However, it was hardly a happily-ever-after time for Flood’s children. I think that if I can afford this place, then I think I oughta have it.”
#Curt flood free possible other professional#
“Not because I’m a professional athlete or even a (Black man) even, but I am a human being regardless of what I am. “How can they do this?” Flood asked during a press conference outside the home. Then, accompanied by armed guards, Flood and his family moved in while local and national television reporters were there to capture it. He received a victory in the form of a temporary injunction. He sued the property owner for the right to move into the home. 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.Īlthough shocked and outraged, Flood had a measured reply. The agent was met by the property owner, who was brandishing a shotgun. He thought he’d found the perfect place to live out in the Tri-Valley in Alamo.Īfter agreeing to the “high-priced rental terms” - $290 per month for the spacious, $35,000 ranch home - their real estate agent went to the home to secure the deal.
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. How do you regain that?”įor 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 you lose your dignity you lose an awful lot. “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. He later told his wife he was so shaken that he sat naked on a chair in the crowded locker room and silently cried. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood is shown, March 1968. The man grabbed a long stick with a nail on the end of it to pick up Flood’s jersey and pants, then dropped them onto a nearby stack with the dirty gear belonging to the other Black players. 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. He led Flood out to a back alley to catch a taxi ride to another hotel where the Black players were staying.įlood 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. 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. That’s where Flood got his introduction to the Jim Crow laws of legalized racial segregation. 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, Fla. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s.īut even fewer still remember the uncomfortable stories of racism Flood endured, which tormented him for much of his life. He was an even better defensive center fielder than Willie Mays, winning seven straight National League Gold Glove Awards for the St.
(Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)Ī few people also remember Flood was quite a player. “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.” Arif Khatib at Curt Flood Field. “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. 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. 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.
First, like his hero Jackie Robinson, who famously broke baseball’s color line, Flood felt he’d found a noble mission he could champion.
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