Curt Flood, Gratitude, and the Image of Baseball
by Gerald Early

(Reprinted with permission of the Author)

"...They go by the creed 'keep them grateful.'" College defensive back Bobby Smith on why he wasn't drafted by an NFL or AFL team in 1968 after he had become spokesman for militant African American athletes on campus [1]

1. The Trade and the Players

On October 7, 1969, St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood, along with teammates Tim McCarver, Bryon Browne, and Joe Hoerner were traded to the Philadelphia Phillies for Dick Allen, Cookie Rojas, and Jerry Johnson. It was a big trade because of the number of players involved, but there was nothing about it, on its face, that was unusual. Flood refused to submit to the trade, after 12 years of service with the Cardinals as one of their best players and 14 years of service overall in professional baseball, he helped to redefine how athletes, particularly black athletes, were seen by the public and the press in the United States. He filed suit against Major League Baseball in federal court on January 196, 1970, accusing baseball of violating the nation's antitrust laws. But the trade itself had racial and political overtones: true, the Cardinals probably wanted a power hitter for the middle of their line-up and Dick Allen, also called Richie, the major player they received from Philadelphia in the trade for Flood, was one of the best power-hitters in the game, having hit 40 homers once and over 30 homers twice during his six years with the Phillies as a regular player. And it was also probably true that the Phillies were seeking both better defense and more speed, and Flood was one of the speediest and one of the best defensive outfielders in the game, although Flood was over three years older than Allen and could not match his overall run production. Most important, however, was that both men were black and both were causing, from management's point of view, problems with their teams; teams often decide, whatever skills a player may possess, to swap problems. Indeed, it was almost a certainty that if a team wanted to trade a black "problem" player in 1969, considering the reality of quotas for black players on most professional sports teams at that time, it was going to have to take a black "problem" player in return. In other words, Allen and Flood were traded for each other, aside from their skills and the particular needs their respective teams had, because, as they were both "problem" players, they likely could not have been traded for anyone else.

The Cardinals had won back-to-back National League pennants in 1967 and 1968 but were a dispirited team in 1969, finishing fourth in the National League Eastern Division, 13 games out of first. Flood blamed the team's dismal performance on two events: a speech given to the team by owner and beer magnate August A. Busch, Jr during spring training on March 22, 1969 and trading, a few days later, Orlando Cepeda, known among his teammates as Cha-Cha, the team's most popular first-baseman to Atlanta in exchange for Joe Torre. Busch's speech was largely a diatribe in defense of baseball owners: how costly it was to field a major league team, how much work is involved in getting people to come out to the games, how much owners have done to elevate the image and status of the ballplayer:

"It used to be that some parents looked down their noses at the thought of their sons going into professional baseball.

Today, that's all changed. Making the grade in the major leagues is just about the most productive thing that could happen to a young man.

In addition to being well paid during his baseball days, there are even greater opportunities for a player to make lasting and profitable business connections mostly because they played major league baseball.

Many of you have already done that. Stan Musial, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Tim McCarver, Roger Maris, and many others are already in that category. And you know it.

True, you deserve to be well paid in accordance with your playing ability. But I must call your attention to the fact of life that you take few, if any, of the great risks involved." [2]

Busch concluded his speech by deploring all the recent talk in the off-season about the players' pension fund and the possibility of a strike, saying that such talk did not go over well with the fans. "They are the ones who make you popular. They are the ones who make your salary and pension possible." [3] In effect, Busch seemed to be berating his players for being ungrateful, a charge that was to be made in several quarters about ball-players generally during this period as they became more union-conscious and more militant in their demands with the owners, and a charge that was made against black athletes during this period as they had become more self-consciously racial and political. Busch made his speech only a few months after the 1968 Olympic Game in Mexico City where sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carols made clenched-fist "Black Power" salutes during their medal-awarding ceremony. Boxer Muhammad Ali was already famous around the world for his stance against the draft and the Vietnam War and had been banned from boxing.

Flood, a black player on a team with other star blacks-Lou Brock and Bob Gibson, both Hall of Fame players now-and a huge black Latino star, Orlando Cepeda, who was there during several of the Cardinals glory years and who is now, also, in the Hall of Fame-described his response to Busch's speech: "During 1969, I protested more vigorously than usual, and even broke into print a few times. This did not endear me to management. Especially not at $90,000 a year." He felt, by the end of the 1969 season, that he would be traded because he made himself a trouble-maker and because he made so much money. He called himself the highest-paid singles hitter in the game at that time. Flood was on a successful team that had won two World Series during his tenure, had several over-achieving black teammates. Flood had an artistic bent and ran a portrait painting and photography business as a sidelight to baseball career. He was also friendly with Johnny and Marion Jorgensen, political activists who greatly influenced Flood. Johnny sacrificed business with the defense department because he opposed the Vietnam War and his death in 1966 deeply affected Flood, inspiring him to think about the importance of social action. He [was] also something of a free spirit, visiting places like Copenhagen, and imbibing a bit in a black male bohemian lifestyle so richly satirized in Cecil Brown's brilliant 1969 comic novel, The Life and Love of Mr. Jiveass Nigger.

Dick (Richie) Allen's situation was a little different. Despite such black and Latino players as Ruven Amaro, Tony Taylor, Tony Gonzalez, Wes Covington, Ted Savage, and Johnny Briggs, Allen was the first true black superstar to play in Philadelphia. No Hall of Fame players of color were in his cohort on that team. In this sense, he operated under even more pressure and more scrutiny that Flood because Allen in Philadelphia was the MAJOR black star. Allen was Rookie of the Year in 1964, when the Phillies nearly won the National League pennant. It was the same year the city experienced a major race riot in the North Philadelphia ghetto area where Connie Mack Stadium, where the Phillies played, was located. A group of merchants sponsored a "Richie Allen Night" in September 1964, during the midst of the team' infamous collapse that cost them the pennant, an unusual honor for a rookie player, fueling the idea that Allen was being given special treatment. Despite Allen's offensive heroics, the team never won a pennant in the 1960s. Allen was a much misunderstood man; he seemed to like horses and cars better than people and many thought he squandered his enormous talent. He would sometimes disappear for several days during the season, prompting many to think him lazy and uncommitted. He got into a highly-publicized fight with white infielder Frank Thomas in 1965, where Thomas hit Allen with a bat after Allen slugged him for using a racist slur, that resulted in Thomas being waived, and Allen being booed by Philadelphia crowds. The white public and some white sports writers began to think that there were separate rules for Allen, that he was indulged not only because he was a start but because he was black. It became a popular notion that the Phillies operated under two realities: one for Allen and one for the other 24-men on the team. "On of Richie's biggest supporters," wrote black sportswriter Bill Nunn, Jr. in 1968, "is team owner Bob Carpenter. The two get along well. They seldom have serious contract difficulties. Yet, if you listen to the Philly press it comes out that Richie is teacher's pet and is coddled by the boss." [4] He was the most disliked player on the team by the Philadelphia public, particularly whites, in a city with a heavy white ethnic population. Allen nearly ended his career in August 1967 when he accidentally cut the tendons in his hand when he pushed it through his car's headlight when trying to move the vehicle after it had stalled in the rain. The hand never fully recovered but Allen played for ten more years. By 1968, because of the constant booing and bad press, Allen desperately wanted to be traded. Both Allen and Flood were very different black men with different abilities and different playing situations; Flood did not want to be traded from St. Louis and Allen wanted to get out of Philadelphia in any way he could. Yet both men were alike interesting ways-they were both heavy smokers and drinkers; neither let these habits affect their performance on the field, although Allen drank during games [5]; both were incredibly tense men, high-strung, having habits and personalities that symbolized and reflected the highly stressful world of pressurized performance of the professional athlete, probably a tad more pressurized for the black professional athlete. [6] Both, by the end of their 1960s tenures with their respective teams, were considered trouble-makers, albeit of very different sorts. On was artistic, outspoken, concerned about social justice issues; the other was moody, incommunicative, isolated, almost trapped within his own psyche. Rejecting the idea of representing anything to anyone, Allen once said, speaking about himself: "You're supposed to be an example. Why do I have to be an example for your kid? You be an example for your own kid." Both were condemned by many because they no longer seemed to appreciate what baseball had done for them. They both expressed something, one more articulately than the other, but each in his own passionate way, that troubled the public and press deeply-a profound concern about what baseball had done to them. Interestingly, at the time of the Flood controversy, Allen thought that Flood would play for the Phillies in 1970 because of the money. [8] But whether Flood decided to play was immaterial to Allen; he was never going to return to Philadelphia.

What I wish to examine in this essay is not how or why Flood's legal challenge to this trade precipitated the rush of events, if indeed it did, that produced modified free agency for baseball players in the middle-1970s with the Messersmith-McNally labor relation settlement that so changed the salary structure of the sports, by so radically changing the bargaining position of veteran players. What I am more interested in is how African Americans began to perceive sports quite differently in the 1960s, sensing in some way that it simply replicated their relatively powerless political and social position in the larger society, that participating in sports, even on a highly successful level, did not liberate either the individual athlete or his group in any significant way, that sports were, in the main, dehumanizing; and how this new perception was related to how some members of the press responded to a particular aspect of the Flood challenge, the idea that he was a slave because of the conditions under which he played with baseball' reserve clause, placing that response within the historical, cultural, and political context of the moment of the late 1960s and the growing sense among the press, the public, and the baseball owners that baseball players generally were ungrateful for their good fortune, and the same growing sense in some of the white press, white management, and among the white public that black athletes were generally ungrateful for what sports had done for African Americans. I am reminded that there was a sense in the late 1960s, a very turbulent time in American social history, among many whites that blacks were, on the whole, ungrateful for the changes that had been made in their behalf as a result of the civil rights movement. It was commonplace to hear cries among whites of "What do blacks want?" or "What more do they want?" With the civil rights agitation, came, of course, a white reaction, or as was called in the 1960s, a white backlash against further reform or, as some whites saw it, the further granting of concessions as they feared that blacks were moving from being a stigmatized caste to becoming a specially privileged caste. And, naturally, there was nostalgia among many for the old days when black knew their place. Flood exacerbated this mood among many whites when he sued baseball in 1970 but particularly because he sued not only on the grounds that baseball's reserve clause, that prevented him from contesting the trade, was a violation of federal antitrust law but also a violation of the 13th amendment that outlawed involuntary servitude. That fact that Flood was black intensified the significance of this particular attack against baseball's reserve clause; the fact that the black athlete was becoming more and more politicized in the 1960s and that some saw performing sports as a form of slavery made this attack all the more a reflection of the great racial divide that afflicted the country. "How can they hat performing sports of find it demeaning," was the response from many whites and even some blacks, "when sports have been so good to the Negro?"

2. The Slavery Metaphor and the Meaning of the African American Presence in Sports

Throughout his famous 1969 work, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, sociologist Harry Edwards made a number of references to slavery, often comparing the modern-day black athlete to a slave or the practices of modern-day, high-performance athletics to slavery. For instance, he called college recruitment, "the modern-day equivalent to the slave trade"; [9] he distinguished the white athlete from the black athlete who "are reduced to a slave-with-pay status"/ [10] he states a bit further on that "[like] the black slave who sang songs and hummed tunes as he toiled in the fields, the black professional athlete has, too, traditionally accommodated himself to the discrimination and racism he has encountered in professional sports. And, as was the case with the black slave, so successful has his masquerade been that many naïve, ignorant, or openly racist whites actually believed that the black professional athlete was in fact not humiliated or enraged by the treatment he received." [11] A little later, Edwards wrote, "Taking a page from the slave's book on survival tactics, the black pro learned to turn the other cheek when his impulse was to kill, to smile when his impulse was to curse…" [12] In keeping with the motif of the black athlete as a kind of slave, Edwards also made the point several times that black athletes were not considered human beings in the sports industry but a form of chattel. "The black athlete in professional athletics is regarded by most of his white comrades and owners as a machine-a machine to be used as white men see fit and then discarded after youth has gone or injury has reduced it to the point where cost has surpassed production. Then the 'machine' is simply traded in for a newer model…" [13] Edwards stated earlier: "Like a piece of equipment, the black athlete is used." [14] Elsewhere, he wrote this about athletes generally: "All professional athletes-black and white-are officially and formally classified as property." [15]

Ex-American League baseball star Larry Doby, who entered major league baseball only one month after Jackie Robinson in 1947, said much the same in a 1968 issue of Sports Illustrated: "Black athletes are cattle. They're raised, fed, sold, and killed…" [16] It didn't surprise people that Edwards would say the sort of things that he was saying but it surprised a good many people at the time to hear Doby say that.

Several times during his exile from boxing between 1967 and 1970, Muhammad Ali was to make the same comparison of the black athlete to the slave. In the May 1970 issue of Esquire, Ali said, "fighters are just brutes that [exist] to entertain the rich white people. Beat up on each other and break each other's noses, and bleed, and show off like two little monkeys for the crowd, killing each other for the crowd. And half the crowd is white. We just like two slaves in the ring. The master gets two of us big old black slaves and let us fight it out while they bet. 'My slave can whup your slave.' That's what I see when I see two black people fighting." (emphasis Ali) Later in the same article Ali talks about his nemesis, Joe Frazier: "All his Cloverlay, Inc. stockholders who own him are gathered around him, acting like he's their racehorse. That's just the way my white managers were: investing in me, buying and selling stock in me, getting on trains for the big fights, like they were going to some kind of slave festival, to watch their slaves perform." [17] He repeated himself nearly verbatim in an interview published a month later in The Black Scholar: "We're slaves in that ring. The maters get two of use big ones and let us fight it out while they bet. 'My slave can beat your slave.'"[18] Ali made these remarks in the same year that Flood filed suit against baseball's reserve clause. Ali certainly had not been influenced by Flood's stance against the reserve clause as inducing or creating a form of slavery in formulating his thinking. He had been thinking about boxing in this way probably since he officially became a member of the Nation of Islam in 1964 [19] Almost certainly he heard ideas of this sort as early as 1964 when he first fought Sonny Liston for the title and was good friends with Malcolm X, who held such ideas himself. The Nation of Islam disparaged sports and blacks in popular culture, generally. Flood, though, had been almost certainly influenced by Ali's stance against the Vietnam War. But the larger issue here, I think is that black athletic performance as a form of slavery, that the black athlete seen as a thing, not a person, had become a kind of zeitgeist. Blacks had offered opinions like this before: abolitionist Frederick Douglass, for instance, when he talked about sporting activities on the plantation in his autobiographies or Marxist writer Richard Wright when he covered Joe Louis's fights in the 1930s. [20] But generally blacks saw sports as an arena where they could compete with whites head-to head on the basis of something as close as humanly possible to objective merit. Indeed, the idea of sports as the great meritocracy made the ideology of sports as a component of American liberalism very appealing to many blacks. But in the 1960s this idea of blacks in sports as a subtle form of degradation of dehumanization had become near commonplace.

For instance, the comparison of the high-performance athlete to a slave was made before Flood's case. In the first of his noted five-part series on the black athlete written for Sports Illustrated in 1968, Jack Olsen quotes a Big Ten basketball coach as saying: "Things are now getting to the point where all a coach has to do is go out and pick up four or five good Negro players and let things take their natural course. In order to succeed-which means to win-coaches are being forced to resort to what I would bluntly call nothing else but the slave trade." [21] Ebony magazine's April 1964 Photo-Editorial was entitled "Needed-An Abe Lincoln of Baseball" and dealt wit the unfairness of professional baseball's reserve clause, and this is six years before Flood sues baseball: "When Abraham Lincoln inked his angular letters at the bottom of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, there were many who thought this marked the end of slavery…To all intents and purposes, it freed the slave in the United States for all times.

"But what Abe, a true lover of sports (he was a wrestler of considerable skill), didn't know was that in the United States under the guise of a great national pastime, a form of semi-slavery would grow and flourish, seemingly with the whole-hearted approval of the public and the government." The editorial continues: "If anyone would tell Willie [Mays] that he was 'slave labor,' the highest paid player in baseball (he is said to be the man earning around $110,000) would probably laugh himself silly. But what would his answer be if you asked him why he didn't check with the Yankees of the American League to see if maybe they wouldn't pay him $125,000 a year for his services?" The Ebony editorial, after explaining how the reserve clause made it impossible for Mays to negotiate with another team for a higher salary as he was the property of his club for life or to the club to which his club may choose to trade or sell him, it then discussed the fate of two white ball players: Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton who was forced to sign for less than he wanted and far less than his market value as he had won 21 games the previous year, simply because the club gave him a take-it-or-leave-it offer which the reserve clause gave them the power to do; and Chicago White Sox relief pitcher Jim Brosnan who was released because he wrote articles during the baseball season. The editorial expressed concern that the Major League clubs may have the power, through the reserve clause, to restrict players in other ways: "There might be a restriction on speaking at Urban League and NAACP rallies. Come to think of it, major league ball-players have not been very evident in the forefront of equal rights demonstrations." The article, after mentioning that major league baseball owners had exercised the right to determine who could play, not on the basis of talent but skin color, concluded: "As a general rule, we don not object to baseball's privileges. But when these privileges deprive a man of his right to write for magazines, keep a man from joining in a fight for freedom, or limit his earning ability just because he must play for a certain team, we wonder." [22] What is striking here is that a middle-of-the-road magazine, fixated with the notion of bourgeois accomplishment, that made a fetish of black material success and social status should make an issue of baseball's reserve clause and question the political commitment and economic remuneration of black baseball stars, among the most revered black figures of popular culture in the 1960s, [23] especially at a time when it was not a pressing public or pressing black issue. "Ebony's" concern about how much the reserve clause stifled the black baseball player's political expression was partly substantiated in 1968 when an anonymous black baseball star said: "Baseball players can't stick their noses out and say things about racial injustice…We can't negotiate for ourselves because of the reserve clause. There are no other leagues. Either you sign with your team or you don't play baseball." [24]

Jack Olsen's series of articles on the black athlete in America that appeared in Sport's Illustrated in the summer of 1968 made clear that black athletes, as a group, were "dissatisfied, disgruntled, and disillusioned." Tired of a quota system which kept the number of black professional and college athletes at a certain number; cynical about the phenomenon of stacking which kept blacks from playing certain "leadership" positions in certain sports; disillusioned by the experience of being scholar-athletes at white universities where few graduated and most felt alienated and isolated; disenchanted with the fact that they out to outperform whites in order to remain in their chosen sport and yet had virtually no future in the sport once their playing days were over; blacks were becoming more vocal in the expression of their feelings about the shortcomings of a sports career as an entry into mainstream America. But this unhappiness, which went to the heart of the role of the intersection of athletics and race in the affirmation of the ideology of American liberalism, was not received very well by many sports fans or sportswriters, some of whom, naturally, felt threatened by such a feeling on the part of blacks. "…the Negro athlete who has the nerve to suggest that all is not perfect," wrote Olsen in 1968, "is branded as ungrateful, a cur that bites the hand." [25] Understanding the historical moment, it is certainly no surprise that Flood, a thoughtful man, deeply proud and sensitive, with a somewhat ironical turn of mind, would make such statements in his 1971 autobiography as "[The trade] violated the logic and integrity of my existence. I was not a consignment of goods. I was a man, the rightful proprietor of my own person and my own talents;" [26] saying this right after he had talked about the proximity of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project to the old courthouse "in which Dred Scott sued for his freedom. From the shattered windows of the worst of the slums…10,000 inheritors of old Dred's disappointment are free to enjoy superb views of the arch and to draw what conclusions they will." [27] Or "'I just won't be treated as if I were an IBM card.'" [28] Or "I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes." [29] Flood knew well how inextricably bound were the idea of gratitude with the paternalistic liberalism of American sports and with the white public's idea of how a black person should feel about his success. "The proprietors and publicists of baseball could be depended on to remind me of [my advancing age and eroding skill] at every turn, meanwhile reviling me in print as a destroyer, an ingrate, a fanatic, a dupe." [30] He described a piece of hate mail he received where the writer reminded him "that if it were not for the great game of baseball I would be chopping cotton or pushing a broom. And that I was a discredit to my race." [31] Flood also talked at great length about how the professional baseball industry itself, with its shills, sportswriters, fosters the attitude of gratitude by mythologizing the game, trying it so vividly to the idea of the American national character and propagandizing it as a symbol of American democratic values, thus, masterfully and subtly turning the public against any player who does not express that he feels blessed to be playing it. As Flood wrote: "The only approved posture is one of tail-wagging thanks for the opportunities provided by the employer. Few active players feel anything like such gratitude, and none has reason to. Baseball employment is too insecure for that. Not many players deliever their ceremonial recitations [of gratitude] without a sense of embarrassment." [32] And so Flood's challenge to baseball not only cost him his career but cost him virtually everything. In 1978, six years after the Supreme Court ruled against Flood, despite saying in its ruling that no rational basis existed for baseball to have a reserve clause and to be exempted from anti-trust laws when every other sport had been subject to them, Richard Reeves went looking for Curt Flood. When he finally reached him, Flood said to him in heartbreaking desperation: "Please, please don't come out here. Don't bring it all up again. Please. Do you know what I've been through? Do you know what it means to go against the grain of the country? Your neighbors hate you. Do you know what it's like to be called the little black son of a bitch who tried to destroy baseball, the American Pastime?" [33] In retrospect, it is not surprising that Flood would take the stance he did at that particular moment when the black zeitgeist was to challenge all the assumptions about what affirmed American liberalism. It is also not surprising that because he challenged baseball, a sport so deeply connected to the country's sense of itself as it would imagine itself to be, a sport, more than any other, that fosters incredible national self-deception, that because he challenged it in the way he did, that he would be destroyed. In the end, though, many have come to see that Larry Doby was right when he said in 1968: "Baseball has done a lot for the Negro but the Negro has done more for baseball." [34]

3. The Press, Curt Flood, and the Idea of Involuntary Inservitude

In his discussion of the Flood case in is Sociology of Sports (1973), Harry Edwards quotes part of federal judge Irving Ben Cooper's decision to deny Flood suit: "The plaintiff's $90,000 a year salary does not support the spirit of his assertion that the reserve clause relegates him to a condition of involuntary servitude. For if he did, he would be the highest paid slave in history." [35] The fact that Cooper based his ruling in this way on Flood's contention that the reserve clause was a violation of the 13th Amendment's anti-involuntary servitude clause (he could have simply said the clause was not applicable because Flood was paid for his services which precluded any sense that he was an involuntary servant in the sense that the Amendment meant; it would not matter, in this understanding of the clause, how much he was being paid) and that Edwards, in his discussion of the case, chose to highlight it, reveals how much this case turned in the minds of many not on the more complex technical issues of anti-trust law but on the visceral issue of whether Flood was a slave in any sense of that term based on the amount of money he was paid when he last played baseball for the Cardinals. (Flood did return to baseball briefly in 1971 as an outfielder for the Washington Senators but after a dismal start quite baseball for good after about a month. He would have earned over $100,000 had he stayed with the team for the season or at least beyond May 15. [36]) In a sense, the Flood case was about whether paternalism, as a mythologized form of employer's benevolence and employee's gratitude, remained an essential component of the nation's understanding of liberalism, more than one hundred years after the end of slavery as a system built on that very idea as a democratic value. As so many found it difficult to side with Flood because of his salary (and his priviledged status was doubtless intensified by his race, the fact that he was a black man making a salary that few black men at the time were eligible to make), it would seem that the powerful attack made against paternalism in Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (two of Tom's three masters are benevolent, models of white paternalism, but neither protects Tom, one from selfish convenience, the other from negligence, when he is sold from family and friends) never truly seeped into the collective American consciousness. We only remember the brutal Simon Legree.

Flood had some mainstream sportswriters who supported him such as Jim Murray who in his column, "Uncle Curt's Cabin," wrote: "The 'reserve clause,' to be sure, is just a fancy name for slavery. The one thing it doesn't let the owners do is flog for help." [37] Red Smith, also sympathetic to Flood, felt that the question of whether the abolition of the reserve clause would destroy baseball, the claim made by the owners at Flood's trails, was the wrong issue entirely. "First it should be agreed that ownership of people is repugnant per se and that a business which depends for its existence upon such evil isn't necessarily worth saving." [38] When the trade was first announced, Flood said he would retire and continue to paint portraits, which he had been doing with some success for several years before the trade. Former Cardinal general manager Frank Lane said, upon hearing this: "Flood will play next year…unless he's better than Rembrant." To this, Smith responded: "It was a beautiful comment, superlatively typical of the executive mind, a pluperfect example of baseball's reaction to unrest down in the slave cabins. Baseball demands incredulously, 'You mean at these prices, they want human rights, too?" [39]

The black press, although some thought Flood made a bad decision to challenge the reserve clause, was generally sympathetic and supportive. Bill Nunn, Jr. of The Pittsburgh Courier pointed out the hypocrisy in how baseball executives viewed Flood and how the viewed pitcher Denny McClain (who won 31 games for the Detroit Tigers in 1968) who was found to have a financial interest in a bookmaking operation: "Funny thing about baseball. Most executives of the game are more peeved at Curt Flood, for his stand against the reserve clause than they are at Denny McClain for his outside dealings that caused him to be suspended from the game until July. Poor Denny, as Commissioner Bowie Kuhn stated last week, is just an ignorant $200,000 (with outside interests) a year player who was used by unscrupulous outside parties. Flood, on the other hand, has been described as an ungrateful you know what, who is trying to destroy the very foundation of the game. Now how about that for making gold old American common sense!" [40] Several in the black press praised Flood because he was fighting for a principle at great sacrifice. Bill Nunn, Jr. wrote: "That is why I believe Flood should be commended for the battle he is waging. He isn't doing it for personal gain. He's fighting for something he believes in. Few men are willing to pick up the sword of battle under such circumstances." [41] Nunn again: "Even if you don't agree with Curt Flood in his fight against organized baseball concerning the reserve clause, his fortitude in fighting for what he believes to be right has to be admired. Flood thus joins a growing list of black athletes who have placed principle above personal gain. Jackie Robinson was one of the first when he quit organized baseball rather than join a new club after being traded by the Brooklyn Dodgers. Others who come to mind, Cassius (Muhammad Ali) Clay, Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe, and Bill Russell." [42] Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin also compared Flood to other noted black athletes who stood up to the system in his column that appeared in The Philadelphia Tribune: "[Flood's suit] is also an attempt to reform an institution in which black athletes have acquired prestige and wealth and have become a source of pride for other Negroes. As such, Flood stands in the tradition of such black athletes as Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali who, in addition to achieving great status within their professions, took courageous stands on issue of human rights…" [43] Ric Roberts compared Flood to other black baseball players who rebelled in a somewhat different way, as a kind of Samson whose destruction of the temple becomes a form of self-destruction: "To all intents and purposes, Jackie Robinson's stardusted career lost its glitter, never to gleam again from that hour, between the 1954 and 1955 seasons when he put the finger on what he called the biased anti-Negro front office of the then reigning New York Yankees...

"From the moment Larry Doby dropped Yankee pitcher Al Ditmar, with a sizzling left hook in the summer of 1958, Larry's big league career was finished-forever.

"We mention Jackie and Larry, of course, because they led the black parade-from the top black administered baseball, into the majors. Baseball's punitive code struck both men down. Unless Flood is the seventh son of a seventh son, the obit index rests upon the ex-St. Louis Cardinals star." [44]

Sports editor Jess Peters, Jr. countered the argument that a man who makes $90,000 cannot be a slave in his column: "The fact that major league baseball players are fairly well paid during their big league careers is really irrelevant, anyone who follows a normal path of logic can't ignore the fact that a man who makes $20,000 a year is entitled to no less Constitutional protection than a man who makes $5,000." [45] Ebony magazine praised Flood in a photo-editorial in which he was called, in connection to the slavery claim made against the reserve clause, the Abe Lincoln of baseball. [46] "It will be a bit of poetic justice," the editorial said, "should it turn out that a black man finally brings freedom and democracy to baseball. After all, organized baseball kept black players out of the game for 75 years just because they were black."

What is clear is that the black press generally saw Flood in heroic terms, as a fighter for a principle, as someone unafraid to challenge a white-dominated system, as someone who was in the tradition of important, politically conscious black athletes. His argument about the reserve clause being a violation of the 13th Amendment fell upon sympathetic ears, although it should not be assumed that blacks, because of their common history of slavery and oppressive treatment at the hands of whites, would all be supportive of Flood's involuntary servitude claim or would see it as sensible. I encountered more than a few black men at the time of Flood's case who thought he was a fool and should have played in Philadelphia. "Where else is he going to make that kind of money? There are few places where a black man can. Besides, you can't beat the white man at a game that he has rigged in his favor. He should go out there and play and let a white boy beat the reserve clause in court of let the union do it." More than a few blacks did not find paternalism nearly as abhorrent as Flood. I heard occasional this opinion: "He should be grateful to the white man for being able to make that kind of money playing a game. They're no black people who can pay him that kind of money for doing anything, legal or illegal." But criticism of this sort was expressed by many blacks about Ali's decision not to join the Army. Yet Ali became a kind of political symbol for blacks during the 1960s and 1970s that Flood never did.

And Flood, over the years since the case was decided, has not become a politicized sports hero for a new generation of blacks in the way that Ali and Jackie Robinson have. (I recall few special tributes to him in black publications when he died in 1997 and few public expressions of sorrow by black public figures or leaders.) I think the reason for this is much related to the nature of Flood's battle. He was fighting a particular legal advantage that baseball owners had that was not explicitly racial. In other words, what was done to Flood in trading him to Philadelphia against his will, was not done to him because he was black, nor was it something that was only done to black players. And Flood did have a choice of continuing his career in Philadelphia for a higher salary than what he was being paid in St. Louis. Both Ali's and Robinson's struggles seemed more racial because their experiences seemed unique, something that could only happen to black men. Even Ali's legal battle against the draft seemed more dramatic because for the black public, more was at stake. Ali was fighting his government, not a small cartel of businessmen in a tiny industry called baseball. If Flood failed, he was out of a job; if Ali failed, he would be imprisoned, which seemed far worse and far more political to most blacks. In Robinson's case, his struggle to integrate baseball made him the emblem of his race. If Robinson failed, many blacks felt, the whole race failed (although this was not, in point of fact, strictly true). Flood's case carried not any of this resonance; if Flood failed, there was nothing much at stake for blacks at large. In this regard, despite the fact that Flood was generally more sympathetically received in the black community, he may have been more intensely admired and supported by those whites who truly found the entrenched power of baseball owners utterly destestable and who would be especially fond of a black rebel going against the system. Flood would be more the darling of the white left than he would ever be of the black civil rights establishment or of black nationalist-minded thinkers.

One of Flood's most persistent critics was St. Louis Post-Dispatch sportswriter Bob Broeg, who wrote several columns about the Flood case. Broeg was never convinced by Flood's claim that the reserve clause reduced a player to involuntary servitude, which he though went to the heart of the issue of Flood's entire case. The headlines for his columns tell the story: "$100,000 A Year-What A Way To Be Mistreated," [47] "Does 'Principle' or 'Principal' Motivate Flood?" [48] and "Sports Get Jilted When Athletes Go A-Courting?" [49] Broeg's criticism of Flood's legal claims against the reserve clause are these: First, a man who collects Flood's kind of salary cannot possibly be considered a peon or slave in any rational sense of the terms and if he is being more than fairly compensated for his services, how can he claim to be a slave? The basic issue of the unfairness of slavery, as nearly everyone understands it, is not being compensated for one's labor, to have someone unfairly take your labor from you through coercion or force. None of that, to Broeg's mind, existed in the Flood case. Broeg said that he would have been more sympathetic to a challenge of the reserve clause if it had been made by a less affluent player. [50] Second, the Cardinals had rendered much aid to Flood "above and beyond the call of contractual obligations, with financial and personal problems of which he must still be aware, yet he does not choose to mention or acknowledge." [51] This, for Broeg, is tantamount to a lack of loyalty to the organization on Flood's part. Moreover, if Broeg's contentions are true, Flood misrepresented aspects of the nature of his relationship with the organization, so the fact that he was informed about the trade with an abrupt phone call did not characterize the true nature of the organization's support for him during the years he played for it. Broeg might even have gone further with this line of reasoning and argued that Flood's initial reaction to the trade showed that he was disappointed that the organization showed so little gratitude for his services, the very thing he was accusing the organization of wanting from him in some manipulative way. Finally, Broeg argued that the reserve clause had changed over time as has the status of the ball player, who, at the time of Flood's suit, had a good pension plan, rules about how deeply his salary could be cut, and enjoyed changes in roster construction, the draft, and interleague trading that made his life a greater deal better than it had been. [52]

But Broeg's arguments are really nothing more than an elaborate rehearsal on the theme of ingratitude. The Cardinals have been good to Flood, why should he wish to be free? What Broeg does not account for in his argument is the fact that the Cardinals traded Flood and this is what Flood objects to, not how the Cardinals treated him up to the time of the trade. And if, indeed, the Cardinals do not want him, why should Flood not be able to go where he wishes to go instead of where the Cardinals want him to go? For the argument of paternalism, as it was conceived by the slave owners of the 19th century, was that the slave was taken care of, that families, contrary to abolitionists like Mrs. Stowe, were not broken up but that slave was indeed part of the larger, fictive plantation family. (Hence, the degrading honorific titles of Aunt and Uncle.) What Flood was arguing in his objection to the trade was that the Cardinals want all the binding human obligations of paternalism when they want the player and all the freedom of the commodities market when they don't. Flood's challenge, for Broeg, thwarted the logic of paternalism but paternalism has only the logic of power for the paternalist and the logic of obedience for the recipient. That Broeg added the point about favors done for Flood above and beyond the terms of his contract only means that Broeg believes that paternalism not only has a logic but also a morality or an internal set of ethical demands upon the parties to it. But, in truth, no real morality can exist in paternalism for the system only replicates and reflects how well those who control it mask their ability to do so with favors, concessions, and pet treatment of star players, how well they mask their power through, paradoxically, the whimsical exercise of it as an expression of benevolence or indulgence. The exceptionalist status granted baseball by its being allowed the reserve clause was part and parcel, a reification of the broader exceptionalist status the sport enjoyed that gave it its mythical standing in American society, because the exceptionalism of baseball mirrored and interpreted the exceptionalism of America itself, that demanded gratitude from the players for being permitted to play it in much the way the country has, at times, such as period during the Cold War, for instances, demanded gratitude from its citizens for being able to live here, as the American South, the exceptionalist region of our country, demanded gratitude from blacks in their inhuman paternalism that insisted, with Orwellian logic, that slavery and degradation was freedom and uplift. In the velvet glove of the myth of baseball as the Great American pastime, the game of heroes, the sport that symbolized our democratic impulses, was the iron fist of its absolutist corporate power, a power it enjoyed far too long in the form of the unrestrained exercise of its reserve clause.

Notes

1. Quoted in Jack Olsen, "The Black Athlete-A Shameful Story; Part IV: In the Back of the Bus," Sports Illustrated, July 22, 1968, p. 34.

2. Curt Flood, with Richard Carter, The Way It Is, (New York: Trident Press, 1971), pp.233-234. The entire text of Busch's speech makes up appendix B of Flood's autobiography, pp.228-236.

3. Curt Flood, with Richard Carter, The Way It Is, p. 235.

4. Bill Nunn, Jr., "Change of Pace," The New Pittsburgh Courier, March 22, 1969

5. For more on Allen's drinking habits, see Dick Allen and Tim Whitaker, Crash: The Life and Times of Dick Allen (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989), pp. 101-103

6. For more on Allen's tenure in Philadelphia, see Dick Allen and Tim Whitaker, Crash: The Life and Times of Dick Allen, and Richard Orodenker (editor), The Phillies Reader, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), particularly the essays comprising the section, "The Mauch Years." Gene Mauch was the manager of the Phillies for much of Allen's time with the team. The two men never got alon well.

7. Robert Lipsyte, "Waiting for Richie," New York Times, March 9, 1970

8. Stan Hochman, "Flood's Business is Booming, Urge to Play Isn't" Philadelphia Daily News, November 19, 1969

9. Harry Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, (New York: The Free Press, 1969), p.13

10. Harry Edward, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, p.24

11. Harry Edward, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, p.26

12. Harry Edward, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, p.27

13. Harry Edward, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, pp.25-26

14. Harry Edward, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, p.16

15. Harry Edward, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, p.22

16. Jack Olsen, "The Black Athlete-A Shameful Story; Part IV: In the Back of the Bus," Sports Illustrated, July 22, 1968, p.28

17. Muhammad Ali, "I'm sorry, But I'm Through Fighting Now," Esquire, May 1970, p.121

18. The Black Scholar Interviews Muhammad Ali, The Black Scholar, June 1970, p.33

19. For specifics on the Nation of Islam's view of sports, see founder Elijah Muhammad's Message to the Blackman in America, (Chicago: Muhammad's Temple No. 2, 1965), pp. 246-247. Also see the several references in this book to Muhammad Ali for Elijah Muhammad's views on boxing. I am reminded that Ali was suspended from the Nation of Islam in the late 1960s for expressing a desire to return to boxing. This is why he began to make statements deploring boxing as cruel sport of slave origin.

20. See Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, in Henry Louis Gates (ed), The Classic Slave Narratives, (New York: New American Library, 1987), p. 299 and Richard Wright, "High Tide in Harlem: Joe Louis as a Symbol of Freedom," in Gerald Early (ed), Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Content from Polemics to Pulpit, Vol. 1, (Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1992), pp. 153-157. Also seem in this regard of a skeptical view of African American and sports among leading black intellectuals, LeRoi Jones "The Dempsey-Liston Fight" in Home: Social Essays, (New York: William Morrow, 1966), pp. 155-160.

21. Jack Olsen, "The Black Athlete-A Shameful Story; Part 1: The Cruel Deception," Sports Illustrated, July 1, 1968

22. "Needed-An Abe Lincoln of Baseball," Ebony Photo-Editorial, Ebony, April 1964, p.110

23. It was noted in the black press on more than one occasion that black baseball players were among the highest paid athletes in sports. See, for instance, black sportswriter Wendell Smith's column, "Baseball Salaries Are Tops in Sports," The Pittsburgh Courier, February 10, 1962

24. Quoted in Jack Olsen, "The Black Athlete-A Shameful Story: In the Back of the Bus," Sports Illustrated, July 22, 1968, p.34. Concern about the conservatism of black baseball players was expressed in several Wendell Smith columns: "Baseball Stars Can Take Anti-Bias Tip From Cagers,": The Pittsburgh Courier, October 28, 1961; "Negro Players in the Majors Have Huge Responsibility to Meet," The Pittsburgh Courier, September 21, 1963; "Isn't it About Time for Negro Athletes to be Heard From in Civil Rights Field?" The Pittsburgh Courier, March 14, 1964

25. Jack Olsen, "The Black Athlete-A Shameful Story; Part I: The Cruel Deception," Sports Illustrated, July 1, 1968, p. 15

26. Curt Flood, with Richard Carter, The Way It Is, p.15

27. Curt Flood, with Richard Carter, The Way It Is, p.14

28. Curt Flood, with Richard Carter, The Way It Is, p.194

29. Curt Flood, with Richard Carter, The Way It Is, p.194

30. Curt Flood, with Richard Carter, The Way It Is, p. 16

31. Curt Flood, with Richard Carter, The Way It Is, p.18

32. Curt Flood, with Richard Carter, The Way It Is, p.49

33. Quoted in Richard Reeves, "The Last Angry Men," Esquire, March 1, 1978, p.42

34. Quoted in Jack Olsen, "The Black Athlete-A Shameful Story; Part IV: In the Back of the Bus," Sports Illustrated, July 22, 1968, p.39

35. Harry Edwards, Sociology of Sports, (Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1973), p. 282

36. Flood's inability to return after a year's lay-off greatly concerned sportswriter Norman Wallace of the St. Louis Argus, a black newspaper: "Curt has problems…Of some nature that is preventing him from returning to the baseball world and regaining the fame he once enjoyed as a member of the St. Luis Cardinals. I got to know Flood real good in the short time that our friendship developed. He was a tremendous out-going person, the type of guy that one enjoyed being around. Some people think Curt has a woman problem. This might be true. But it is rather difficult for me to think he has a woman problem when I know of the babes who ran after him while he was here in St. Louis. But the grand centerfielder wasn't interested. Perhaps being away from his family might have some influence on his present conduct. However, I hope that Curt will get a hold of himself, cast off whatever evils are bugging him and return to the game he loves and demands the salary his abilities merit. There is no way to tell me that Curt is finished in baseball at such a young age. The Man has too much natural talent and energy. Now he merely needs to exercise the determination to make the big top once again." The St. Louis Argus, May 7, 1971 (Ellipsis in original)

37. Jim Murray, "Uncle Curt's Cabin," The Sporting News, February 7, 1970, p. 45

38. Red Smith, "Baseball Bondage Priced at $90,000," The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 8, 1970

39. Quoted in Neal Russo, "Flood Case: Is Reserve Clause Constitutional?" St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 4, 1970

40. Bill Nunn, Jr. "Change of Pace," The Pittsburgh Courier, April 11, 1970

41. Bill Nunn, Jr. "Change of Pace," The Pittsburgh Courier, May 30, 1970

42. Bill Nunn, Jr. "Change of Pace," The Pittsburgh Courier, March 21, 1970

43. Bayard Rustin, "In Support of Curt Flood's Anti-Trust Suit Against Baseball," The Philadelphia Tribune, February 17, 1970

44. Ric Roberts, "Flood's Big Gamble, " The New Pittsburgh Courier, February 28, 1970

45. Jess Peters, Jr. "The Jess' Sports Chest," The Pittsburgh Courier, April 22, 1972

46. "Found-An 'Abe Lincoln' of Baseball," Ebony Photo-Editorial, Ebony, March 1970, p.110

47. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 14, 1970

48. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 25, 1970

49. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 6, 1970

50. "Does 'Principle' or 'Principal' Motivate Flood?" January 25, 1970. Actually, a less affluent player did challenge the reserve clause in 1952. In Toolson v. the New York Yankees, a minor leaguer sued for his freedom to sell his services outside the Yankee organization. The case reached the Supreme Court. Toolson lost. In point of fact, the legal principles involved in deciding either for or against the existence of the reserve clause have nothing to do what the plaintiff in the case makes.

51. "Sports Get Jilted When Athletes Go A-courting," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 6, 1970

52. "$100,000 A Year-What A Way to Be Mistreated," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 14, 1970