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Overview
Curt Flood, former star center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, is a hero to many for selflessly sacrificing his career to challenge the legality of baseball’s reserve system. Although he lost his case before the Supreme Court, he has become for many a martyr in the eventually successful battle for free agency. Sportswriters and fans alike have helped to paint a picture of Flood as a larger-than-life figure, a portrait that, unhappily, cannot stand closer inspection. This book reveals the real Curt Flood—more man than myth.
Flood stirred up a hornet’s nest by refusing to be traded from the Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1969 season, arguing that Major League Baseball’s reserve system reduced him to the status of bondage. Flood decided to resist a system in which his contract could be traded without his consent and in which he was not at liberty to negotiate his services in an open market. Stuart Weiss examines the man behind the decision, exploring the span of Flood’s life and shedding light on his relationships with those who helped shape his determination to sue baseball and providing a new perspective on the lawsuit that found its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Although a superb player, Flood was known to be temperamental and sensitive; in suing Major League Baseball he transformed his grievances against the Cardinals front office into an attack on how the business of big-league ball was conducted. Weiss shows that Flood was far from the stereotypical “dumb jock” but was rather a proud, multifaceted black man in a business run by white moguls. By illuminating Flood’s private side, rarely seen by the public, he reveals how Flood misled a gullible press on a regular basis and how his 1971 memoir, The Way It Is, didn’t tell it the way it really was.
Drawing on previously untapped sources, Weiss examines more fully and deeply than other writers the complexities of Flood’s decision to pursue his lawsuit—and demonstrates that the picture of Flood as a martyr for free agency is a myth. He suggests why, of all the players traded or sold through the years, it was Flood who brought this challenge. Weiss also explains how Flood’s battle against the reserve system cannot be understood in isolation from the personal experiences that precipitated it, such as his youth in a dysfunctional home, his troubled first marriage, his financial problems, and his unwavering commitment to the Cardinals.
The Curt Flood Story is a realistic account of an eloquent man who presented a warm, even vulnerable, face to the public as well as to friends, while hiding his inner furies. It shows that Flood was neither a hero nor a martyr but a victim of unique circumstances and his own life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826265982 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Missouri Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2007 |
| Series: | Sports and American Culture , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 14 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
It Takes a Village
On June 1, 1970, a handsome, well-proportioned, neatly tailored black man waved to reporters from the top step of the federal courthouse in New York City. Charles Curtis Flood, "Curt" to friends and baseball fans, could not have appeared more cheerful to those below, although he was now, most unhappily, out of the game he loved. The previous October the St. Louis Cardinals had traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies, after which sportswriters in both cities evaluated the trade, never thinking Flood might not accept it. He had only one alternative under Major League Baseball's Uniform Players Contract: to retire from baseball, and that seemed highly unlikely given his known love for the game and his handsome salary. But before 1969 ended Flood decided to challenge Major League Baseball in the courts.
Flood knew that the controlling reserve system lodged in the UPC (several contractual clauses commonly referred to simply as the reserve clause, probably because there was one key section, Section 10A) rested on baseball's exemption from the antitrust statutes that bound other professional sports. Furthermore, he had been advised by his lawyer in St. Louis that if he sued Major League Baseball, the clubs might surrender rather than face audits or a battle in the courts. Moreover, late in the fall of 1969 Flood had obtained the financial and legal support of the young but newly assertive Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), which, for obvious reasons, shared his interest in loosening the bonds of the reserve system. Consequently, in January 1970 his lawyers, retained by the Players Association, had taken the first steps in a six-month journey that placed him on those courthouse steps in early June (the trial had begun in May). The key issue to be decided by the judge was now well beyond that posited by Flood's St. Louis lawyer: it was whether the reserve system, by definition involving collusion among the club owners, violated the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) that prohibited conspiracies in restraint of trade among the several states. So far the courts had decided otherwise. However, if circumstances had changed such that the federal courts now found that the Sherman Act encompassed baseball, as it did every other major sport, then the reserve system would be eliminated, and ball clubs would no longer be able to treat players as mere property to be traded, bought, or sold without any recourse on their part.
Flood's battle for the right of ballplayers to negotiate in a free, open market for their services was to cost him his career and his income. Financially, it would also cost his ex-wife, his children, his mother, a treasured sister, and a dear friend. This he knew was almost certain before he initiated his lawsuit. He had been warned by Marvin Miller, the executive director of the Players Association, that his case was very chancy. Even so, he had taken the plunge. Why? Was it from a personal, deeply rooted sense of injustice, coupled with a righteous anger at Major League Baseball's reserve system? Simply put, did Flood battle for principle? Was he a martyr to the cause of free agency, even to freedom itself? This is the story that permeates the documentaries that have appeared since his death. But is it only a story, a myth, although a very powerful one?
Flood's decision to challenge Major League Baseball did not take place in a vacuum. It will be argued that his decision was a product of an unusually complex personality, character, and set of life experiences — dare one say a sensitive psychological makeup that gave him a sense of victimization. And these underlying characteristics set the stage for a chain of events in which an apparent miscue in the 1968 World Series would cause Flood to unravel, to feud with the Cardinals and be traded a year later, then to react almost blindly by filing his lawsuit. However, as might be expected, Flood did not see the connection between these events; neither has anyone else in the many years since his battle against Major League Baseball.
Flood first discussed his reasons for challenging baseball's reserve system in a book ghostwritten by Richard Carter. Published as The Way It Is in early 1971, this slender tome offers an account of Flood's experiences, from his childhood and youth in Oakland through his career with the Cardinals, his trade, his trial, and a very brief period after. Of course, Flood and Carter attack the reserve system, but they do so without discussing its possible merits as well as its defects, although they imply that it has at least some merit because Flood in his lawsuit wants to modify it, not destroy it root and branch. But in the last analysis, the book is about Flood as a victim, although other than Cardinals' president August "Gussie" Busch, and, of comparatively little significance, racists in general, Flood and Carter are vague about their villains. Yet The Way It Is is more dubious on another score: it is seldom "the way it was." Carter did not make a serious effort to corroborate what Flood told him. He was too sympathetic to Flood and his cause, years later rejecting even well-documented statistics that defied his point of view. At last, then, Carter and Flood's book is an apologia, Flood's justification of his battle. Equally, The Way It Is is the story of Flood's life as he was about to turn thirty-two, but especially the story of his baseball career and temperament as it set the stage for his reasoning or lack thereof in challenging the reserve system. Despite the fact that the book is something other than it claims to be, and that it was written when Flood was still relatively young, the reader will find it referred to in these pages as a memoir. In any event, it is hoped that what follows is a more detached, more objective, and therefore more realistic portrait of Flood's life, and especially of his lawsuit, than is presently available. It may not be the final word, but it attempts to separate myth from reality in his life, beginning, as it must, with his parentage, his childhood, and his youth in Oakland.
In his memoir Flood ignored his family's history prior to his birth. Only in his recollections near the end of his life would he mention it, and then he depended on the memory of his older half sister, Rickie Riley. Sometimes he or his sister got the details wrong. But he knew where the focus belonged, on Oakland, the City by the Bay, and on his parents, especially his mother, Laura, a "woman with a heart" with whom he shared a certain streak, "not of orneriness exactly, more like 'I just won't take a whole lot.'" Fearless Laura's sensitivity to racial slurs, real or imagined, would lead to instant, sharp attack or retreat; there was seldom a middle way. So it was also with her son Curtis, as young Flood preferred to be called.
The mother that Flood spoke of was baptized Laura Portis in the black township of Mossville, Louisiana, according to Rickie, but in nearby West Lake according to Flood's application for a passport in 1957. Both Flood and his sister agreed, however, that she was born slightly more than two years before the end of the nineteenth century. Rickie believes her grandparents' poverty explains why, at age four, Laura went to live with an aunt; just as her mother's improved circumstances eight years later — a house was purchased in DeRidder in the west-central part of the state — explains why she could later come home to live throughout her youth. In any event, in Louisiana Laura Portis's last name was mispronounced as Porter so often that eventually she adopted it as her legal surname. Although obviously of chiefly black stock, Laura bore the imprint of mixed racial ancestry in her cheekbones and, some said, her character. Her strikingly handsome face and silken skin, which her son Curtis would inherit, if in a coal-black hue, probably reflected a slice of Choctaw ancestry, though those who knew the family best attributed her character, even her speech, to her Creole grandparents. The family included many strong people, Rickie recalled, and they taught Laura that she was the equal of any woman — or man — and that she should stand firmly against injustice. Also, she must use proper grammar, seek and use the best word choices possible — practicing by doing crossword puzzles would be helpful — and enunciate clearly. Finally, except when truly and rightfully angry, she should speak in a warm, soft voice that said "I am nice." What Laura learned was of no small moment for at least one of her children. Learning to speak clearly if softly and to charm was a lesson young Curtis would learn at her knee. But it was not the only one. He also imbibed her (often temperamental) reaction to perceived injustices.
The value of her grandparents' tutelage notwithstanding, by early adolescence Laura Porter found their supervision confining. Only marriage suggested an escape and, still in her early teens, she found a man who seemed to promise a suitable match. Ivory Ricks was a black man and, unusually for that racist era, a mechanical engineer with a degree from Prairie View College northwest of Houston. At the end of 1913 he had answered an ad and almost sneaked into a position at a lumber mill in Ludington, Louisiana, just a short distance north of DeRidder. Fortunately for Ivory, he arrived at the mill when the owner's need for an engineer prevailed over the region's traditionally strong racial prejudices, and he was hired as the mill's assistant foreman. Shortly after, he met Laura Porter, and in 1914 they married and moved to a small house near his Ludington work site.
Within three years Laura Ricks bore two children. The first, Rickie, baptized Iola, was born in 1915. Rickie never cared for the name, however, and asked one and all to call her by what she thought a minor alteration of the family's surname. A strong, motherly, easygoing woman, Rickie would keep the family's history, outliving two stepbrothers many years her junior, as well as her younger brother, Alvin. When interviewed years later, Rickie, speaking in a smoothly modulated voice typical of her mother and, in time, of her half brother, Curtis, and her other siblings, recalled several fascinating aspects of the family's life in DeRidder, Ludington, and elsewhere, as well as Laura's life with her second husband and their children.
Apparently the Ricks family did not suffer noticeably from racism during their early years in Ludington. Ivory maintained the lumber mill's equipment and, for all intents and purposes, managed the mill itself. His status seemed to shield the family from the terrible problems most southern blacks faced. But that shield was very thin, as Laura learned in 1920. Spiraling prices during and after the First World War were followed by a sharp recession that exacerbated racial tensions in rural Louisiana as in most other places in the country. And perhaps as a result, an incident occurred that forced Ivory, Laura, and their children to flee Louisiana.
One day Laura Ricks was shopping in DeRidder's best department store when a local matron approached her. "Do you know where I can get a nigger to do my laundry?" the woman drawled in a voice loud enough for Laura to hear. Quickly, sharply, and surely unusually for that time and region, Laura said, "No, as a matter of fact I'm looking for a white bitch to do mine." Shocked, the woman struck Laura, who slapped her back, and a "cat fight" ensued. The two women grabbed each other, overturned tables, and swept clothes onto the floor before an angry store manager pulled them apart. Then each left quietly.
Laura, quickly gathering her wits, realized that the brawl would not be the end of the matter: a black woman didn't fight with a white woman in Louisiana in that era and live to tell about it. So she ran to the mill to warn Ivory that they must leave the area. Failing to find him (he already knew about the brawl), she ran home to gather up her children. Hurriedly collecting a few necessities, she put the children in the car, somehow found her husband — or he found her — and they left for a safer haven.
Years later, Laura would tell Rickie, who would eventually tell her youngest stepbrother, that "God pointed them west, toward Oakland." There was more to the story, though, than Rickie told her brother. Laura, her husband, and their children first took a train to her family home, now in Houston. There, Ivory left Laura and the children while he went to Oakland to look for a job. He would send for them, he said, when he found work and a place for the family to live.
Unfortunately for Ivory, he found Oakland gripped by the same postwar collapse and absence of jobs that was crippling Ludington and DeRidder, and he could not find work in mechanical engineering or anything else that paid enough to provide his family a decent living. For a few months he eked out a bare existence for himself and his family as a strikebreaker on the docks, hardly a permanent job. A year went by before he found permanent work as a longshoreman on Oakland's wharves, rented a small apartment for a meager $12.50 a month, and sent for Laura and the children. They soon came to Oakland as Ivory asked, but barely a year later Laura and her husband separated and, soon after, they severed their marriage. Exactly when this occurred Rickie did not know, and if she knew why, she would not say directly. She left little doubt, however, that her mother, soft voice or no, had a very short temper and might have been very difficult to live with. She might have added that Laura's youngest son, Curtis, was just as temperamental and would prove in time to be a difficult marital partner as well.
For the next five years Laura worked and cared for her children, although she received some help from Ivory's parents, including rail passes that his father, a fireman on the Missouri Pacific Road, handed her. The passes enabled her and the children to visit Houston from time to time, and there during one visit she met Herman Flood. He played the guitar in a blues group called the Saturday Night Breakdowns, and he met Laura after one evening's "gig." For several nights afterward, they enjoyed each other's company, but though eight years younger and generally easygoing he was much the more serious suitor of the two and, it seems, too serious for Laura. She went back to California without giving him an address where he could write to her. But Herman did not give up, not even when Laura's parents said they did not know her address in Oakland. Something of a romantic, he decided to see if he could find her. He moved to Oakland, and shortly after his arrival he devised a plan. He knew that some day she would take a ferry to San Francisco, so he found a job on a boat he hoped she would board and waited.
Four months after Herman Flood rode his first ferry, Laura Porter boarded the boat. Soon after, they thought themselves in love, and in 1928 they were married. Unfortunately, the times did not favor them. By 1931 the American economy had collapsed and jobs in Oakland, as elsewhere in the country, had disappeared. Unemployed, the two decided to return to Houston to find work and to live with his parents. What Herman did there is unknown. Laura, however, developed two careers. She opened a successful beauty parlor, and she bore four children. The couple's first child, Herman, Jr., was born in 1931; their second, Barbara, in 1933; their third, Carl, in 1935; and, finally, Charles Curtis, or "Curtis," as he preferred and the family always called him, on January 18, 1938.
Though he was born in Houston, young Curtis and his family returned to Oakland shortly after his birth. His older half sister, Rickie, had moved there in 1939. She could not abide Houston: it was a pestilential swamp colonized by swarms of mosquitoes. Yet as much as she preferred racially mixed Oakland with its moderate climate, she also wanted to have her parents and siblings nearby. In 1941 she found them a four-bedroom house that they could rent for thirty dollars a month, and Herman, Laura, and their children traveled by train to Oakland and moved in. For a few years the city was very good to the Flood family. Herman brought home good money earned as a welder in the booming shipyards where Liberty (merchant) ships were being built in legendarily rapid succession, and Laura did her bit for the family and for the war effort, minding the house and the children while folding parachutes in a nearby factory. Thus although both Floods did work very hard, and perhaps, as their son asserts, it was drudgery, the couple made enough money for not only life's staples but also Barbara's piano lessons.
Unfortunately, there were racial problems in this neighborhood with its overwhelmingly white population and, thus, its white-dominated public school. One incident involved the Floods' youngest son, and Rickie found it so fascinating, not to mention revealing, that she easily recalled every detail half a century later. In December 1943, five-year-old Curtis came home from school of an afternoon to tell his mother that his mother that his teacher wanted him to play a role in the class's Christmas play. He was to say: "I'm little black Sambo, ain't I sweet, take me home and put me on your Christmas tree." Laura reacted sharply, her voice dripping with sarcasm: "Well, isn't that cute?" She knew very well that the lines were racist and that Curtis, because of his color, had been demeaned before the class. However, she quickly turned the incident into a positive, telling one and all about it, concluding with more than a little pride: "No one had to tell Curtis that's wrong."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Curt Flood Story"
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