Curt Flood: An Extraordinary Man of Principle and Conviction

One of the signature chapters in the Curt Flood story -- the story of his historic fight against baseball's reserve clause, and the story of his life overall -- played out in Puerto Rico in December 1969, some two months after the trade from St. Louis to Philadelphia that had, seemingly innocently, started the wheels of change in motion. There, he confronted one of the most significant questions about why he was about to create such a storm for himself, his sport, the industry overall and all of American society.

Puerto Rico was the site of a meeting of fellow major-league ballplayers who Flood would try to convince of the motives, sincerity and long-term benefits of his decision to sue baseball. And it was at that meeting that Tom Haller, then a three-time All-Star catcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers and later a big-league coach and general manager, asked him (according to Flood in his 1971 autobiography, The Way It Is), whether he was doing this "simply because you're black and you feel that baseball has been discriminatory?"

Specifically, Flood's answer was no, that this issue affected the freedom of all players regardless of race. But no one who had lived through the 1960s -- in baseball, in sports, in a country that was still an active battleground in the civil rights wars of that decade -- could pretend that Flood's experiences had not shaped the man who had made that statement. The concepts of freedom for professional athletes and for blacks in that and every other aspect of society were not strictly one and the same, but they walked together stride for stride.

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Thus, even though his colleagues soon agreed that his fight was a universal one, few inside or outside of baseball could have missed the analogy Flood made in his subsequent letter to then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn asking to be declared a free agent: "I do not believe I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes."

"What really set people off was when he called what baseball was doing indentured servitude," said Houston Astros scout Hank Allen, a major-league outfielder for seven seasons in the late 1960s and early '70s -- and the older brother of one of the key figures in the Flood trade, Dick Allen. "Any time you invoke slavery, you know how people will react."

At that moment in sports and society, it was understandable for players like Haller to reasonably wonder if it was, as he was later quoted, "a black thing'' -- whether this revolution was about baseball or race. The year before, Flood's own Cardinals team had played in the World Series against the Tigers, whose presence was credited for at least slightly cooling the long-standing racial tensions in Detroit, which had boiled over into violence after the April assassination of Martin Luther King. In October of 1968, almost a year to the day before the trade, Tommie Smith and John Carlos had raised their fists in protests on the medal stand during the national anthem at the Olympic Games.

Muhammad Ali -- still called "Cassius Clay" on first reference by most newspaper and broadcast reporters -- was still in exile as heavyweight boxing champion, after his 1967 conviction on draft-evasion charges; his successful appeal was still two years away. Colleges throughout the South were still crawling towards integrating their football and basketball teams, while at schools outside that region, black athletes were rebelling against authority being misused by coaches and administrators, sometimes leading to boycotts and walkouts.

In light of all of this, then, it was a wonder that neither Flood nor the other black players in baseball -- at this particular meeting, all but two participants were white -- chose not to make race part of the framework of their argument. The biggest reason: he didn't have to. The idea of players being, as Allen put it, "indebted" to their teams, with no say in their fates, made the phrase appropriate.

The season after which Flood was traded happened to be the same season chronicled by Jim Bouton in Ball Four, and amidst the often-repeated tales of the carousing of Mickey Mantle and the other players and the extreme pettiness of the coaches, were endless examples of the complete control franchises had over their "property.''

"Ball Four was probably the first book that told how difficult it was to make a living in baseball," Bouton said. "It was full of stories about players just getting treated like dirt by owners and general managers, over contracts and being traded and being brought up and down from the minors. They fought the owners all the time, and they always lost.

In a later edition of the book, Bouton recalled a players' meeting when he was a Yankee in the early 1960s which the next request for a minimum salary raise -- from $7,000 -- was discussed, and while others recommended $10,000 at the most, he suggested $25,000. "And everybody just laughed," he wrote. More than 40 years later, Bouton said, "Players had no idea what they were worth. I had no idea what they were worth. Even the most visionary player would never believe they were worth a million dollars, or even $100,000."

In 1969 Flood had made $90,000, one of the higher salaries in the game; the minimum that season was $10,000, the average just under $25,000. He was just shy of his 32nd birthday and had played 12 seasons, been in three World Series and three All-Star Games, won seven Gold Gloves and had a .293 career average and a sterling reputation as a defensive centerfielder, clutch hitter and team leader.

Naturally, none of that had shielded him from the injustices and indignities blacks everywhere suffered at the time. Cardinals teammate Tim McCarver -- traded with him to the Phillies in that deal -- said that in every category except his arm, Flood played the position "as well as Willie Mays." As it turned out, Flood, like Mays, had faced an infuriating resistance to his buying a home in the San Francisco Bay Area during that time. In an incident that received national exposure, in 1964 Flood's family was barred from entering a home he had bought in an affluent white suburb of Oakland by the seller, who changed the locks and later barricaded himself inside with a shotgun.

"I remember seeing the tapes of it later, him on camera saying, 'If I can afford this, why can't I live here?''' recalled his daughter Shelly, who was three years old at the time. "That's one thing about him, his diplomacy was so innate. He was never rude or belligerent; he always had the right phrase to respond, no matter what the situation."


It came in handy throughout his rise through the minors in the late 1950s, as part of the second wave of baseball integration -- coming through the system in the South, as Jackie Robinson had not. (During one season, in High Point, N.C., he chose uniform number 42, Robinson's number, in his honor and as motivation.) In the majors, Flood was part of the group of prominent black players on the team that had to deal with the overtly racist remarks of one manager, Solly Hemus, and with the segregated conditions at the Cardinals' spring-training home in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Even as he later made clear that being black was not a factor in his challenge to the reserve clause ("from what I knew at the time, he felt that it was just wrong to not have any say, after all he'd given to the Cardinals," Hank Allen said), it is impossible to ignore that as a factor in what made Flood the man he was as he stood before those players in Puerto Rico.

Allen, for example, recalled that one year in spring training in Florida, he and his black teammates were put up in a funeral home. Dick, his brother (then known as Richie), declined the sleeping-with-coffins option and was left to live in an abandoned house next door, with no electricity or heat. During a subsequent season, Hank and his family were detained at the side of a road in the middle of the night in Chattanooga by a policeman who did not believe that the local team had integrated, while in Little Rock, Ark., a terrified Dick had refused to disembark a team plane because it had been greeted with residents holding signs such as "Don't Niggerize Our Team."

"Without a mother and father and older brother who were able to talk us through and be strong for us,'' Allen said, "we might have been done in by that."

Years later, while only Flood fought the trade, Dick Allen was relieved, because of his conflicts with management, teammates, media and fans in Philadelphia – many of which he perceived as racially-based, others which unquestionably were. The city's and team's reputation had been forged by, among other factors, their rabid resistance to Robinson's presence years earlier and having been the last National League franchise to integrate. It has never been proven conclusively that Flood ultimately wanted to avoid playing in that atmosphere at all costs; on the other hand, Flood had once called Philadelphia the country's "most northernmost southern city."

Again, though, black players at that time could not afford to be selective about their baseball homes -- as no player in the game was allowed to be. In many cases, the same thing that kept black players of that era from cracking under that pressure is the same thing that kept them separate from the struggles in other segments of society -- and all ballplayers away from that same outside tumult: their own fight for survival in a historically unforgiving game.

Thus, players of all races generally fell into two categories on the subject of Flood's challenge, astonishment and indifference. "It surprised everybody that Curt would want to do that. He was making a lot of money, more than most," McCarver said. "But he was a man of principle, and more than anything, that's what that stance proved, that principle was ahead of money to him."

Among the other reasons Flood stood out at the time, McCarver added, were his outside interests, his character and his vision for his post-career life. "Curt was a very intelligent guy, and that was a trait a lot of players on that team had," he said, naming Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Mike Shannon and Roger Maris among them.

Allen remembered the paintings Flood did: "I've seen some of his artwork. Just a very talented individual in many ways. It wasn't something you saw in guys too often back then."

Still, the fact that he was well-paid made the quest seem pointless in many minds. Others, who did believe in his case and hoped he'd win, couldn't devote any time or effort to following it closely, and certainly not to supporting it openly.

By the 1970 season, when the suit was filed, the daily task of staying in the big leagues had overtaken everything once again. "We were concerned with that night's ballgame," Bouton said. "We said, 'Good luck, lots of luck, who's pitching tonight?' The players figured that nothing would change anyway. The owners had won every round, and they'd win that one, too. If anything, it confirmed the futility of their positions."

As for his own recollections of the time, Bouton (who said he never had the chance to meet Flood) was preoccupied with the publication of Ball Four, to booming sales but thunderous condemnation from the establishment: "I was dealing with my own crisis."

The stir that Flood had created was much further below the surface even then. But the players he spoke to in Puerto Rico in late 1969 had already sent up signals that America, its pastime and its citizens of all colors had reached a crossroads. Flood was going to take them down the next path they would travel, and he would be packing his entire history with him.