Throwback Thursday: When Curt Flood Tried To Get Free

(Editor's note: Each week VICE Sports will take a look back at an important sports event from this week in sports history. We are calling this regular feature Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.)

From December to December in 1969 and 1970, two great but flawed men drew something similar from a revolution-tinged zeitgeist. On December 29, 1969, the news broke that St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood, having refused a trade to the Philadelphia Phillies and in turn been denied by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn the right to sign with another team, would sue baseball to overturn its nearly hundred-year-old reserve clause.

This dryly phrased bit of contractual language, paragraph 10(a) of the uniform player contract, stating, "the club shall have the right… to renew this contract for a period of one year," had always been interpreted by baseball men to have an invisible two words appended to it: "in perpetuity." Curt Flood challenged this interpretation, which is to say that he challenged everything.

Under the reserve clause, players subject to those infinite one-year terms would never gain the ability to work where he chose or sell his services to the highest bidder. In Talkin' Baseball: An Oral History of Baseball in the 1970s, Players Association head Marvin Miller remembered:

Somebody told me that Lefty O'Doul, who was now 72 years old, was still on the Giants' reserve list, and [pitcher Jim] Bouton asked a tongue-in cheek question of National League counsel Lou Carroll.

"Mr. Carroll," he said, "would you consider removing a former player from the reserve list when he reached age 65?"

And Carroll, without batting an eye, said, "No, because that would be a foot in the door."

From at least 1890 on, when the Sherman Antitrust Act became federal law, the Reserve Clause would have been considered illegal restraint of trade. However, in 1922 the United States Supreme Court ruled that the law applied pretty much everywhere but baseball; in 1953 they affirmed that decision and said that it was Congress's problem to deal with. Congress, as we well know, is an asylum for narcissistic sloths. The Supreme Court's prescription was not unlike your doctor telling you that your pneumonia will clear up if God wills it, and no sooner.

A little more than a year after Flood filed suit, in early December 1970, John Lennon released Plastic Ono Band, an album that contained the anti-anthem "Working Class Hero." Following a simple and dirge-like musical pattern, Lennon muttered five bitter verses:

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be

The song invites the listener to identify. Then, at the end, Lennon intentionally undercuts any possibility of that with a deflating hypocrisy: "If you want to be a hero, well, just follow me." Lennon imagined a protest so obtusely narcissistic that it missed the point of its own testimony. It was prescient, both generally and in Curt Flood's case.

This was exactly how observers, including Flood's fellow ballplayers, judged his case. They thought he was cynical and self-serving, and in the process of expressing that belief became cynical and self-serving themselves. Flood took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, losing his way up the ladder and being denied in the Supreme Court, as well, in a bizarre and capricious decision. The result, as Flood knew it would be, was that his career was destroyed. Think of Buck Weaver or Pete Rose spending decades trying to get back into baseball after a commissioner threw them out. Flood threw himself out of baseball because he felt his principles were worth fighting for. "I was not a consignment of goods," he said.

Yet, the loss is not the tragedy of Curt Flood. The tragedy is that Hank Aaron did not stand up for him, nor did Willie Mays. Carl Yastrzemski, Harmon Killebrew, and Ron Santo second-guessed the union for supporting him. Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Bob Feller said he was wrong. No active ballplayer testified on his behalf, nor did any of them even come to court and sit in the gallery. Flood's witnesses included Jackie Robinson, Hank Greenberg, Jim Brosnan, and Bill Veeck, all out of baseball at that time. They did not include Mickey Mantle, who had been hardballed in negotiations by the Yankees for nearly 20 years, or Tom Seaver, who found the voice to come out against the war in Vietnam in 1969.

Years later, Flood told Ken Burns, "We lost because my guys, my colleagues, didn't stand up with me. And I can't make any excuses for them. Had we shown any amount of solidarity, had the superstars stood up and said, 'We're with Curt Flood,' … I think the owners would have gotten the message very clearly…"

The press, with a few exceptions, also abandoned him. The writers couldn't get past his 1969 salary of $90,000, or the fact that the Phillies had offered him $110,000 to chuck his scruples. In January, 1970, Flood went on television and had this exchange with Howard Cosell:

Cosell: You're a man who makes $90,000 a year, which isn't exactly slave wages. What's your retort to that?

Flood: Well, Howard, a well-paid slave is, nonetheless, a slave.

The backlash was tremendous. Flood was called baseball's Bolshevik, and, because he asked for damages in his suit, accused of "putting principal ahead of principles"—that is, of just making a play for more money.

These critics failed to understand some very basic facts: You can have a beautiful husband or handsome wife, but if you don't love them you're just as unhappy as if they were hideous, or not there at all; that it is possible to own a mansion and great works of art and to derive no pleasure from them; that a relatively wealthy man can still be part of the proletariat; that money does not automatically bring happiness or respect, self- or otherwise, and that bondage comes in many guises.

Most of all, they missed that virtually everyone else—including them!—had the right, if they were unhappy in their place of work, to say, "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more." They accepted the arguments of paid-for baseball men like Kuhn that the game "would simply cease to exist" if the reserve clause was overturned. Kuhn predicted that a whole league's worth of teams might go under, and the integrity of the game would be questioned if, say, (to put things in contemporary terms) Yoenis Cespedes hit .150 against the Royals in the World Series, then signed with them as a free agent that winter. Surely the public would think he tanked his at-bats to curry favor with his future employer. Or something.

None of that makes the slightest sense, of course, but people believed him anyway. Flood lost in the Supreme Court 5-3, and even Harry Blackmun's decision didn't take him seriously, pausing pointlessly for a sentimental list of nearly 100 players, including Bill Wambsganss; the list initially included no black players. Though six justices agreed that baseball should be subject to antitrust laws, the court declined to follow that belief to its logical conclusion. Blackmun wrote, "We continue to loathe… to overturn those cases judicially when Congress, by its positive inaction, has allowed those decisions to stand for so long."

Here was a truly American doctrine, casting Congressional inertia as a passive-aggressive assertiveness. Sins of omission and commission had been made indistinguishable from each other.

It seems almost unnecessary to add this: Before all of this happened, Flood was an extremely good player. He was one of the best defensive center fielders in history; contemporaries said his speed and intelligence made him just as good as Mays. He was just 5'9" and didn't have much power, but Flood could hit, with a .293 career average in a league that was then undergoing offensive desertification. He was a key part of three pennant winners and two World Series champions. The time lost to the lawsuits eroded skills, which had already been declining in his early 30s, and Flood's eventual short-lived comeback with the Washington Senators ended when Flood left for Europe. Flood sent owner Bob Short a telegram: I TRIED. A YEAR AND A HALF IS TOO MUCH. VERY SERIOUS PROBLEMS MOUNTING EVERY DAY. THANKS FOR YOUR CONFIDENCE AND UNDERSTANDING.

There followed, for Flood, some years of heavy drinking, missed child-support payments, and estrangement from family. There was a career as an artist that was something of a scam. Flood rectified some of these things, or tried to, in the last 10 years of his life. He was, by then, an obscure figure even to players who should have lionized him, and it is only in recent years that Flood's reputation has been rescued by biographers such as Brad Snyder and Alex Belth. (Full disclosure: Belth and Cliff Corcoran, who edited Snyder's books, are among my closest friends. The books are really good, despite their poor choice in associates, and you should read them.)

None of that is really relevant, though. All that matters is that Curt Flood didn't have his freedom and fought to get it. And in his losing, the players eventually won: Even as they were celebrating their victory, the owners' lawyer cautioned them: "Fellas, this is the twentieth century. You can't get anybody, drunk or sober, to agree that once a fella goes to work for the A&P, he has to work for the A&P for the rest of his life." Looking for a fig leaf, the owners consented to independent arbitration in the 1970 basic agreement. It was an arbitrator, Peter Seitz, who in 1975 declared that when clause 10(a) said one year, it meant ONE year. He explicitly rejected the Flood case as an influence on his decision, but Flood's campaign had led to his being there nonetheless. In that sense, it led to free agency.

Years later, Flood ran into Kuhn at a game. Kuhn told Flood he bore him no ill will, "but you were wrong to walk out on Bob Short in 1971 after taking his money." This was the same Short who had walked out on Minnesota with the Lakers and Washington with the Senators-cum-Rangers, but then rules have always been different for plutocrats. Though John Lennon would also be called a hypocrite (including by his assassin) for being, as Elvis Costello later put it, "a millionaire who said, 'imagine no possessions,'" he was right about one thing: a working-class hero is something to be, and Curt Flood was just that. It's not about how much you make, but how you make it, who you are, and what you stand for. We know that now.