington.

“By way of Barcelona?” Reichler asked.

Flood laughed. “It's not baseball I'm worried about but other things,” he said. “I just can't cut it anymore. The problems are mounting and I'm going crazy thinking about them.” Flood told Reichler he had been thinking for a month and a half about leaving.

For 20 minutes, Reichler tried to persuade Curt to stay. He told him that he was not a quitter. Then Reichler shifted tactics and said Flood owed it to Short to come back.

“I know I owe Bob Short a great deal,” Flood said. “He stuck his neck out for me. All right, I'll give it some thought.”

Reichler thought he had persuaded Flood to stay. He suggested that Flood take a few days off in New York City to think things over. Suddenly, Flood regained his resolve.

“No, no,” Flood said. “I'm not going to do it. I've reached the end. I'll go crazy if I don't get out. I'll go crazy, if I don't get out.”

Flood boarded Pan Am flight 154 for Barcelona and settled into seat 3-F, refusing a request to step off the plane to speak to the press before takeoff. When his flight touched down at 5:15 a.m. in Barcelona, however, Flood did not disembark. He might have slipped away three hours earlier when the plane stopped in Lisbon, but no one knew for sure where he was.

Short told the press that he hoped Flood would return. Williams publicly praised Flood as “big league all the way,” but privately, Whitfield said, “it was good riddance.”

Most of the press hammered Flood for jumping ship after just 18 games, especially after collecting close to half a season's salary from Short. Flood's lawsuit, according to
New York Post
columnist Larry Merchant, “was an act of desperation by a deeply troubled and disturbed man.”
New York Daily News
columnist Dick Young wrote that the players' continued support for Flood's lawsuit would break down along racial lines. “[I]f you have to feel sorry for someone,” Young wrote, “try the people who put their faith in him, and are left holding the bills.” “The Flood sympathizers said he had problems,”
Washington Evening Star
columnist Merrell Whittlesey wrote, “but we all have problems.”

Red Smith was one of the few writers who understood the reality of Flood's situation: “If he wins his suit, everybody else will benefit. The fetters will be eased for all other players present and future. Baseball will gain respectability as an American institution. The only one who has nothing to gain is Curtis Charles Flood.”

Lieutenant Fred Grimes, a black St. Louis police officer and friend of Flood's, implored
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
columnist Bob Broeg not to write another negative column. “He's running away from himself,” Grimes said, “so don't be hard on him. This man's personal life is as unpleasantly involved as a soap opera.”

Flood left the country for parts unknown not because he had lost a step or two, or even three, or because he no longer had any desire to play baseball, though both were true, but because leaving was the only way to preserve his sanity and his lawsuit.

Flood's “personal problems mounting every day” were mostly financial. Two days before he left, Beverly filed a lawsuit seeking back alimony and child support even though she had married a St. Louis attorney, Richard L. Johnson. The debts and legal fallout from his photography business had not gone away. Creditors had been hounding Flood from the moment the season began. They called him day and night and drove him to distraction. He avoided them by refusing to cash his last few paychecks until he left for Barcelona.

Flood had been receiving paychecks since November and had collected between $50,000 and $60,000. He could have collected the rest of his $110,000 salary, according to his oral agreement with Short, by playing until June 15. Flood, however, had too much pride merely to hang on for a paycheck. His hitting was anemic (7-for-35 with no extra-base hits), his fielding was not much better, and his manager had relegated him to the bench. He refused to embarrass himself any longer.

A week before he left, Flood's personal attorney, Allan Zerman, had advised him that filing for bankruptcy protection was his best option. Short agreed that bankruptcy was the only way to shield Flood's salary from his creditors and his ex-wife. Otherwise, Flood could not have become solvent even if his paychecks had continued for another five to ten years.

Bankruptcy, however, came with an unbearable cost: the end of his lawsuit. Had Flood declared bankruptcy, a court-appointed receiver could have settled his lawsuit for money damages and distributed them among Flood's creditors. Paul Porter had met three times with Goldberg about a possible settlement. Goldberg wanted the reserve clause modified and Flood's lost salary in 1970 and his legal fees reimbursed. There was no deal. If Flood declared bankruptcy, the decision to settle would no longer have been up to Flood, Goldberg, or the Players Association.

Flood remembered his promise to the player representatives in Puerto Rico to see his lawsuit through to the end. In the minutes from the union's July 12, 1971, executive board meeting, Miller and Moss explained to the players: “It seems clear that rather than letting down the players, as many members of the press have reported, Curt's problems were compounded because of his awareness of his responsibilities to the rest of the players.”

Flood refused to declare bankruptcy because he wanted his shot before the Supreme Court of the United States. He sacrificed everything to get it.

A
rthur Goldberg returned to Washington just a few months after Flood's sudden departure. Goldberg had lost his bid to unseat Nelson Rockefeller as governor of New York the previous November. Rockefeller's political machine had targeted white ethnic voters en route to an easy victory. It was later revealed that Rockefeller had paid a right-wing publishing house $60,000 to publish 100,000 paperback copies of an anti-Goldberg biography that was distributed as campaign literature. Goldberg also believed that the key to his campaign's success lay in a book. He forced his campaign staff to prepare a volume about his stances on the various issues. If New Yorkers would read the book, Goldberg believed, he would win the election. At first, no one would publish it. Then, after Goldberg self-published the book, no one read it. He lost by nearly 700,000 votes. Stephen Breyer, a former Goldberg law clerk and future Supreme Court justice, worked on the campaign while teaching at Harvard Law School. “I cannot be terribly sad that you did not [win],” Breyer wrote Goldberg, “for I suspect that you will be happier not being Governor.”

Goldberg was not happy at Paul, Weiss, either. On June 16, 1971, he announced that he was leaving the New York law firm after four years to open his own legal practice in Washington. Paul, Weiss support staffers disliked Goldberg so much that they removed his name from the firm's elevator directory at 345 Park Avenue the next day.

Goldberg could not wait to return to Washington, where he had enjoyed his finest hours as Kennedy's secretary of labor and second Supreme Court nominee. He had lived there for 17 years, from 1948 to 1965. His children had grown up there. His country house, a farm once owned by Chief Justice John Marshall, was 30 minutes outside the city in Marshall, Virginia. Goldberg rented office space from Caplin & Drysdale, a law firm started by former IRS commissioner Mortimer M. Caplin. He told Marvin Miller and Dick Moss that he only wanted to represent nations, but he still shared a few clients with his former Paul, Weiss partners, including the erstwhile Washington Senators outfielder living in self-imposed exile somewhere in Europe. Curt Flood's lawsuit provided Goldberg with the perfect vehicle for making a triumphant return to the nation's capital. If only he could persuade the Supreme Court to hear the case.

The Supreme Court spends a lot of time determining what cases it wants to decide. The Court operates under the Rule of Four: Four of the nine justices must agree to hear a given case. Requests typically arrive at the Court in the form of petitions for a writ of certiorari, which are known as cert petitions. The Court responds by either granting or denying cert. Most cert petitions are denied. Of the more than 3,100 cert petitions the Court received during the 1971-72 term, the Court heard oral arguments on 177 and issued 129 opinions. In most cases, the Court denies cert without any comment or indication of how the justices voted. The lower court's opinion is neither affirmed nor reversed; it is simply allowed to stand.

From the moment he agreed to take the case, Goldberg knew that the success or failure of Flood's lawsuit hinged on the Court's decision to grant or deny cert. It all came down to Flood's cert petition and the man Goldberg called on to draft it, a Paul, Weiss associate named Dan Levitt. Levitt knew what a winning cert petition looked like because he had read hundreds of them as a Supreme Court law clerk. A Pittsburgh native who had attended 30 to 40 Pirates games a year at Forbes Field, Levitt tied for sixth in the class of 1964 at Harvard Law School with Stephen Breyer. He then succeeded Breyer in 1965 as one of Goldberg's clerks. That summer, when Goldberg left for the United Nations, Levitt stayed at the Court for an additional two years as a clerk for Goldberg's replacement, Abe Fortas.

Levitt also knew how to write. Goldberg so liked the way Levitt wrote that he had Levitt draft his UN speeches and cautionary letters to President Johnson about Vietnam. As an associate at Fortas's old law firm, Arnold & Porter, Levitt wrote speeches read on the Senate floor defending Fortas's unsuccessful nomination for chief justice. After a few years at Arnold & Porter, Levitt left to join former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark at Paul, Weiss's Washington office.

Goldberg often asked Levitt to come to New York to answer mundane legal questions that any associate in the firm's New York office could have researched and answered. Goldberg implicitly trusted his former clerks. They were his boys. After he lost out as governor of New York, he gave a series of lectures at Northwestern law school on the Warren Court, each of which was written by a former clerk. He published the lectures as a 1971 book titled
Equal Justice: The Warren Era of the Supreme Court
. Levitt drafted Flood's cert petition, and Goldberg reviewed it. It was as if they were back at the Court again.

Levitt's Supreme Court expertise and writing talent notwithstanding, a successful cert petition requires a certain amount of luck. The Court generally takes cases for one or more of the following reasons: to resolve conflicting decisions about a federal question among the lower courts; to reverse a lower court opinion in conflict with a Supreme Court decision; or to address an area of federal law of great national interest. “A review on writ of certiorari,” the Court's rules stated, “is not a matter of right, but of sound judicial discretion, and will be granted only where there are special and important reasons therefor.” It is an inexact science. “Frequently,” the second Justice John M. Harlan remarked, “the question whether a case is ‘certworthy' is more a matter of ‘feel' than of precisely ascertainable rules.”