How Curt Flood changed the game.
Flood’s stand against Reserve Clause led to free-agency system
This is the second in a series of stories chronicling the Bay Area’s rich history of sports figures fighting for equality.
Curt Flood, a complicated man with a convoluted legacy, spent the final years of his life consumed with fear he’d somehow be forgotten.
He wondered if sabotaging his own baseball career to help other players win their freedom — in what he really saw as a civil rights issue — would just be a footnote in sports history.
It’s been nearly 25 years since Flood, the kid who grew from an Oakland playground legend into a three-time All-Star, two-time world champion and once-in-alifetime baseball pioneer, died in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 59 when he passed away on Jan. 20, 1997 due to complications from throat cancer.
Just as Flood feared, he may be a forgotten man today.
The most tangible evidence of
Flood’s impact in his hometown can be found at the corner of School St. and Coolidge Ave., just off I-580, where a modest, rectangular sign tells all they’ve arrived at Curt Flood Field, a multipurpose space used by high school and youth teams.
“But if you go within two blocks of the field named after him, and ask people who Curt Flood is, they wouldn’t be able to tell you,” lamented Arif Khatib, founder of Oakland’s Multi-Ethnic Sports Hall of Fame and a longtime friend of Flood’s. “Nobody
knows who the hell he is. That’s the sad part.”
Sure, some remember Flood’s defiant, solo fight against Major League Baseball in 1969 that ended with a Supreme Court defeat, but led to modern free agency and the freedom to choose that players still enjoy today. Flood, though, was essentially blackballed from the sport when he refused to go to Philadelphia after being traded by St. Louis.
His reason for resisting was two-fold. First, like his hero
Jackie Robinson, who famously broke baseball’s color line, Flood felt he’d found a noble mission he could champion. He told MLB Players Association director Marvin Miller he didn’t care if suing baseball would end his career as long as it would ultimately benefit other players and those to come.
Secondly, he viewed baseball’s old Reserve Clause, which bound a player to a team for as long as the team wished, as just a version of indentured servitude.
“In the history of man, there’s no other profession except slavery where one man is tied to one owner for the rest of his life,” Flood said then. “Me as a Black man, I’m probably a lot more sensitive to the rights of other people because I have been denied these rights.”
A few people also remember Flood was quite a player. He was an even better defensive center fielder than Willie Mays, winning seven straight National League Gold Glove Awards for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s.
But even fewer still remember the uncomfortable stories of racism Flood endured, which tormented him for much of his life.
It started in 1957 when he was 19 years old, after the Cincinnati Reds signed him following his senior year at Oakland Tech and flew him to Tampa, Florida, for spring training. That’s where Flood got his introduction to the Jim Crow laws of legalized racial segregation.
He took a taxi to the Reds’ lavish hotel, only to be greeted by a hotel employee, who told him it was for Whites only. He led Flood out to a back alley to catch a taxi ride to another hotel where the Black players were staying.
Flood and the other Black players had to dress separately in the locker room, sometimes having to change into their uniforms in a small shack beside the field. After their first practice, Flood mindlessly tossed his uniform on top of a giant pile of others, only to be immediately yelled at by the clubhouse attendant.
The man grabbed a long stick withanailontheendofittopick up Flood’s jersey and pants, then dropped them onto a nearby stack with the dirty gear belonging to the other Black players.
He later told his wife he was so shaken that he sat naked on a chair in the crowded locker room and silently cried.
“I think it was something that he could never forget,” said Jim “Mudcat” Grant, one of Flood’s ex-teammates, in an interview with HBO a few years ago. “When you lose your dignity you lose an awful lot. How do you regain that?”
For Flood, the most troubling part about the way he was treated wasn’t that he was discriminated against and called the N-word while playing baseball in the southern United States, it was that he and his family faced racism in his own backyard.
When he helped the Cardinals win the 1964 World Series, Flood decided to move his pregnant wife and four kids from Oakland to a bigger house in a better neighborhood. He thought he’d found the perfect place to live out in the Tri-Valley in Alamo.
After agreeing to the “highpriced rental terms” — $290 per month for the spacious, $35,000 ranch home — their real estate agent went to the home to secure the deal. The agent was met by the property owner, who was brandishing a shotgun. He had found out Flood and his family weren’t White and he allegedly threatened to shoot them if they tried to integrate the all-White neighborhood.
Although shocked and outraged, Flood had a measured reply. He sued the property owner for the right to move into the home. He received a victory in the form of a temporary injunction. Then, accompanied by armed guards, Flood and his family moved in while local and national television reporters were there to capture it.
“How can they do this?” Flood asked during a press conference outside the home. “Not because I’m a professional athlete or even a (Black man) even, but I am a human being regardless of what I am. I think that if I can afford this place, then I think I oughta have it.”
However, it was hardly a happily-ever-after time for Flood’s children.
“Alamo was a horrific experience for us as children,” said Shelly Flood, Curt’s secondoldest daughter told HBO. “To be confronted with racism at 3 years old, that’s scary.”
Things were even worse for Debbie Flood, his eldest daughter. She remembers seeing burning crosses on their front lawn and getting into fights practically every day.
“We were going to school and we were getting called (racial slurs),” Debbie told “The Undefeated” in an interview last year. “And they were wondering why I was beating up everybody like I was crazy.”
The daily battles for Flood, both inside and outside the home, were also taking a heavy toll on him.
‘I am pleased that God made my skin black, but I wish he had made it thicker,” Flood once said.
He was an alcoholic and his drinking became more out of control. Months later, his marriage was over. He left his five kids with his ex-wife and essentially disappeared from their lives.
“Dad was always gone and I missed him,” Shelly said. “I missed him most all of my life.”
As imperfect as Flood’s life was at times, friends and family still believe his effect on baseball is not only worth remembering, but worth honoring with an induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He’s eligible to be elected as a contributor by the Golden Days Committee when it votes for the 2021 class in December.
Just as it’s done the past few years, the Curt Flood Foundation, led by Curt’s widow, Judy Pace Flood, and his youngest son, Scott, will send a signed petition to the Hall of Fame urging voters to do the right thing and vote in Flood.
“There you are, going through Cooperstown and you start at Abner (Doubleday), and you’re walking through the history,” Shelly Flood told this news organization. “Then all of a sudden, they go from the Reserve Clause to free agency, but how did they get there? That whole piece is missing. Why would you want to censor history?”
His widow, though, believes she knows the answer to that question.
“I think the holdup is that he got on a lot of people’s nerves,” she said earlier this year.
Khatib, whose friendship with Flood goes back to the late ‘70s, is also doing his part to ensure his friend’s legacy is finally taken care of. He’s co-authored a book that includes Flood’s tangled life story, and hopes to get “In the Shadow of Obscurity” published later this year.
In addition, Khatib plans to work with city officials to create the Curt Flood Platinum Award to honor the most worthy pro athletes in each sport. It would include an annual banquet in which all proceeds would go to Oakland’s parks and recreation department and the Curt Flood Foundation.
As Khatib sees it, he’s doing nothing more than looking out for a friend.
“I promised him I’d keep his name, sacrifices and contributions alive as long as I was still alive,” he said.