by Brad Snyder
Flood’s most consistent supporter was the black press. Sportswriters at weekly black newspapers had led the fight to integrate Major League Baseball and played a critical role in Branch Rickey’s selection of Jackie Robinson as the 20th century’s first African-American player. They had also fought for the integration of spring training camps and major league hotel accommodations and had railed against the reserve clause.
Flood graced the February 15 cover of Jet magazine, which declared him “The Man Who Fights Power Structure of Baseball.” Jet ’s sister publication, Ebony, said it had been looking since 1964 for an “Abe Lincoln of Baseball” to challenge the owners’ stranglehold on the players’ services and had finally found one in Flood. “It will be a bit of poetic justice should it turn out that a black man finally brings freedom and democracy to baseball,” Ebony wrote in a March 1970 editorial. The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most prominent black newspapers, frequently chimed in with praise. “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,” Courier columnist Bill Nunn Jr. wrote. “Flood thus joins a growing list of black athletes who have placed principal [sic] above personal gain.” Nunn Jr. compared Flood’s selflessness to that of Robinson, Ali, Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe, and Bill Russell.
One of Flood’s most ardent supporters was Baltimore Afro-American columnist Sam Lacy. Along with the Pittsburgh Courier’s Wendell Smith, Lacy had led the fight to integrate Major League Baseball and served as one of Jackie Robinson’s traveling companions and confidants. Lacy was the social conscience of the black press. From his January 6 column “Cheers for Flood and His Compatriots” until the end of Flood’s lawsuit, Lacy stood in Flood’s corner. “Flood’s decision last week to challenge organized baseball’s reserve clause wins admiration here,” Lacy wrote on January 6. “It is high time that someone should be made to say how far baseball can go in its one-way travels.”
The most prominent black writer to come to Flood’s aid was Bayard Rustin. A longtime adviser to Martin Luther King and leading organizer of the March on Washington in 1963, Rustin was relegated to the fringes of the civil rights movement because of his homosexuality, Communist ties, and steadfast belief in nonviolent social protest. He was a pacifist in a violent age, but he knew courage and possibility when he saw it. He went to Montgomery to help King with his bus boycott, and he stood up for Flood in print. “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 issues of human rights,” Rustin wrote February 17 in the Philadelphia Tribune. “For these reasons, Curt Flood deserves our support and our respect.”
Dr. Harry Edwards, a black sociologist and a former member of the San Jose State basketball and track teams, had encouraged black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City to call attention to the continued struggle for racial equality in America. Edwards recognized Flood’s lawsuit, like Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’s black-gloved salute at the Olympics, as helping both black and white athletes regain their dignity. “Flood is fighting this master-slave relationship that exists between baseball owners and baseball players . . . ,” Edwards wrote in his 1970 book, The Revolt of the Black Athlete. “[I]f Flood is successful, he will have pulled off the greatest victory for justice in pro athletics since another black man turned a similar trick in the late 40s when Jackie Robinson entered professional baseball.”
Despite the support for Flood in the black press, the alphabet soup of civil rights organizations—the NAACP, SNCC, SCLC, CORE, the Urban League, and the Black Panthers—failed to make the connection between Flood’s lawsuit and the freedom struggle. Many of them threw their support behind Ali and his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. Supporting Ali was understandable given that Vietnam affected the lives of thousands of black soldiers. Ali paid a heavy price. He was stripped of his heavyweight title and did not fight again competitively for 43 months. He was also convicted of evading the draft and risked going to prison. Ali’s stand reflected America’s growing frustration over the war and launched his career as a legendary international figure. But, as heroic as Ali was, he acted out of self-interest in not wanting to fight in an unjust war. Ali never spoke out for the rights of his fellow boxers.
Flood, by contrast, fought against the system not to enrich himself, but to benefit future generations of ballplayers. Maybe civil rights organizations were overwhelmed by the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s and therefore too busy to stand up for Flood’s cause. Maybe they lacked sympathy for a small group of athletes perceived to be spoiled and overpaid, rather than subjugated and oppressed. The reserve clause was not strictly a racial issue. Flood, however, stood up for employee rights that Martin Luther King had fought for at the end of his life. King was murdered after marching with Memphis sanitation workers. King realized that the freedom struggle had grown beyond seats on buses or at lunch counters; it was about economic justice. Flood carried on King’s fight for economic freedom, a fight that affected future generations of black athletes. The civil rights organizations, however, failed to see the larger implications of Flood’s lawsuit.
Many fans believed what they read in the press about Flood ruining baseball. They wrote angry letters to the promanagement Sporting News and to daily newspapers. Most Cardinals fans shared Bob Broeg’s outrage and refused to cut Flood any slack for wanting to stay in St. Louis. Soon after Flood’s lawsuit became public, Ron Jacober of Channel 5 in St. Louis interviewed Flood on the street outside Flood’s Central West End apartment at the Executive House. After Flood referred to himself on the air as a slave, the station received dozens of angry phone calls. Of the hundreds of letters that Flood received at home, he said, 90 percent of them were favorable. But the hate mail seemed to stick out in his mind. “Once you were compared with Willie Mays,” one fan wrote. “Now you will be compared with Benedict Arnold.”
Flood said at the end of January that the pressure “is making it a little difficult to sleep at night. I’ll toss and turn and try to evaluate what I’ve done. In my mind I’m doing the right thing.” He acknowledged having second thoughts. He wanted to play but vowed never to sign another contract with the reserve clause. There was no chance that he was turning back. “I’m not trying to create chaos or end baseball,” he told Jack Herman of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “I just want to stand up like a human being. I want something we can live with.”
The media reaction and the hate mail from the fans did not hurt Flood nearly as much as the criticism from his fellow players. “If I had 600 players behind me,” he said later, “there would be no reserve clause.”
Boston Red Sox outfielder Carl Yastrzemski led the parade of players who spoke out against Flood’s lawsuit. One of the game’s highest-paid players, Yastrzemski was fiercely loyal to Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey, who paid him $130,000 a year. Yastrzemski charged that all the players, not just the player representatives, should have voted whether to pay Flood’s legal fees. “That backing should never have been given to Flood,” Yastrzemski said. “Personally I am against what Curt Flood is trying to do because it would ruin the game.” On January 15, Yastrzemski wrote Marvin Miller a two-page letter urging that all major league players be polled about Flood’s lawsuit.
Rather than try to stifle dissent within the union, Miller used it as an opportunity to educate the players. On January 22, he sent Yastrzemski’s letter to all the Players Association’s members accompanied by his own seven-page reply. In his reply, Miller explained that all the players had been questioned about their views on the reserve clause before the current labor negotiations. He also said that the union had only two choices regarding Flood’s lawsuit: whether to support him or not. Either way, Flood was going to file a lawsuit that affected the entire union. It was in the union’s interest to facilitate the best possible outcome. In exchan
ge for the union’s financial backing, Flood agreed to allow the union to select his counsel and to drop his lawsuit if the union negotiated reserve clause modifications.
Miller wrote that before the 1969 season Yastrzemski had tried to undermine the union’s pension negotiations, and that Yastrzemski’s friend, American League president and former Red Sox general manager Joe Cronin, had tried to force a playerwide vote on an inferior pension proposal in an effort to divide the union. Mets player representative Ed Kranepool was less tactful in calling Yastrzemski Cronin’s “yo-yo.” Kranepool and other players correctly observed that Yastrzemski was trying to prevent the union from operating as a representative democracy. “If Yastrzemski doesn’t like an association supported by 700 players,” Kranepool said, “perhaps he should start his own.”
Yastrzemski, however, was not alone among superstar players in opposing the union’s decision to back Flood. Many of the game’s top-salaried players had been brainwashed by their owners that Flood’s lawsuit would ruin the game. Harmon Killebrew, who was in line to become the Minnesota Twins’ first $100,000 ballplayer, also called for a playerwide poll. “As far as I’m concerned, the reserve clause is something all of us knew about when we came into baseball . . . ,” he said. “Without control, there would be no baseball.” Washington Senators slugger Frank Howard agreed with Killebrew: “I can’t speak for Curt Flood, but if he believes in what he’s doing, God bless him. I don’t agree with him. The reserve clause is the foundation of the game. It protects the clubs’ investment in a player.” A few months later, Howard signed with the Senators for a team-high $125,000.
Part of the negative reaction among baseball’s star players stemmed not from self-interest but from ignorance. Howard said he did not agree with Flood’s lawsuit, yet in the next breath volunteered that the reserve clause should be modified. Years later, Howard admitted he had no understanding of the reserve clause or the issues behind Flood’s lawsuit. Yastrzemski also confessed that his loyalty to Tom Yawkey clouded his judgment about the reserve clause. “We played for a great owner,” Yastrzemski said. “The players on the Red Sox didn’t understand the conditions on the other teams.”
Many retired superstars from the 1950s and early 1960s opposed Flood’s lawsuit. Ted Williams described Flood as “ill-advised” and “wrong.” Joe DiMaggio, who had endured the wrath of the media and the fans for holding out several times during his career, said the reserve clause did not hurt the players. Only the highest-paid players, he said, would benefit from a change. Ralph Kiner, who had helped form an earlier version of the Players Association in 1954, echoed the management line that any change to the reserve clause would cause the weaker teams to go out of business. Robin Roberts, who along with Jim Bunning had been instrumental in hiring Miller, said: “Curt’s doing the wrong thing.” Bob Feller, who had feuded with Jackie Robinson about the lack of minority hiring in baseball management during baseball’s 1969 centennial celebration, took aim at Flood: “Flood is just a crusader. Baseball hasn’t hurt him. He’s selling his paintings for $1,000 each, so what does he care.” Mets manager Gil Hodges could not look past Flood’s salary: “It’s hard for me to sympathize with any individual making $90,000 a year. That’s a lot more than I make, and I can’t understand why he’s doing what he is. My own personal opinion is that the reserve clause is good the way it is. It’s been good to me for over 20 years in baseball.” Former players usually resist changes to the system because they tend to think that the game was better in their day and that modern players are spoiled and lazy.
But even Flood’s contemporaries, many of whom could have benefited from a loosening of the reserve clause, reacted to his lawsuit with either skepticism or contempt. San Francisco Giants pitcher Gaylord Perry blasted the player representatives, even though one of them was his brother, Jim: “How these two-dozen player reps ever voted unanimously in support of something the majority of the players weren’t even asked about is a mystery.” Chicago Cubs third baseman Ron Santo said Flood’s lawsuit reminded him of another “Ken Harrelson deal.” Even Harrelson, who had landed a $75,000 salary and $25,000 for promotional work in 1969 by threatening to retire after being traded to the Indians, said Flood was “making a mistake. . . . This is biting the hand that feeds you.”
Black superstars also refused to come to Flood’s aid. Many of them felt the same loyalty to their owners as the white superstars and bought into the current system. A climate of fear also prevented minority ballplayers from speaking out. They had fought hard for their places in the game. Many of them, like Flood, had come up through the southern minor leagues. Some had even spent time in the Negro leagues. They did not want their professional success ripped away from them because of newspaper comments supporting baseball’s number one persona non grata.
Hank Aaron sided with the Yastrzemski-Killebrew position that players were “left out in the cold” and “should have been consulted.” Soon after those comments, he signed a two-year, $250,000 contract. Aaron had not yet endured the torrent of racist hate mail and abuse as he chased Babe Ruth’s career home run record in 1974. After that record-breaking season, he was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers. He later went to work in the Atlanta Braves’ front office.
Willie Mays refused to take a position. “If Curt is doing something he thinks is right, I think he should do it,” Mays said. “I haven’t really studied it too much. I don’t know all the arguments that are going on and I’m not going to get involved.” Two years earlier, Jackie Robinson had blasted Mays for not speaking out about racial issues and called him a “do-nothing Negro.” With his salary approaching $150,000, Mays was the highest-paid player in baseball. Two years later, he was traded to the Mets.
Ernie Banks waffled: “I can understand his side. . . . I certainly want to see him back.” The Chicago Tribune, however, reported: “Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, and Henry Aaron have indicated—ever so lightly—that they are not in complete sympathy with an attempt to destroy the reserve clause.”
Cubs outfielder Billy Williams also straddled the fence. “If he wins the case, he made the right decision. If he doesn’t, it was wrong,” Williams said. “I hope they don’t think our association is going to pay his salary if he doesn’t play, tho[ugh].”
Frank Robinson, Jackie Robinson believed, was too fixated on becoming baseball’s first black manager to speak out on racial and social issues. “To me, your personal desire hurts the cause of your people,” Jackie wrote Frank in May 1970, “but if that’s your bag, so be it.” Frank, like most black players, remained silent about his former high school teammate’s lawsuit.
It is not surprising that these five black future Hall of Famers failed to support Flood. At the time of Flood’s lawsuit, none of them spoke out on racial or social issues. All of them, except Frank Robinson, had grown up in the South. Aaron, Banks, and Mays had played in the Negro leagues. Williams and Frank Robinson had started in the minors straight out of high school. They succeeded by obeying the system. They were not boat rockers. They feared retribution from the owners and did not want to jeopardize their salaries, their playing careers, and their futures in the game.
Athletes in other sports, however, spoke out in favor of Flood’s lawsuit. National Basketball Association (NBA) contracts included the same renewal provision as in baseball, but basketball players could jump to the rival American Basketball Association. Oscar Robertson, a black superstar guard, had spoken out about the reserve clause as early as 1966 and had negotiated a contract with the NBA’s Cincinnati Royals allowing him to veto any trade. In late January 1970, he rejected a trade to the Baltimore Bullets before accepting a trade to the Milwaukee Bucks a few months later. The president of the NBA Players Association, Robertson understood the ramifications of Flood’s fight against the reserve clause. “We hope he makes it illegal,” he said. “I’m certainly behind him.” Chicago Bulls forward Chet Walker agreed: “It’s going to affect all sports. I’m definitely behind him. . . . That’s a lot of hogwash about it de
stroying baseball.” Hockey players, who were also subject to a reserve system, expressed similar support for Flood’s lawsuit through NHL Players Association president Red Berenson of the St. Louis Blues.
Flood soon found out who his real friends were in baseball. Privately, his best friend, Bob Gibson, told him: “You’re crazy.” Gibson let Flood know that he supported him but planned on standing “a few hundred paces” behind him to avoid any fallout. Publicly, Gibson could not remain silent as others took potshots at his old roommate and the lawsuit. “Guys who come out against it see themselves as having futures in base-ball management,” Gibson said. “How many black guys you know are going to make it in baseball management?” Gibson admired the selflessness of Flood’s actions: “If he succeeds it won’t benefit him nearly as much as it will most of the other players.”
Vada Pinson publicly supported his childhood friend and former teammate. Flood and Pinson were reunited on the 1969 Cardinals. It rekindled their friendship, which had begun in West Oakland. Professionally, it was an unhappy season for both men. Flood slumped and was traded to Philadelphia. Pinson played most of the season on a broken leg and was traded after the season to Cleveland. Pinson was so incensed about the trade that he considered joining Flood’s lawsuit. “Something had to be done and Curt is doing it,” Pinson said. “Curt’s doing it for all of us. But it’s too bad all the players don’t dig what he’s doing.” Pinson knew that Flood was not backing down. “Flood is going to go through with it all the way in my opinion,” he said. “He’s convinced the reserve clause is a bad one and he’ll fight it to the end, regardless of what happens to him. That’s just the way it is.”
