by Brad Snyder
Please, please don’t come out here. Don’t bring it all up again. Please. Do you know what I’ve been through? Do you know what it means to go against the grain in this country? Your neighbors hate you. Do you know what it’s like to be called the little black son of a bitch who tried to destroy baseball, the American Pastime?
Flood relented after Reeves agreed to his request for one-third of the money from the article (because Flood was to be one of three people profiled). For the only time in his career, Reeves paid a source; he gave Flood $750.
Reeves admired Flood for taking on the establishment and pitied him for what he had become. Flood could not figure out how to put his life back together without baseball. He had been told that the price for challenging the reserve clause would be high, but he could not have known that he would be paying for that choice for the rest of his life. He drank straight vodka as he and Reeves talked into the night. “He was about the saddest man I ever met,” Reeves recalled.
Flood was so desperate for money that he tried to revive his portrait business. He and Karen started Curt Flood Portraits. Oakland furniture store owner Sam Bercovich agreed to show the paintings at E. Bercovich and Sons and even printed up flyers announcing “portraits by Curt Flood painted from your favorite photograph.”
The key to the business was reconnecting with Burbank-based artist Lawrence Williams. On January 9, 1978, Flood sent Williams payment for several portraits and thanked him for “whipping out the portraits I ordered on such short notice.” Flood also informed Williams of his new portrait business. “I decided that in leiu [sic] of a dishwashing job, I will try and sell portraits,” he wrote in a letter typed by Karen. “You should do a lot of business up your way,” Williams replied the next day by telegram. “I have one former professional football player that has been associated with me for 9-10 years, and he made a little over $80,000 this past year.” Williams was alluding to former NFL wide receiver Tommy McDonald.
On March 2, Flood sent Williams a check for another portrait and asked for more paintings. A New York gallery had invited Flood to show some baseball paintings, with part of the commission funding a new Harlem sports complex. Flood was concerned that the gallery would be able to detect the process used to create the portraits, in which Williams would blow up photographs, stretch and mount them on Masonite, and then paint over the blown-up photographs with a palette knife instead of a brush. “Is there any way (short of doing it myself from scratch) to provide them with some paintings to sell, that would not reflect this process?” Flood asked Williams. “Do you know of any galleries that might be able to push your/my work?” Flood inquired. It is doubtful that Curt could have painted a portrait from scratch. Karen once asked him if he could. He said no. He was too drunk most of the time even to try.
Except to Karen and a few family members, Curt kept up the illusion that he was painting the portraits. He even fooled Bercovich, who asked Flood to paint a portrait of Cincinnati Reds second baseman Joe Morgan for a banquet a few days later honoring the East Oakland star.
“Sam Bercovich,” Flood said, “you’re the only person I can’t say no to.”
Flood quickly sent the photograph of Morgan off to Williams in Burbank, and a few days later presented Bercovich with a completed portrait. Morgan started to cry when he saw it and later hung it prominently in his home. Flood told Bercovich that he had stayed up all night painting even though he had never touched a brush (or a palette knife) to the canvas. But Flood had stopped signing his name on the portraits, an indication that his conscience had begun to get the best of him.
Bercovich tried to help Flood return to baseball and to his roots. In the fall of 1977, Flood coached the Bercovich-sponsored American Legion team that he had played for as a youngster. He also coached a younger Connie Mack team. Bercovich treated Flood like one of his sons. The bat that Flood had used during the 1964 World Series still hung on the wall of Bercovich’s store.
Bercovich’s plans for Flood included a return to the major leagues. As a supposed prelude to buying the Oakland A’s from Charlie Finley for $12 million, Bercovich purchased the team’s radio rights. The A’s began the 1978 season without a radio contract; Larry Baer, a student at the University of California at Berkeley (and the future executive vice president and chief operating officer of the San Francisco Giants), broadcast their first 23 games on a 10-watt Cal station that could not be heard beyond the Berkeley hills. One month into the season, Bercovich paid $150,000 for the radio rights and switched the games to KNEW, a 5,000-watt country music station. He chose as his broadcast team legendary Oakland Oaks play-by-play man Bud Foster and Flood.
For the rest of the 1978 season, Flood hit the road as the A’s radio color commentator. Bercovich insisted that Finley include Flood on the broadcast team.
“Oh, Curt Flood, he’s the guy that cost the owners all this money,” Finley said.
“Just think of what Bowie Kuhn would think,” came the reply.
“Hired,” Finley said.
No one disliked Bowie Kuhn more than Finley. During the 1976 season, he had tried to sell Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Red Sox and Vida Blue to the Yankees for a total of $3.5 million before they left the A’s via free agency. Kuhn had voided the sales as contrary to the best interests of baseball. Finley had called Kuhn “the village idiot,” “the nation’s idiot,” and “his honor, the idiot in charge” and challenged the commissioner’s power in court. Finley lost. He constantly battled with his players, particularly at contract time, but Flood said: “You’ll never hear negative things about Charlie Finley from me.” Giving Flood an open mike was Finley’s sweet revenge on Kuhn.
Flood’s first night in the broadcast booth attracted camera crews from ABC and CBS and reporters from the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. He did not say much to entertain the listening audience. He possessed all the tools to be a great announcer—a smooth speaking voice, subtle wit, and years of knowledge about the game. He practiced at home and arrived at the ballpark early. On the air, however, he always seemed to say the wrong thing or nothing at all.
Flood’s problem was alcohol. At the ballpark, the writers could smell it on his breath. He announced games drunk. His friends warned him that he was embarrassing himself. Instead of popping off about the players or the owners on the air, he simply clammed up. One night in New York, he refused to announce that night’s game. He did not answer the phone in his hotel room. It was as if he were back with the 1971 Senators.
Flood’s harsh experiences at Yankee Stadium continued. At a pregame party in George Steinbrenner’s office, he ran into his former legal adversary, Bowie Kuhn. Flood walked over and extended his hand.
“I bet you don’t know who I am,” Flood said, according to Kuhn.
Kuhn said he did.
“Well, I suppose I’m not one of your real favorites,” Flood said.
Kuhn said he harbored no hard feelings. They exchanged small talk about Flood’s postbaseball life and broadcasting career. Kuhn could not resist a parting shot: “But you were wrong to walk out on Bob Short in 1971 after taking his money.”
Kuhn’s comments betrayed his ignorance. Flood had collected only about half a season’s salary from Short. He could have hung around for a few more weeks until June 15, when, as Short promised, Flood would have been entitled to the other half of his salary. Kuhn showed that even after three years of litigation, he lacked any understanding of what made Flood tick.
That encounter was classic Bowie Kuhn—smug and condescending even about his one moment of victory against Marvin Miller and the union. In November 1982, after a decade of being outmaneuvered by Miller and the Players Association, Kuhn was voted out of office at the end of his term. Two Supreme Court justices who had voted against Flood, Potter Stewart and Byron White, were mentioned as possible successors. The owners replaced Kuhn in October 1984 with the organizer of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Peter Ueberroth.
Kuhn, like Flood, found adjusting to life outs
ide baseball difficult. After writing a score-settling autobiography, Kuhn returned to his old law firm, Willkie Farr, but spent most of his days sitting around his office doing very little. He had no clients and no desire to practice law. His partners had not wanted him back and were gently pushing him out the door. Against the advice of his longtime friend Lou Hoynes, Kuhn started a new law firm in January 1988 with a lawyer named Harvey Myerson. Under the name of Myerson & Kuhn, Myerson bilked clients and absconded with the firm’s assets. Kuhn, who had ignored Myerson’s activities, was on the hook for the firm’s debts. Two years after starting the firm, Kuhn protected his remaining assets by selling his New Jersey home and purchasing a mansion in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, near Jacksonville. He eventually made a lump-sum payment to his creditors of several million dollars and went into business buying and selling minor league franchises—franchises he had said would not exist without the reserve clause. He became reclusive and devoutly religious, joining Opus Dei, a private Catholic sect with more than 3,000 U.S. members. In 2005, he served as the chairman of the Thomas More Law Center, a nonprofit organization founded by conservative Roman Catholics, which litigated an “intelligent design” lawsuit on behalf of a Pennsylvania school board seeking to teach ninth-grade biology students a religion-based alternative to evolution.
Kuhn, who rarely commented about the Flood case, said he’d had no choice but to deny Flood’s request in December 1969 to become a free agent. Nor did he have any regrets about his handling of the matter. “I don’t think I would have done anything differently,” Kuhn said before his death in March 2007. “We were successful.”
The clearest indication of how he felt about the whole affair came after the release of his 1987 autobiography, Hardball. Kuhn sent a copy to the justice who had switched his vote at the last minute in baseball’s favor, recently retired chief justice Warren Burger. Kuhn met Burger for the first time after both men had relinquished their respective offices. In Burger’s smaller Supreme Court chambers befitting a retired justice, Kuhn asked Burger to serve as a potential arbitrator in some asbestos litigation. The Flood case never came up. Kuhn’s handwritten inscription, dated May 27, 1987, read:
To the Chief Justice:
With fond regards to a great American
Best always,
Bowie K. Kuhn
Burger saved the book in his personal collection until his death in 1995. He never revealed publicly why he had switched his vote.
Aside from the parting shot from Kuhn, Flood received a warm reception during the 1978 season from an unexpected source—the St. Louis Cardinals. In May, Cardinals general manager Bing Devine—the same man who had traded him to the Phillies in October 1969—called Flood and invited him to St. Louis on June 9 for the 25th anniversary celebration of Anheuser-Busch’s ownership of the team. Devine asked Flood to be one of 10 guests of honor. Flood graciously accepted.
Before the lawsuit, Flood had been one of Gussie Busch’s favorite players. Busch later blamed Flood for turning baseball into a business for him. Busch, however, let bygones be bygones. So did Flood. On June 9, Gussie greeted Curt warmly. “You were always my favorite center fielder,” the beer baron said.
Flood donned a full Cardinals uniform, including a late-1970s pullover jersey with his name and number on the back. He rode through the tunnel at Busch Stadium in a Pontiac Firebird with “Flood 21” on the side. He stood up through one of the T-tops and waved at the adoring 45,487 fans. Nine years after his last at-bat in that ballpark, they gave him a standing ovation. Cardinal Nation loved Flood. And Flood loved the Cardinals. After all, he had sued baseball to stay in St. Louis, not to leave. Upon his return, the team’s management treated Flood the same way it treated Bob Gibson, Stan Musial, and Enos Slaughter. A personalized car drove each of the anointed players to a podium in the center of the field.
Gibson playfully pinched the cheek of his good friend and former roommate. Gibson lived in Omaha and had tried to stay in touch with Flood through phone calls and letters. Gibson even gave Flood the Cardinals uniform off his back that day. The two old friends ate dinner together at a St. Louis restaurant. Flood spent that weekend drunk but incredibly happy. It was a grand homecoming to St. Louis and a reminder of the happiest times of his life.
Flood returned from St. Louis euphoric. One afternoon before an A’s game, he put on his Cardinals uniform. He lent Gibson’s uniform to his 21-year-old radio producer, Larry Baer. Flood and Baer took the field; Flood took batting practice. Baer admired Flood’s graciousness and warmth. He was fascinated by the players’ reaction to Flood. A few thanked him for what he had done. But many players did not even know who he was. “A lot of people didn’t know how to react to him,” Baer said. “In a lot of ways, at least for the players, he was a conquering hero. The front office people were polite but not all that respectful.”
Flood’s return to baseball ended after less than a season of subpar color commentary with the A’s. Bercovich lost out on his bid to buy the club from Finley and did not repurchase the radio rights the following season. The best thing about the loss of his radio gig was that it curtailed Flood’s inebriated attempts to drive to and from the ballpark. He once lost his car in the stadium’s parking lot. Another time, he was pulled over for driving 20 miles per hour in the fast lane of the freeway. The police officers asked for his autograph and sent him on his way without a ticket. After that incident, however, he avoided Oakland’s many freeways and stuck to side streets.
Flood tried to earn some extra money in December 1978 by participating in the ABC Superstars competition in the Bahamas. There was a problem—he could neither run nor stay sober. Physically unable to compete against other ex-athletes, he dropped out of most of his events with the exception of bowling. In addition to his free trip to the Bahamas, he received the minimum $1,000 appearance fee.
While Flood was in the Bahamas, Pete Rose, the singles hitter often compared to Flood, signed a four-year contract with the Philadelphia Phillies for $800,000 a year. “I guess I thought that something like this might happen,” Flood said. “But not to this extreme.” Without his $300-a-week radio job, Flood sat in front of the television all day and all night drinking straight vodka. He even slept with the television on. He was afraid of the dark.
Flood’s friends believed that he had sacrificed too much to challenge the reserve clause. Reporters frequently asked him, if he had it to do all over again, would he? He usually said yes. The private answer was no. Flood, Karen said, was “not that altruistic.” If he had known that he would end up impoverished back in Oakland, he never would have done it. Flood’s financial situation forced him to confront that reality. “[O]ver the past seven years I’ve not made that much money. I’ve been stripped of my security,” he wrote in Sport magazine. “You always have a little selfish thing in the back of your mind which asks, ‘Did I give up too much to do this?’ I’ll never know.”
Some players acknowledged what he had done for them. Rod Carew, the California Angels’ new first baseman in 1979, thanked Flood for his five-year, $4 million contract. “I wanted to bring Curt to my first press conference with the Angels and thank him publicly, but I couldn’t find him,” Carew said upon arriving at spring training. “The last I heard he was in Oakland, but nobody could find him for me. But sooner or later I’ll find him, and when I do I’ll thank him.” Flood appreciated comments like Carew’s. “All around the league last season people were expressing appreciation to me in the same vein, and I always answered, ‘Hey, that’s cool.’ And I mean it.” He insisted that he was not “bitter.” Other times, Flood sensed a different tone in some people’s voices when they realized that he was Curt Flood. “There’s a negative undertone to it,” he said. “People will nod recognition and say, ‘Oh yeah, he’s the guy who wanted to ruin baseball.’ ”
Carew’s comments no doubt stemmed from the lessons of Marvin Miller. Joe Morgan said that Miller concluded every discussion with the players in spring training the same way: “Curt Fl
ood got you these things.” Miller understood the importance of educating the players about those who had made sacrifices for them.
Yet what Flood really needed from the union was a job. The NFL Players Association hired Dave Meggyesy—the St. Louis Cardinals linebacker who had quit in 1970 because football was “dehumanizing”— to open its West Coast office in San Francisco. Miller could have done the same thing for Flood, whose pension kicked in no earlier than at age 45. Many baseball players either grew up in or lived in California. Players from both leagues played games in the Bay Area. The job, even a token position that paid him $20,000 a year, would have helped Flood regain his dignity and made him feel that he was still part of the game.
In April 1979, Flood voiced second thoughts about the players’ skyrocketing salaries. “When I started my case,” Flood said in an interview with Newsweek, “we tried to get the owners to agree to a middle ground, where players would have some rights. But now it’s swung too far in the other direction.” Maybe it was the alcohol talking. Flood’s drinking problem, as much as the lingering bitterness from his lawsuit, probably kept him from finding a job in baseball. Before the 1980 season, he wrote Bill Veeck, Charlie Finley, George Steinbrenner, and recently fired Cardinals general manager Bing Devine. He received several nice replies. Veeck, who had repurchased the White Sox in 1975 after testifying against the owners at Flood’s trial, wrote “that if anything comes up, I’d be first on his list.” Veeck then hired Orlando Cepeda, a close friend of Flood’s, recently released from prison after a drug conviction. “I think people in baseball are holding a grudge,” Flood said. “It’s a very sad and disappointing part of my life.”