A Well-Paid Slave

For Flood, the rest of the trial after Jackie Robinson’s testimony was a “blur.” He was at loose ends in New York City. He shared a suite with Allan Zerman at the Warwick Hotel. They hung out at the hotel bar, which was across the street from ABC News. Flood and Zerman drank with Howard Cosell and Don Meredith after the sportscasters had signed their first contract to do a weekly sports broadcast known as Monday Night Football. They also met the brains behind ABC Sports, producer Roone Arledge.

Flood also went out for drinks with the two young Paul, Weiss associates working on his case, Bill Iverson and Max Gitter. They were only a few years younger than Flood, but whereas Flood’s baseball career was at an end, their legal careers were just beginning. For Iverson and Gitter, Flood’s trial was a joyride. On lunch breaks, Flood and his trial team retreated to a Chinese restaurant near the Bowery. Cosell and Red Smith joined them a few times, as did a few of Flood’s friends. One afternoon, Iverson and Gitter left the trial early to order the food. They became so enamored of the restaurant’s dumplings that they placed six orders—72 dumplings in all. Flood and the rest of the group ate only a dumpling or two apiece and left the other 60 dumplings on the table. Iverson and Gitter finished them all.

One of Flood’s lunch guests was the brother-in-law of Judy Pace, Oscar Brown Jr. An accomplished singer, songwriter, poet, and playwright, Brown was a theatrical revolutionary. He produced two Broadway musicals but spent his life challenging the establishment. In 1967, he put on a revue, Opportunity Please Knock, with the Blackstone Rangers street gang in his native Chicago. In December 1969, he cast former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali—during his exile from the ring—in the starring role of a Broadway musical, Buck White. Wearing an Afro wig, Ali sang the chorus of the title song with his black fist raised in the air:

Critics panned Buck White, which had only four Broadway performances. Ali, after mixed reviews, waited for the courts to reverse his draft-evasion conviction before returning to boxing. But Brown and his wife, Jean Pace, returned a month later with another musical revue, Joy, which was in its fifth month of a successful off-Broadway run during Flood’s trial. Brown, like Flood, was his own man. They bonded in New York City. Brown even came to Flood’s trial.

Flood did not lack for female companionship. His Warwick Hotel suite was a revolving door of beautiful women—a black schoolteacher, a beautiful blonde, and even a few prostitutes. The secretaries at Paul, Weiss swooned over him when he walked through the halls of the law firm. He looked and talked like a movie star. Women could not get enough of him, and he did not turn many of them away.

Women served as a welcome distraction from Flood’s problems with his photography business. Feeling the pressure in the months leading up to his trial, he had neglected his business interests. While the trial proceeded in New York City, Marian Jorgensen stayed in St. Louis trying to keep the power company from turning off the electricity at Flood’s photography studios. More creditors closed in on him. The demise of the business was imminent.

After Robinson, Greenberg, and Brosnan testified, Goldberg returned to the campaign trail—a move that must have disappointed Cooper. Cooper wanted to prove that he was a competent judge under the brightest possible spotlight. That spotlight dimmed in Goldberg’s absence. Goldberg had promised Cooper that Flood’s trial would be his first priority. He had also promised that Flood’s case would take only one day. He had broken both promises.

Flood’s biggest disappointment with his ongoing trial was that no current players testified on his behalf. “So far as I know no one volunteered,” Flood said on June 1. “I understand the situation. If a guy comes here and publicly says I’m right, he could be risking his future career in baseball.” Miller and Moss explained the players’ predicament to Flood and the press. “Some of Curt’s friends indicated to him that they would like to testify but were fearful of jeopardizing their baseball careers,” Moss said. “They said they hope Curt understands—and I think he does.”

Not a single active player came to the trial to show his support by sitting in the gallery. The players were the ones paying for it; they could at the very least have come to the trial to see what they were getting for their money. The Cardinals played night games May 26 and 27 in New York against the Mets. Flood’s best friend in baseball, Bob Gibson, started the series finale on the afternoon of Thursday, May 28. Flood asked Gibson for two tickets that day. Flood and Zerman skipped the trial to watch Gibson strike out 11 Mets at Shea Stadium during a 9-2 Cardinals win. “Curt Flood still likes baseball,” Gibson told reporters, citing the ticket request as proof. The night before he pitched, Gibson had stopped by for several hours at Flood’s Warwick Hotel suite. But Gibson made good on his promise to stay “a few hundred paces” behind Flood to avoid any fallout. Gibson and a few of Flood’s former Cardinals teammates could easily have come to lower Manhattan one of those mornings and quietly watched Flood’s trial from the back of the courtroom. They never did. “I know we talked about it, and I know we were aware of it,” Joe Torre recalled. “I can’t give you a good reason why we weren’t there.”

Miller later admitted that one of his biggest tactical mistakes was not encouraging the players to be seen watching the trial and leaving the courthouse. “[I]f I had it to do over again I would say, ‘For God’s sake, this man is a colleague of yours!’ ” Miller wrote. “‘What happens to him could have a dramatic impact on your life, so when your team comes to New York, if you’ve got a night game, come on down to Foley Square for a couple of hours during the day and show him some support.’ ” Miller blamed himself. But he had been on the job for only four years; he and the players were not as united as they would later be.

As soon as Flood’s lawyers rested his case, the owners again asked Cooper to dismiss the lawsuit. Hughes argued that Flood had not proved any of his claims. Flood was “obviously not a slave” because, as Cooper had said in denying the preliminary injunction, Flood “was free to quit and refuse to play for Philadelphia.” All of Flood’s witnesses, except Flood himself, favored modification, not elimination, of the reserve clause. This did not amount to an antitrust violation. Hughes reminded the judge that Toolson exempted baseball from the federal antitrust laws. Hughes characterized Flood’s lawsuit as merely a union negotiating tactic. Any changes in the reserve clause, he said, must be accomplished at the negotiating table. Baseball, Hughes argued, also was exempt from Flood’s lawsuit under federal labor law. The players, according to this theory, could choose either to join forces as a union and negotiate collectively with the owners or to sue the owners under the antitrust laws, but not both. Relying on this “labor exemption,” Hughes argued that the Players Association, or one of its members, could not bring an antitrust lawsuit about the reserve clause while engaging in labor negotiations about the same issue. Finally, Hughes cited the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision in the Milwaukee Braves case as proof that baseball’s federal antitrust exemption trumped Flood’s state and common law anti-trust claims.

Flood’s biggest asset for the remainder of his trial was the leadership of Jay Topkis. In a stirring response, Topkis told Cooper that “we are fortunate to live in a time of change, great change,” reminded him that the Supreme Court had struck down its long-standing decisions permitting racial segregation, and argued that it was time for Toolson to go the way of the Court’s other decisions that restricted personal freedom. Topkis understood if Cooper was waiting for the Supreme Court to overrule Toolson. But the state antitrust laws applied to insurance companies; there was no reason they should not apply to baseball. Cooper, as a federal judge, was not bound by decisions of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And as for Flood not being a slave, Topkis remarked: “The only difference that I can see between peonage and involuntary servitude on the one hand and Curt Flood’s position on the other is that he was being paid $90,000 a year. That makes him a mighty high-paid slave. There is no doubt about that. But you remember Winston Churchill’s great remark about the lady of easy virtue who was paid a great deal of money and the label that was still hung on her, the same thing is true here. As long as Curt Flood has pressed down upon him the restraint of base-ball, he must feel himself a slave because, in fact, he is a slave. To use his skills, he must submit to slavery.”

Topkis employed his ample rhetorical skills to remind Cooper about Flood’s courage. “I would ask your Honor to consider what a remarkable sacrifice it is that this young man is making by coming into this court,” Topkis said. “He is at the peak of his powers today as a baseball player, or he was two months ago, being compensated quite handsomely. But he is putting that all aside, saying, ‘To me freedom is worth more.’ ”

Kuhn’s problems as commissioner continued to mount. The city of Seattle was suing baseball because after a single season the expansion Pilots had left town to become the Milwaukee Brewers. Kuhn was fending off criticism for his lenient suspension of pitcher Denny McLain. Even his self-described “Washington mentor,” lawyer Paul Porter, advised Kuhn on a limousine ride from New York to Washington to abandon his “high moral tone.” Kuhn replied: “I think it’s the commissioner’s job to strike a high moral tone, come what may.”

A high moral tone was all that Kuhn had left after the union and the owners agreed in principle to a new labor agreement, known as the 1970 Basic Agreement. The owners agreed to allow the players to take future grievances, except those involving “integrity issues,” to an independent arbitrator. Kuhn acceded to the arrangement after a chance meeting with Miller on a midtown Manhattan street corner. Miller explained that the union intended to inundate the commissioner with grievances and that every decision Kuhn made would alienate either an owner or the union. In the long run, independent grievance arbitration turned out to be a powerful weapon for the players to resolve disputes with management and another way for them to attack the reserve clause besides the courts. In the short run, the decision to permit independent grievance arbitration eviscerated Kuhn’s authority. “[T]he Lords of Baseball have sold out the commissioner,” Dick Young wrote a few days before Flood’s trial. “They have peddled away his power. They have conceded, at last, that he is their commissioner, not the players’ commissioner.”

With his only remaining role to protect the game’s integrity, Kuhn embarked on a moral crusade against pitcher Jim Bouton and his new book, Ball Four, a behind-the-scenes account of Bouton’s 1969 season as a knuckleballer for the Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros. Bouton’s irreverent look at the game portrayed his former New York Yankees teammates as Peeping Toms, described Mickey Mantle drinking too much and slamming bus windows in the faces of kids asking for his autograph, and revealed players popping amphetamine pills they called “greenies.” Bouton’s Ball Four made Brosnan’s The Long Season look tame.

On June 1, Kuhn called Bouton into his 20th-floor, corner office on Fifth Avenue, which Bouton described as “decorated in Early Authority—paneled walls with pictures of presidents and a large desk between two American flags.” Kuhn tried to persuade Bouton to sign a document that repudiated everything in his book and placed the blame on his editor, sportswriter Leonard Shecter. Bouton, accompanied by Miller and Moss, refused. Kuhn then spent the next three hours urging Bouton not to reveal what had happened at their meeting. The commissioner let Bouton off with a warning and turned his book into a bestseller.

Kuhn’s two days of testimony represented an argument against change. Kuhn testified that “baseball as we know it simply could not survive” without the reserve clause. “Baseball as we know it,” Leonard Koppett wrote after the trial, was an elusive concept. It meant 16, 20, or 24 teams; 154 or 162 games; natural grass or artificial turf; a dead or lively ball; big or little gloves; 400 or 600 major leaguers; two or four umpires; day or night games; franchises in 11 Northeast cities or 16 franchise shifts in 17 years; massive farm systems or a free-agent draft; complete-game pitchers or starters followed by relievers. “The only aspect ‘preserved’ by the reserve system,” Koppett wrote, “is the reserve system itself.”

Without the reserve clause, Kuhn predicted, the rich teams would sign all the star players, the poor teams would go out of business, and the operation of a league would be impossible. Major League Baseball would devolve into an “exhibition business.” He based his predictions on the “chaotic conditions [that] prevailed when there was no reserve clause” in professional baseball from 1871 to 1879, when players jumped to rival teams and leagues and fixed games. Kuhn’s argument, however, lacked historical context. He was comparing baseball in Reconstruction-era America in the 1870s to modern-day baseball in the 1970s. The argument ignored the industrialization of America, the evolution of the game, the rise of the modern print and electronic media, and a century of progress.

Kuhn rejected all Miller’s proposed reserve clause modifications by rigidly analyzing their effects on four criteria: (1) integrity of the game; (2) economics of the sport; (3) mechanical workability; and (4) equality of competition. Topkis countered on cross-examination that the reserve clause accomplished none of these goals except to limit player salaries. Player salaries constituted 59 percent of team expenses in 1879 compared with 22 percent in 1950 and 21.5 percent in 1970. It certainly did not help equalize competition. Four teams won 63 of the 100 pennants from 1920 to 1969.

Both Kuhn and National League president Chub Feeney testified that free agency would compromise the game’s integrity by inducing players to cheat. Feeney raised the possibility of a potential free agent committing a key error during the pennant race and then joining the opposing team the following season. According to Feeney, “the public’s confidence in the integrity of the game would be shattered.” Feeney did not explain what incentive a free agent would have to perform below his best or what incentive another team would have to sign a player who did so. Kuhn made an equally implausible prediction that free agency would stifle trades and end offseason discussion of baseball known as the Hot Stove League.

On June 2, after Cardinals general manager Bing Devine’s testimony, former Cardinals catcher Joe Garagiola brought 13 minutes of promanagement cheer. Garagiola’s image had come a long way since his heated 1947 encounter with Jackie Robinson. During a routine double play at first base, Garagiola stepped on Robinson’s heel. Robinson—who had been spiked by Cardinals outfielder Enos Slaughter a few weeks earlier—exchanged angry words with Garagiola before Robinson’s next time at-bat. Garagiola, according to Robinson, “made a crack about my race.” Umpire Beans Reardon stepped in between them. Dodgers coach Clyde Sukeforth, knowing that Rickey had ordered Robinson not to fight back, tried to push Robinson away. Nothing more came of the incident. Garagiola spent the rest of his life trying to make people forget that it had ever happened. The gregarious host of NBC’s Today show, the game show He Said, She Said, and several radio programs, Garagiola endeared himself to a subsequent generation of baseball fans as one of the voices of television’s Game of the Week.

The only nondefendant in baseball to testify against Flood, Garagiola made light of the system of player ownership years later. “Being traded is like celebrating your hundredth birthday,” he said. “It might not be the happiest occasion in the world, but consider the alternatives.” Garagiola lacked Flood’s vision to do just that.

Another former player who testified against Flood was American League president Joe Cronin. As the Washington Senators’ player-manager, Cronin was traded to the Boston Red Sox for $225,000 and shortstop Lyn Lary by his uncle-in-law, Senators owner Clark Griffith. After sending Cronin to the Red Sox, Griffith and the Senators never won another pennant. Cronin testified that Griffith—known during his pitching days as “the Old Fox”—was “one of the finest baseball talents (and one of the finest human beings) he had ever known.”

Topkis then read Griffith’s testimony before a 1951 House subcommittee in which Griffith said he had “jumped his reserve clause and joined the American League at the time of its formation.” Griffith had been instrumental in persuading other National League players to jump their contracts and join the league known as the junior circuit.

The defense’s next four witnesses were baseball executives— Cincinnati Reds president Francis L. Dale, Montreal Expos president and CEO John McHale, California Angels president Robert Reynolds, and Kansas City Royals owner Ewing Kauffman. They testified that they would not have purchased their teams without baseball’s antitrust exemption and without the reserve clause.

Of the four, Kauffman was the most impressive witness. In 1950, the Royals’ owner founded a pharmaceutical company, Marion Laboratories, in his 500-square-foot basement with $5,000 and turned it into a three-acre laboratory worth millions. In 1968, he bought the Royals as an expansion team and started a baseball academy in an effort to find young men with the right athletic gifts to turn them into professional baseball players. On the stand, he toed the party line about baseball not being able to survive without the reserve clause. But when Topkis asked him how much he would pay Curt Flood on the open market, Kauffman said $125,000 a year and even more than that if Flood was willing to sign a long-term deal.

As their last two witnesses, the owners called economist John Clark and their labor negotiator, John Gaherin. A veteran negotiator for the railroad and newspaper industries, Gaherin was the owners’ most credible witness. He countered many of Marvin Miller’s assertions that the owners had not negotiated about the reserve clause in good faith. He said that Miller and the Players Association had thrown out ideas about how to modify the reserve clause, but they had not made any formal proposals. He also said that the union’s decision to fund Flood’s lawsuit undermined their efforts to negotiate a new labor agreement. Gaherin came off as a professional negotiator rather than a baseball partisan.

Between rebuttals by Miller and Gaherin, Flood’s legal team called its best witness last—former Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns, and Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck. Known as the P. T. Barnum of baseball because of his crazy promotions, Veeck was not so much a clown as a visionary. He originated exploding scoreboards, bat days, ball days, cap days, and names on the backs of uniforms. He would do almost anything to help his team at the box office and in the standings.

Veeck is most famous for sending a midget—3-foot-7-inch, 65-pound Eddie Gaedel—to bat with the Browns. Gaedel jumped out of a papier-mâché cake before the game, pinch-hit for the leadoff batter, and stepped to the plate wearing the number ¹/8 and holding a toy bat. “Eddie,” Veeck had earlier told Gaedel, “I’m going to be up on the roof with a high-powered rifle watching every move you make. If you so much as look as if you’re going to swing, I’m going to shoot you dead.” Gaedel walked on four pitches. Detroit Tigers pitcher Bob Cain was laughing so hard that balls three and four sailed over Gaedel’s head. Cain’s catcher, Bob Swift, caught the pitches on his knees. The Browns immediately sent in a pinch runner. The following day, American League president Will Harridge banned Gaedel from baseball. Veeck claimed Harridge’s ruling “discriminate[d] against the little people.” Veeck demanded that Harridge set a minimum height requirement and wanted to know whether diminutive Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto was “a short ballplayer or a tall midget.” Veeck befriended Gaedel and hired him for several other baseball-related promotions until Gaedel’s death in 1961. The last line of Veeck’s Hall of Fame plaque reads: “A champion of the little guy.”

As the owner of the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, Veeck installed movable outfield fences. A gadget lowered the fences when the Brewers batted and raised them for opposing teams. In Cleveland, he moved the fences in and out depending on the opposing team’s power. Both leagues immediately outlawed Veeck’s fence manipulation. “I have tried always not to break any rules,” Veeck testified at Flood’s trial, “but to test highly their elasticity.”

Veeck purchased the Brewers in 1941 with $11 in his pocket and a $25,000 loan to cover the team’s pressing debts and left the game in 1961 after selling his share of the Chicago White Sox for $1.1 million. The son of the president of the Chicago Cubs, Veeck had been thrown out of several boarding schools and dropped out of Kenyon College upon learning that his father was dying of leukemia. The younger Veeck worked for the Cubs from 1933 until 1941. He lost part of his right leg after injuring his foot as a World War II marine. Over the years, he had bought and sold a number of franchises: the Brewers, Indians, Browns, minor league Miami Marlins, and White Sox. He persuaded Hank Greenberg to join the Indians’ front office in 1948. The two men later bought the White Sox and were best friends. Veeck likely influenced Greenberg to testify at Flood’s trial.

In his quest for success, Veeck disregarded not only size but also age and race. Although disputed by some historians, he claimed that Judge Landis had scuttled his plan to purchase the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1942 season and stock the team with black players. He signed Larry Doby, the American League’s first black player, in July 1947, only a few months after Jackie Robinson had broken in with the Dodgers. The following year, Veeck signed Negro league pitching legend Satchel Paige. Paige and Doby helped the 1948 Indians become the first team to draw more than 2 million fans and capture Cleveland’s last World Series trophy. Paige also pitched for Veeck with the Browns and the Marlins.

Veeck was a man ahead of his time. In 1952, he suggested at an American League meeting that the owners increase the visiting team’s share of the gate receipts and pool their television revenues. “After all,” Veeck reasoned, “it takes two teams to put on a game.” After Veeck received a second for his proposal, the owners voted against it, 7-1. The NFL adopted Veeck’s television idea in 1961 at the urging of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, which helped football maintain competitive balance and overtake baseball as America’s most popular professional sport.

For nearly 30 years, Veeck had been on record as opposing the reserve clause. While taking night law school classes at Northwestern in 1941, Veeck wrote Judge Landis a letter that described the reserve clause as “legally and morally indefensible.” Veeck recalled Landis’s tersely written response by heart: “Some very knowledgeable fellow once said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and you just proved him a wizard.”

Veeck sold the White Sox in June 1961 after doctors at the Mayo Clinic had told him to slow down. He had been smoking four packs of cigarettes and drinking a case of beer a day. He had lost the rest of his right leg to subsequent operations. He had suffered a chronic case of walking pneumonia, and had been coughing so hard that he was blacking out.

For Veeck, however, there was no slowing down. Even though he retired to a farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he purchased Suffolk Downs racetrack outside Boston. He also wrote, with Ed Linn, two of the best baseball autobiographies ever published, Veeck As in Wreck and The Hustler’s Handbook. An insomniac and voracious reader, Veeck read an average of five books a week.

Miller, Topkis, and Goldberg all spoke with Veeck about testifying. It did not take much persuading. During a three-hour dinner with Miller in Washington, Veeck readily agreed to testify. Topkis and Gitter visited with Veeck for several hours at Suffolk Downs. The two lawyers barely got a word in as Veeck regaled them with stories just as he had done with Miller. Topkis, who, like Miller, had read Veeck’s books, knew what to expect. “I was prepared to love him and be charmed by him, and I was,” Topkis recalled.

Veeck refused to allow his desire to return to baseball to prevent him from testifying against the owners. He had already revealed many of their foibles in his two books. He had testified against them in 1966 during the Milwaukee Braves relocation case. A prior speaking engagement, however, had prevented him from testifying May 19 or 20 for Flood. Veeck initially agreed in a phone conversation with Goldberg to testify on May 21, but Veeck could not make it that day either. He wanted to testify June 1—in the middle of the defense’s case. The owners’ lawyers balked at the idea of interrupting their defense. Flood’s lawyers agreed to call him as a rebuttal witness.

Veeck arrived in New York City late on the night of June 9. The next morning, Topkis and Iverson met Veeck at 7:45 in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where they ate salmon omelets and discussed his testimony. Iverson was concerned that during cross-examination the owners—by bringing up midgets and movable fences—would make Veeck look like a crackpot. Veeck told Iverson not to worry. He pulled out a large embossed book that American League owners had given him in 1961 after he had sold the White Sox. The book contained a list of his accomplishments and a citation that read as follows:

It is a matter of deep regret to the American League that Bill Veeck has been forced by illness to divest himself of his interests in the Chicago White Sox and to resign from the presidency of that club. The American League expresses its appreciation to Bill Veeck for his many valuable contributions to baseball, the league and the Chicago club, and extends sincere wishes for his speedy recovery to good health and to the personal vibrancy which has so characterized his career in baseball.

Resolution unanimously adopted by the members of the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs at its meeting in Chicago on Monday, June 26, 1961.

The owners thought that Veeck was dying. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic believed that lung cancer had spread to his brain. He turned out to have a chronic concussion exacerbated by the coughing fits that caused his blackouts. His health improved with rest. He spited his American League adversaries by living an additional 25 years and testifying against them at Flood’s trial.

Before his testimony, Veeck waited in Cooper’s courtroom to be called to the witness stand. He wore an open-neck, wide-collared shirt and no tie. He hated to wear ties on account of a skin condition. He ignored the No Smoking signs in the courtroom and lit a cigarette. Miller sat there bemused by Veeck’s wearing an open-collared shirt and smoking in federal court. Goldberg, who had declined Topkis’s and Iverson’s repeated invitations to join them at breakfast, was horrified. “Bill,” Goldberg said, “you can’t smoke in the courtroom.” Veeck pulled up his right pants leg and extinguished the cigarette in an ashtray carved into his wooden leg.

Fortunately for Veeck, Topkis conducted his direct examination. After reviewing Veeck’s background, Topkis asked whether he had received any awards from the American League. “Well, I presume it was an award,” Veeck said. “It was a very nice citation or call it what you will. I have a feeling that maybe it was kind of in memoriam.” The crowd laughed. Topkis then read the entire resolution into the court record. The owners could not portray his witness as a kook.

Veeck set himself apart from Flood’s other witnesses because of his quick wit and because, in Topkis’s words, “he had thought about these issues more than anyone else.” Veeck opposed the complete elimination of the reserve clause, but phasing in a different form of the reserve clause “wouldn’t dislocate baseball horrendously and wouldn’t cause any chaotic conditions.” Veeck advocated seven-year contracts like the ones between movie stars and Hollywood studios, which called for automatic raises at designated option periods. He suggested a system similar to pro football’s, in which the player played out his one-year option and joined a new team as long as the new team was willing to pay his former team mutually-agreed-upon financial compensation. He also endorsed signing players to a combined major league-minor league contract for a period of years.

Modifying the reserve clause, Veeck argued, would benefit management. The wealthiest teams, Veeck said, could not sign all the best players. He attributed the Yankees’ dominance not to their wealth but to their scouts and added, “though it grieves me to say it, they had probably the best administrator in the game in a fellow by the name of George Weiss, with whom I did not see eye to eye on much of anything except that he is a very talented man.” Veeck believed winning was “not a questionof dollars” but “a question of the ability of the people operating and their willingness to work hard.”

Veeck also recognized the principles at stake: “Everyone should once in their business career have the right to determine their future for themselves.” He envisioned more equitable contractual negotiations and distribution of talent. Teams could not stockpile players if the players were free to negotiate with another organization where they could receive more playing time. He believed that teams recouped their investments in their players after five major league seasons.

Unlike most of the owners, Veeck understood why Flood felt like a slave and why the current system was bad for the game. “I think that it would certainly help the players and the game itself to no longer be one of the few places in which there is human bondage,” Veeck said. “I think it would be to the benefit of the reputation of the game of baseball. . . . I still think it is a game that deserves to be perpetuated and to restore it to the position of honor it once held, and I think this would be a step in that direction. At least it would be fair.”

Kuhn’s lawyer, Victor Kramer, cross-examined Veeck. “I would say I found Veeck As in Wreck an extremely enjoyable book,” Kramer announced. “I recommend it to everyone within the sound of my voice.” Kramer then turned Veeck’s literary genius against him. He adopted the same strategy that baseball’s lawyers had used in the Milwaukee case: He read sentences from Veeck’s books and asked Veeck whether he agreed or disagreed with them. A contrarian by nature, Veeck disagreed several times with statements from his own books.

Goldberg, in one of his few speaking roles since the beginning of the trial, stood up and objected to Kramer’s marking selected pages from Veeck’s books as exhibits. Goldberg wanted Veeck’s entire books entered into the record. Goldberg had already been burned by the owners’ selective quotation of Jackie Robinson’s prior statements. Judge Cooper refused to admit the entirety of both books into evidence. Instead, they compromised on the admission of a complete chapter.

Despite a few early inconsistencies, Veeck was too quick for both Kramer and Judge Cooper on cross-examination. Cooper asked Veeck to stick to yes-or-no answers when asked yes-or-no questions on cross-examination. “I know that you are a colorful witness,” Cooper said, “and it is good to have a colorful witness, but would you remember that it is important to address yourself to the particular question.” “I’m sorry to have spoiled your morning,” Veeck replied.

Kramer asked Veeck a hypothetical question about an unhappy star shortstop who wanted just compensation and therefore wanted to leave the team. “I find that question impossible to answer,” Veeck said, “because I can’t anticipate as an owner, when I was an owner, that I would have a shortstop who would be so unhappy with being with me.” Kramer also asked Veeck why he seemed to be so fond of the American League owners. “I think it is that I don’t have to associate with them as directly,” Veeck replied. During a recess, however, he told a reporter that the owners have “intractable minds that respond only to necessity.” After an hour and a half, Veeck stepped down from the witness stand. He walked out of the courthouse and smiled for waiting photographers.

Only baseball’s outsiders—black, Jewish, pitcher-turned-author, and maverick—had the guts to support Flood. Robinson, Greenberg, Brosnan, and Veeck brought an enormous amount of publicity to Flood’s case. The American people—69 percent of them according to a September poll—believed that the reserve clause was “necessary.” But these four men reminded everyone why it needed to be modified.

John Gaherin briefly rebutted Miller’s third and final appearance on the witness stand, and both the plaintiff and the defense rested. Lawyers from both sides asked Judge Cooper to decide the case in their favor; Cooper refused to rule. Instead, he ordered post-trial briefs due July 7 with replies due July 13. Cooper’s decision was going to come in the form of a written opinion.

Just past 3:37 p.m. on June 11, Cooper concluded Flood’s trial after 3 weeks, 15 trial days, 21 witnesses, 56 exhibits, and 2,078 pages of transcript. Cooper singled out each of the lead attorneys in the courtroom for praise. He reminded the audience that Hughes was the past president of the New York County Lawyers Association, a subtle reference to the only local bar organization that had refused to testify against him at his confirmation hearings. He praised Goldberg’s “leadership” as “exemplary” and told Topkis “your hair-trigger alertness was remarkable and at times truly fascinating.”

“As to the case itself,” Cooper said, “it really is a cause in the truest classical sense. Interwoven with the rights of the litigants named in the caption of this matter is baseball itself. This is enough to compel us to proceed with utmost care. . . . It goes without saying that we are resolved to call them as we see them as they come across the plate.”

“The law doesn’t require a judge to anesthetize his emotional reflections. ‘Only death yields such complete dispassionateness, for dispassion signifies indifference. Much harm is done by the myth that merely by putting on a black robe and taking the oath of office as a judge a man ceases to be human and strips himself of all predilections and becomes a passionateless unthinking man.’

For three weeks, Cooper had tried hard to prove to the world that he was an erudite jurist and not a raving madman. He had no intention, however, of following Frank’s thinking in Gardella. Cooper’s true feelings about the case came out in the ways he bullied Flood, browbeat Brosnan, and bristled at Veeck, yet ingratiated himself with celebrities including Robinson, Kuhn, Rozelle, and Garagiola. Cooper was a prisoner of the game’s establishment. And the two Supreme Court precedents in base-ball’s favor did not give him much room to prove otherwise.

Flood was not present for Veeck’s testimony or Cooper’s closing remarks. Nor was he there June 8 for the cross-examination of the owners’ economist, during NHL president Clarence Campbell’s May 26 testimony, or for Topkis’s stirring defense against the owners’ motion to dismiss.

Flood most likely retreated to the Westchester County home of his literary collaborator, Richard Carter. For a month in early summer, he lived at Carter’s home in Ossining, about 25 miles outside of New York City, ostensibly working on his book but mostly getting drunk. He admitted later that he spent most of that summer “bedding and boozing.” The boozing was more evident. He began each day with a vodka martini. Members of Flood’s legal team noticed his drinking during the trial. It got worse at Carter’s home.

Carter’s 12-year-old son, John, idolized Flood. One afternoon, John invited several friends over to play some backyard baseball. Not believing their good fortune that they had a major leaguer in their midst, they invited Flood to join them. Flood was so drunk that he was in no condition to do anything. He uncorked a wild throw and heaved the ball into the woods behind the Carter home. The boys never found the ball. Flood retreated inside the house.

St. Louis—despite Flood’s protestations about being traded from the Cardinals—no longer felt like home. The lawsuits against Curt Flood & Associates and Flood personally represented the least of his problems. The IRS was on his tail. Curt Flood & Associates owed the government $6,888.42 in unpaid withholding taxes. The IRS auctioned off a camera and camera stand from one of Flood’s two St. Louis photo studios. The telephones had been disconnected. Flood’s attorney, Allan Zerman, no longer knew if the corporation was even in business. Neither did Flood. He took no part, nor did he want any part, in his business affairs.

In early August, Marian Jorgensen forced Flood to confront the reality that his portrait and photography businesses were finished. Flood lacked the business sense, the desire, and the money to keep them afloat. The failure to file annual corporate disclosure forms with the state of Missouri by the end of 1970 spelled the official end of Curt Flood & Associates, Inc.

The demise of Flood’s business interests in St. Louis also led to the end of his close friendship with Marian Jorgensen. Flood decided to clear his head by returning to Denmark. So Marian packed up the St. Louis apartment and moved back to Oakland. Marian’s family money began to run out. She went to work for Oakland’s welfare department and later moved in with her son about an hour outside Oakland. She never remarried and became reclusive, eventually severing her ties with Carl, Flood’s sister, Barbara, and Flood himself. Without Marian, Flood had no support system, no way of coping, other than vodka.

Denmark helped Flood escape from reality. He initially checked into the same Copenhagen hotel as the Rolling Stones, but the groupies who pounded on the door of the band’s room and bombarded it with phone calls reminded Flood of his hectic life at home. He checked out and rented a room that overlooked a harbor in Vedbaek, a suburb 15 miles north of Copenhagen. He grew a goatee, bought a sketch pad and a beret, and sat in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens flirting with Danish women. He enjoyed the anonymity of a black expatriate artist much more than the constant celebrity of a major league ballplayer. “In Denmark, I can walk down the street and nobody recognizes me,” Flood said. “I can have a beer and nobody recognizes me. I feel free here.” He also was free from answering reporters’ questions about his lawsuit against baseball.

On July 7, both sides filed massive post-trial briefs that set up their arguments for the inevitable appeal. The 88-page brief filed by Flood’s legal team exposed inconsistencies in baseball’s position. In Federal Base-ball and Toolson, baseball’s lawyers had encouraged the Supreme Court to exempt the game from the federal antitrust laws because the state antitrust laws still applied. Flood’s lawyers recognized that no trial court was going to reverse two Supreme Court precedents but that it might rule in Flood’s favor on state law grounds. If baseball was not interstate commerce, as Federal Baseball had claimed, then it was intrastate commerce subject to state law. State antitrust law, therefore, might provide the federal court of appeals or the Supreme Court with another way of ruling in Flood’s favor.

The opening of the owners’ 133-page brief drove a wedge between Flood and the Players Association by asking: “Who is the real plaintiff in this action?” The owners’ lawyers pointed out that the union was paying for the litigation and that the goals of the union (modifying the reserve clause) and of Flood (eliminating the reserve clause) were at odds. On appeal, they sought to make Flood and his enormous personal sacrifices irrelevant. They wanted to remove the human face from the lawsuit and expose it as a mere labor negotiation tactic. They, too, were looking ahead for ways that the Supreme Court could rule in their favor.

On July 13, Flood and the owners’ lawyers filed short replies to each other’s briefs. A month later, on August 12, Cooper issued his decision. Cooper’s 47-page typewritten opinion said what both Cooper and everyone else already knew before Flood’s trial: He could not overrule the Supreme Court’s decision in Toolson upholding baseball’s antitrust exemption. He rejected Flood’s state and common law claims as preempted by federal law. He found it unnecessary to rule on whether federal labor law also thwarted Flood’s antitrust claims. Finally, he dismissed Flood’s claims of involuntary servitude because Flood “has the right to retire and to embark upon a different enterprise outside organized baseball.” After reading this section of Cooper’s opinion, Red Smith wrote: “To the Four Freedoms of Franklin Roosevelt—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—Judge Cooper has added freedom to starve.”

Prior to the trial we gained the impression that there was a view, held by many, that baseball’s reserve system had occasioned rampant abuse and that it should be abolished. We were struck by the fact, however, that the testimony at trial failed to support that criticism; we find no general or widespread disregard of the extremely important position the player occupies.

Clearly, the preponderance of the credible proof does not favor elimination of the reserve clause.

Cooper also predicted that the solution to this lawsuit lay at the bargaining table. He rejected Flood’s argument that the owners had refused to negotiate in good faith and expressed optimism that “the reserve clause can be fashioned so as to find acceptance by player and club.” Cooper concluded: “We are bound by the law as we find it and by our obligation to ‘call it as we see it.’ ” He ordered judgment for the defendants.

Bowie Kuhn commended Judge Cooper’s decision. “I am particularly pleased,” Kuhn read from a prepared statement, “that the court has recognized the need for a reserve system and has recognized further that baseball has not disregarded the extremely important position the player occupies.” The commissioner used Cooper’s decision to urge the players to abandon Flood’s lawsuit and settle their issues with the reserve clause at the bargaining table.

Miller was unfazed by Cooper’s opinion or Kuhn’s response. “Judge Cooper only held that it is up to the Supreme Court to overrule the Supreme Court,” he said. “I think everyone knew that it would be very difficult for a district court to overrule the Supreme Court.” Miller chided Kuhn and his call for negotiations as disingenuous given that the union and the owners had agreed not to negotiate about the reserve clause while Flood’s lawsuit was pending. The owners, moreover, had never wanted to negotiate about the reserve clause when there was no lawsuit. Miller welcomed sincere efforts by management to modify the reserve clause but doubted any real possibility of change.

Arthur Goldberg heard the news while hiking with a half dozen reporters in the Adirondacks. For this reluctant campaigner, the 10-mile hike was the highlight of the campaign trail. He ditched his conservative suit and vest for a backpack, a sweater, khaki pants, and a jacket. He spoke with environmentalists, slept overnight in a pup tent, and washed in a stream. He won over a few reporters, who discovered beneath Goldberg’s aloof and somewhat pompous exterior a real human being.

Phillies general manager John Quinn, informed of Judge Cooper’s decision while in Hampton, Virginia, repeated his offer that if Flood “wants to come back and play for the Phillies we’d be happy to take him back.” But Quinn knew that Flood would never play for Philadelphia. On August 31, the Cardinals sent the Phillies Bob Browning, an 18-year-old minor league pitcher on the disabled list with a broken collarbone, as final compensation in the Flood deal.

In Denmark, Flood read about Judge Cooper’s decision in the International Herald Tribune. He, too, viewed it as a perfunctory step on the way to the Supreme Court. Flood told reporters that Denmark was his “permanent home.” He had begun negotiations to buy a restaurant-bar but was having trouble obtaining a liquor license. His only American visitor was his onetime girlfriend, Judy Pace. American soldiers on leave from Germany kept him abreast of the baseball season. They told him about the success of Bob Gibson (who won the 1970 Cy Young Award), the failure of the Cardinals (who finished fourth in the NL East), and the World Series victory by the Orioles.

Flood’s financial problems began to weigh on his conscience. The IRS and other creditors hounded him. He owed his ex-wife, Beverly, back alimony and child support. He realized that it looked like he was running away from his debts. He viewed Copenhagen no longer as “a vacation resort but a jail.”