A Well-Paid Slave

by Brad Snyder

  Flood’s biggest disappointment was his strained relationships with his five children. By leaving for Denmark in 1970 and Spain in 1971, Flood had abandoned his children when they needed a father most. Curt Jr., who was 11 when his father left for Denmark, later experienced his own problems with alcohol. Flood felt like a failure as a father. He dreaded Thanksgiving and Christmas. Father’s Day was a nightmare. He tried to reconnect with his children, who occasionally came to Oakland to visit him. Flood, however, did not have much to offer them. Alcohol was his escape.

  Flood’s consumption of straight vodka had begun to take its physical toll in the form of blackouts, hallucinations, and alcoholic seizures. He had to be hospitalized on two or three occasions but never seemed to remember his seizures. Finally, Karen turned on a small tape recorder duringone of his seizures. She played it for him the next day. He was shocked to hear himself mumbling and talking in gibberish. He agreed that he needed help.

  With Karen’s help, he spent 30 days in alcohol rehabilitation in early 1980 at the Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley. He later refused to go to Alcoholics Anonymous for fear that people would recognize him, but after 30 days at Alta Bates, he sobered up. A lingering benefit from Flood’s season of color commentary was the health insurance he received by joining the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). Flood had been dropped from the Players Association’s health plan after he stopped paying his premiums, but his AFTRA health insurance allowed him to take care of some chronic physical problems. When Andorran police had broken his left arm in 1975, doctors had inserted pins that were never removed. The pins had infected his arm, pushed through the skin, and left him in constant pain. Flood was finally able to get them taken out. He also received a new set of upper teeth.

  Flood’s sobriety landed him a different type of baseball job—as the commissioner of the youth baseball league for the Oakland Parks and Recreation Department. Bill Patterson, Flood’s old friend who ran the De Fremery playground in West Oakland, helped him get the job, provided that he stay sober. Flood served as the first commissioner of the Youth America Baseball program for 3,000 Oakland boys and a few girls. “I’m the Bowie Flood,” he said.

  His job as youth baseball commissioner enabled him to be Curt Flood the baseball player again. With the city supplying only 60 percent of the league’s funds, Flood solicited contributions from famous ballplayers. Joe Morgan donated $4,000 from an award. Reggie Jackson donated $2,000 in equipment. A’s pitcher Mike Norris promised to donate $500 for each of his wins. Flood even affiliated himself with the Oakland A’s special projects division, which agreed to contribute $30,000 over five years. He showed films of Rod Carew on hitting, Willie Horton on power hitting, and Darrell Johnson on coaching. Children looked up to him.

  His new job revived his status as a local hero. The Bay Area Life Membership Committee of the NAACP honored him at a March 8, 1980, banquet before 900 people, including homegrown baseball stars Morgan and Willie Stargell. The Oakland Public Schools declared March 24-29, 1980, “Curt Flood Week.” Students from McClymonds and Oakland Technical high schools presented him with a book of tributes and poems.

  Flood’s newfound sobriety and local celebrity also improved his home life. He helped around the house. He built shelves and decorated them with felt designs. He expertly carved a hiding space for valuables in the pages of a French cookbook. He took spare parts and constructed an Easter egg holder that turned the egg and made it easier to decorate. He liked to construct model airplanes. He drew cartoons. Although he might not have known how to paint portraits, he still possessed an artist’s mind and a craftsman’s touch.

  Aside from his stray comments in Newsweek, Flood continued to stand up for his fellow ballplayers. As a potential baseball strike loomed that eventually halted the 1981 season, he predicted that the players would strike and stood behind them 100 percent. “If they backslide now, they’ll take the ‘free’ out of free agent,” he said. “Ballplayers got crapped on for a long, long time. It’s very hard to say what’s fair, but I think the players are now in a place where they’re getting an equitable share. And what weapons do they have to keep that share, except a possible strike? How do you threaten a millionaire, with a gun? I also don’t think the players should be responsible for keeping the owners honest among themselves.”

  The owners responded by keeping Flood out of baseball. Some of his longtime friends fared better. Bob Gibson, whose friend and former catcher Joe Torre was managing the New York Mets, landed a job as the Mets’ assistant pitching coach. Bill White was broadcasting Yankees games. Flood yearned to join Gibson and White back in the game. His most prized possession, besides his World Series rings, was his leather-bound lifetime pass to any major league ballpark. “I lived for baseball,” he said. “There was absolutely nothing to compare to the high I got playing.”

  Before the 1981 season, Gibson wrote Flood about his new job with the Mets but mostly to reminisce. “I’ll never forget the years we spent together as teammates, roommates, and friends,” Gibson wrote. Flood, Gibson, and other black players of their generation never forgot their experiences in segregated southern minor league towns and spring training camps. Those Jim Crow experiences made them feel like outsiders for the rest of their careers. “I saw Bill White in New York at [former Yankees catcher] Elston’s [Howard] wake. He’s doing pretty well. I often think about the days we spent in the early years in St. Pete, Fla.,” Gibson wrote. “Times have really changed. All for the better.”

  That segregation and discrimination turned Flood against the establishment. It turned him into a fighter. And despite losing the biggest battle of his life, he kept fighting—even if it kept him out of baseball.

  Flood began to show signs of losing his daily battle with alcoholism. In January, he flew to New York to be honored as the Cutty Sark Leader of 1982. The scotch maker ran a full-page color advertisement later that year in national magazines. “Some people think you can’t beat the system,” the headline said. “Here’s to those who show the way.” Next to a silhouetted photograph of Flood, the advertisement told the story of his lawsuit “that opened doors for every baseball player in America.” “So today, a lot of people salute Curt Flood,” the ad copy concluded. “Including those who make his favorite Scotch, Cutty Sark.” Flood rationalized the advertisement based on the dubious distinction that the ad did not say he drank scotch, only that Cutty Sark was his “favorite.” Cutty Sark donated money to Oakland’s Little League program and paid Flood for the promotional campaign. Karen knew that Curt was in trouble when he arrived home in January with a case of liquor.

  In August 1982, he attended the Baseball Hall of Fame’s induction ceremony honoring his former McClymonds High School teammate Frank Robinson. During his playing career, Robinson refused to speak out on racial and social issues. He reacted to Flood’s lawsuit with silence. In October 1974, the Cleveland Indians named him baseball’s first black manager. After the Indians fired him in 1977, Robinson could not find a job. Flood had fought for Robinson. Picking up the cause championed by Jackie Robinson nine days before his death, Flood spoke out in March 1980 about the “lack of blacks in management.” “It is time for the Hank Aarons to speak out about the injustice that has Frank Robinson unable to find a job,” Flood said. “That’s tragic. Racism is not an undocumented rumor in baseball. It is a malady that permeates our national pastime.” The next season, Robinson became the first black manager to be rehired—returning to the Bay Area in 1981 to manage the San Francisco Giants. A few weeks before his Hall of Fame induction, he and Giants second baseman Joe Morgan put on a clinic for Flood’s Little Leaguers.

  Flood and Robinson were not particularly close, but Flood paid his own way to Robinson’s Cooperstown induction ceremony. He wanted to see and be seen. He sat about 100 feet away from the podium in the back of the reserved seating section. Robinson took time out from his speech to acknowledge him. “If Curt Flood is in the audience, please stand up— Curt,” Robi
nson said. Curt stood up to applause. “He wasn’t a bad baseball player either . . . ,” Robinson said. “I think Curt was the first ballplayer to really make a sacrifice toward free agency, and I don’t think he has ever gotten the thanks he so richly deserves for doing that for today’s players. I can’t say that, Curt, because they don’t have free agents for managers.” Robinson’s last line was a joke, but he still did not get it. Robinson stayed in the game by keeping his mouth shut; Flood was ostracized from it for speaking out.

  As soon as he turned 45 in January 1983, Flood took his $2,500-a-month pension and left Karen. It was no way to repay her for years of financial and emotional support. He left with his sobriety and future in question, still searching for happiness, a fresh start, and a job in baseball.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  During the mid-1980s, Curt Flood made a comeback—in life— after reconnecting in Los Angeles with his old girlfriend, Judy Pace. Pace’s career as an actress had peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Aside from her roles on television’s Peyton Place and Brian’s Song, she received positive reviews in Ossie Davis’s film Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), and costarred with Jim Brown in The Slams (1973). She made a few guest appearances during the 1970s on television shows including Sanford and Son, That’s My Mama, Good Times, and What’s Happening!! Divorced from actor Don Mitchell in 1986, she spent most of her time raising her two daughters.

  A friend of Flood’s, sportswriter Stu Black, contacted Pace in 1985 about a screenplay he was writing for a proposed movie about Flood’s life. Before speaking to Black, however, Pace wanted to talk to Flood. Flood flew to Los Angeles to see her on the way to a San Diego baseball card show. They agreed to meet at a hotel near LAX for lunch. It was the first time they had seen each other in 15 years. Lunch lasted more than five hours. Flood took the last flight out that night to San Diego. The movie plans never materialized, but Curt’s relationship with Judy took off. On December 28, 1986, more than 20 years after they had first met, they were married in Las Vegas. “I wasn’t going to let her get away again,” he said.

  Judy helped Curt become a whole person again. In February 1986, he moved into her home in the Baldwin Hills section of Los Angeles. He quit drinking for good (with a public push from Howard Cosell in a July 1986 San Francisco Chronicle column). He received a second chance at fatherhood with Judy’s two daughters, Shawn and Julia, both of whom went on to graduate from Howard University. Living in Los Angeles also allowed Flood to repair his relationships with his five children from his previous marriage. Curt Jr., who bears a strong resemblance to his father, treasured those days.

  Finally at peace, Flood rejected the attempts of writers to turn him into a martyr. “Don’t make my life out to be a Greek tragedy,” he said. “I live on top of a hill. I’m married to a movie star. I have a wonderful life— though the owners would like me to have a tin cup somewhere.” He had grown philosophical about his lawsuit—what he referred to as “the central fact of my life.” “I did it because I believed in the American dream,” he said. “I believed that if you were right, the nine smart men on the Supreme Court would say that.”

  He still seethed about the Court’s decision after reading about the behind-the-scenes vote switching in The Brethren. “I certainly hope that great issues of our time were handled better than that one was,” he said. He still believed that his case was not “decided on the merits” but on “jealousy” and “prejudice”: “The good old boys got together and decided that this little black kid wasn’t going to change the great American game.”

  From his legal defeat, Flood emerged with a spiritual victory. “I have never felt I gave up too much,” he said. “All the things that I got from it, they’re intangibles. They’re all inside of me. Yes, I sacrificed a lot—the money, maybe even the Hall of Fame—and you weigh that against all the things that are really and truly important that are deep inside you, and I think I succeeded.”

  The only aspect of his lawsuit that bothered Flood was the lack of support from his fellow players. “I am bitter now because I know in retrospect that we lost because my guys, my colleagues didn’t stand up with me,” he told filmmaker Ken Burns. “If superstars had stood up and said ‘We’re with Curt Flood,’ if the superstars had walked into the courtroom in New York and made their presence known . . . had we shown any amount of solidarity, I think the owners would have gotten the message very clearly and given me a chance to win that.” But as a rededicated family man, he understood why Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, and Frank Robinson had not rushed to his defense at the time of his lawsuit. They were afraid of being “guilty by association” and needed their jobs in baseball to support their families.

  A job in baseball continued to elude Flood. Cosell wrote in July 1986 that the union should give Flood a job. The union was Flood’s only hope. As Bob Gibson said, management still viewed Flood “as a traitor.” By this time, Marvin Miller had handed over the reins to Don Fehr. Fehr was too young to have worked on Flood’s lawsuit and did not know Flood well, but the new union boss must have been aware of Flood’s desire to return to the game.

  Flood voiced support for the players during the strikes in 1981 and 1994. “One of the reasons I can’t get a job in baseball is I can’t keep my mouth shut,” he said. He carried on Jackie Robinson’s fight for more blacks in management positions—not to find Frank Robinson a job or to lobby for his own, but because of the injustice of it all. In February 1986, he pointed out to the Sporting News that “we’ve only had two black managers. There are none in the front office except for Henry Aaron in Atlanta.”

  An incident at the beginning of the 1987 season finally gave potential black coaches and executives hope. Al Campanis, a Dodgers executive and a former minor league teammate of Jackie Robinson’s, unintentionally helped their cause during an April interview on ABC’s Nightline on the 40th anniversary of Robinson’s first major league season. Blacks, Campanis suggested, “may not have some of the necessities to be” field managers or general managers. Campanis revealed on national television what baseball people had been doing for years: excluding blacks from the hiring process.

  Baseball went into damage-control mode. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth hired black sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards and the consulting firm of former secretary of the army Clifford Alexander and Janet Hill (the wife of former NFL running back Calvin and mother of future NBA star Grant) to study the problem, prompting Jesse Jackson to call off a black boycott of major league stadiums scheduled for July 4.

  Black former major leaguers, however, felt excluded from the process run by nonbaseball people. Flood was among a group of players who met with Ueberroth and Edwards during the All-Star break, but Flood still could not find a baseball job. “I had written to four or five different clubs with the intent of finding nothing more than a token job,” he said. “I only got a response from one of them, and this was ‘A.C.’—after Campanis. Honestly, I don’t know what their problem is.”

  In November 1987, Flood and 60 black former players met for three days in Irving, Texas, to discuss their common experiences and to form their own organization, known as the Baseball Network. “Forty years after the debut of Jackie Robinson, bitterness is not what I am,” Flood told the Baltimore Sun’s Mark Hyman. “But I am a little embarrassed we have not gone further.” When asked what kind of job he wanted in baseball, Flood replied that he wanted to be an owner. He believed in the Baseball Network and designed a piece of jewelry in an effort to raise money for the organization. With former scout Ben Moore as executive director, the former players elected five men to a board of directors: Frank Robinson, Ray Burris, Jim “Mudcat” Grant, Willie Stargell, and Flood. Flood was named the board’s president, probably because he had nothing left to lose with management.

  Flood came close to landing a major league job with his old team, the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1985, the Cardinals had made Flood’s former teammate, shortstop Dal Maxvill, the team’s general manager. Three years later, Maxvill
needed a director of player development. This was not the “token position” that Flood had been seeking, but one of the most integral positions in a team’s minor league system. Flood nonetheless applied for the job.

  Maxvill flew out to Los Angeles to interview Flood. Maxvill remembered Flood as an outstanding defensive center fielder, a hitter who sacrificed his at-bats to advance leadoff man Lou Brock, a smart ballplayer who squeezed the most out of his 5-foot-9, 165-pound frame, and a great teammate who rooted for his fellow players. During the interview, Flood asked Maxvill a series of questions: Do I know the game? Do I get along with people? Do you think I can do the job? Maxvill found himself answering yes each time. Maxvill was not sentimental about former teammates, having declined Gibson’s request for a job with the Cardinals. But, as a former player representative, Maxvill understood the sacrifices that Flood had made for his fellow players. He wanted to hire Flood. Maxvill explained that the position required lots of travel and someone willing to live in St. Louis. Flood wanted to stay in Los Angeles. In June 1988, Maxvill ended up hiring future major league manager Jim Riggleman as director of player development. Neither Maxvill nor any other major league executive ever offered Flood the “token position” he desired. Instead, Flood found jobs and recognition outside the base-ball establishment.

  Judy helped burnish Curt’s public image. For years, she had worked actively for black causes. Along with other black actresses, she helped organize the Kwanzaa Foundation in 1973 to raise scholarship money for black students. She also participated in the efforts of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP chapter to fight for the inclusion of black actors in the entertainment industry. She volunteered on Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign. Judy’s activism may have led to the NAACP’s belated recognition of Flood’s fight for freedom. At the NAACP’s Image Awards in December 1987, Flood received the first Jackie Robinson Sports Award. Actor George C. Scott presented him with the honor. That same year, Flood was honored in San Francisco by the Instituto Laboral de la Raza in conjunction with the Latino Labor Day festivities. The AFL-CIO named an award after him. Two years later, the city of Oakland dedicated the Curt Flood Park and Sports Complex.