A Well-Paid Slave (41 page)

Now that the 47-year-old Rehnquist was a nominee himself, his conservative views created problems for him. The controversy began in early December, after he had testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and just as the debates began on the Senate floor.
Newsweek
magazine published a memo that Rehnquist had written as a law clerk to Justice Jackson titled “A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases.” Rehnquist wrote: “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal' colleagues, but I think
Plessy v. Ferguson
was right and should be reaffirmed.” Rehnquist told the Senate that the memo expressed Justice Jackson's views, not his own. Rehnquist's actions belied his feeble explanation. As a lawyer in Phoenix, Arizona, he had written editorials and made public statements opposing local antidiscrimination, public-accommodations, and school-desegregation ordinances. He had been accused of intimidating minority voters during the early 1960s at local polling places. In an attempt to save his nomination, Rehnquist sent a letter to Senator James Eastland, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, disavowing the views in the memo and embracing
Brown v. Board of Education
. On December 10, the Senate voted to confirm Rehnquist, 68-26.

On January 7, Powell and Rehnquist officially joined the Court, tilting it in a decidedly conservative direction. Based on their credentials, neither of Nixon's latest nominees seemed like a potential vote in Flood's favor.

Nixon's Justice Department, one of the chief enforcers of federal antitrust law, remained conspicuously silent about Flood's lawsuit. The Justice Department frequently weighs in on issues of importance that come before the Court through friend of the court, or amicus, briefs, and even during oral argument before the justices. For example, when the Court agreed to hear William Radovich's antitrust lawsuit against the NFL in 1957, Assistant Solicitor General Philip Elman argued the government's position in favor of Radovich. Nixon's Justice Department, however, never came out pro or con on Flood.

Philip Roth imagined Flood's place in the eyes of the Nixon-led establishment in his 1971 novel,
Our Gang
, his follow-up to the bestselling novel
Portnoy's Complaint
. In
Our Gang
, a forgettable but somewhat prescient satirical novel about the Nixon administration, Roth portrayed President Trick E. Dixon and his advisers discussing their enemies list:

During the Watergate hearings two years later, Nixon's former counsel, John Dean, revealed that the administration had indeed kept an enemies list. Flood was not on it, but Fonda and Joe Namath were.

In
Our Gang
, Trick E. Dixon blames Flood for a Boy Scouts protest about a presidential speech advocating voting rights for the unborn. In a speech to the nation, Roth's Dixon explains:

Dixon declares war on Denmark and demands that the Danish government “surrender to the proper American authorities the fugitive from the Washington Senators of the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, the man who fled this country on April 27, 1971, exactly one week to the day before the uprising of the Boy Scouts in Washington— the man named Curtis Charles Flood.”

After the real Curt Flood took off for Barcelona on Pan Am flight 154, the media, Bob Short, and the U.S. government hunted him down like a fugitive. The
New York Post
called the Pan Am desk in Barcelona as soon as Flood's flight had landed. Airline officials found no record of his leaving the plane or passing through customs in Barcelona. Only 4 of the 17 first-class passengers remained on the plane during the last leg of the trip. Flood was not one of them. He had gotten off the flight in Lisbon. The
New York Post
repeatedly paged him in the Lisbon airport, but he did not answer.

In Lisbon, Flood purchased a plane ticket to Madrid. On April 28, he registered under Curtis C. Flood in a small Madrid hotel. An enterprising UPI reporter got him on the phone. “I'm sorry, but I cannot make any comment to newsmen,” Flood said. Early the next morning, he checked out of the hotel, once again refused to answer the reporter's questions, and jumped into a cab to Madrid's Barajas Airport.

The Senators gave Flood a week to find himself before they tried to find him. Short sought the government's help. On May 6, the State Department sent out a telegram regarding the “Welfare/Whereabouts Curt Flood” to its embassies in Lisbon, Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Madrid. The telegram said:

The last line of the memo listed Flood's passport number and date and place of birth.

Actor Yul Brynner, according to gossip columnist Leonard Lyons, called Flood in Madrid to offer him a role in the Spanish Western
Cat-low
. “No thanks,” Flood reportedly told Brynner. “That cowboy movie stuff is for Jim Brown.”

Flood pulled a neat disappearing act. A month after he had left the Senators, he was no longer in Madrid. No one knew exactly where he was. Short claimed to know the general area where he was hiding but was unwilling to send a man over there to find him. The promanagement
Sporting News
floated a false rumor that Flood was in Mexico. The Mexico rumor persisted for at least another month.

Flood eventually surfaced on Majorca, an island off the eastern coast of Spain. On May 1, he checked into the $25-a-night Hotel Melia. He did not return two messages that the U.S. embassy had left for him. A few months later, he returned to Denmark. From July 25 to August 1, he stayed at the Sheraton Hotel in Copenhagen. Journalists vacationing in Europe kept searching for him. Jimmie Angelopolous of the
Indianapolis News
contacted the State Department, which had tracked Flood to Majorca in May and Copenhagen in July. Neither Angelopolous nor the State Department could find Flood in Spain in August.

Flood made his permanent home on Majorca. Located between Ibiza and Minorca in the Spanish-owned Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Majorca had been the home to writers (author and diarist Anaïs Nin, British poet Robert Graves), artists (Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miró), and musicians (Frédéric Chopin and his lover, novelist George Sand, spent their famous “winter of discontent” there). Beginning in the 1950s, the island became a popular tourist attraction and refuge for Hollywood celebrities. Flood ended up in Majorca somewhat by accident. His friends in Denmark told him about Las Palmas in the Spanish-owned Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco. His travel agent booked him to Palma, the largest city on Majorca, instead. Flood lived in San Augustin, a small coastal town about 10 minutes southwest of Palma.

During the 20th century, racism drove many of black America's brightest stars abroad. They fled unjust criminal convictions (heavyweight champion Jack Johnson) and political persecution (Communist actor-singer Paul Robeson). Many of them sought artistic freedom (writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin, singers Josephine Baker and Nina Simone, and tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon).

Flood continued the tradition of black expatriates living in Europe, but he left America to escape his profession, not to pursue it. Europeans did not care about baseball. Flood once told a Spanish woman that he had been a baseball player. “Yes,” she said, “but what do you do for a living?” Majorca was the perfect place for him. He did not want to deal with his personal and financial problems, to be recognized as a ballplayer, or to answer questions about his lawsuit. He was hiding from all the demons that had haunted him in Washington. “It was kind of fitting he was living on some island because he was on one anyway,” his former teammate and sometimes roommate, Elliott Maddox, said. “It was virtually impossible to get through.”

Rumors abounded in May that Flood might be returning to the Senators. They lacked any basis in fact. After a few weeks in Spain, Flood knew he had made the right decision. He had felt so much pressure during his two months with the Senators. He realized that physically he could not compete anymore. And, since his paychecks would have gone to his creditors, there was no use trying.

Flood, however, did not sever all his ties to baseball. From Majorca, he called Marvin Miller. He did not explain why he had left the Senators other than to say “the situation had deteriorated.” Miller promised to keep him updated about the case. Indeed, the day the Supreme Court granted cert, Miller called Flood with the news. Flood asked Miller what it meant. Ever the pessimist, Miller tried not to give Flood false hope. “I know that it takes just four votes to accept the case, but you shouldn't get too high on this because that doesn't necessarily mean you've got four votes in your pocket,” Miller told him. “It just means that it's a case that ought to be heard.”

Flood's other legal problems played out at home. On July 29, a federal judge in St. Louis ordered Flood and his business partner, Bill Jones, to pay $27,497 owed to a suburban St. Louis couple for buying their photography shop. Flood escaped liability in another federal lawsuit. On September 1, another federal judge in St. Louis ordered Flood's business partners to repay a North Carolina-based printing company $69,528. Flood was ruled to have invested $20,000 in the photography business and pledged to invest more, but he did not commit fraud against the printing company. He still remained on the hook for half of the first judgment and for the rest of the photography business's unpaid withholding taxes to the IRS.

Flood desperately needed money. Repaying his creditors was the least of his concerns; in Majorca he struggled to live, having apparently spent the last of his Senators paychecks. A few weeks before the Court granted cert in his case, Flood wrote Miller asking for an early severance payment of $10,000. Under the rules of the major league pension plan then negotiated by Miller and the union, a player was allowed to withdraw $1,000 for every year of major league service up to $10,000. Players could withdraw the money early without reducing the rate of their pension benefits as long as the money was repaid with interest before they began collecting their pensions. The purpose of the lump-sum severance payment was to prevent players from ending up destitute before their pensions kicked in—particularly for players whose careers ended suddenly from injuries.

At the time of Flood's request, Miller was out of town. On October 18, Dick Moss wrote Flood and explained that he was not eligible to receive the money until a year after his April 27, 1971, retirement. “I'm sorry that we cannot respond more favorably to you [
sic
] inquiry,” Moss wrote. “I do understand the urgency of your request, but unfortunately there is nothing we can do to advance the time of your entitlement.” The only way around the rules of the pension plan would have been to ask the players' pension board to vote to change the eligibility requirements. That never happened.

Despite everything he had done for his fellow players, Flood looked elsewhere for money. He could not wait six months for his pension. He wrote a letter to Arthur Goldberg asking for a $10,000 loan that he promised to repay with interest when his severance check arrived April 28. Flood mailed his letter to Goldberg's old suite at the Pierre Hotel. Goldberg did not receive it in Washington until December 21.

Flood's typewritten letter said, in part: