When was curt flood born

The family moved to California when Flood was two. By seven, he could outrun other kids in his West Oakland ghetto neighborhood. By nine, he was the catcher for the Junior's Sweet Shop team in a local midget league. Following in the footsteps of an older brother Carl, Curt was 10 when he stole a truck and crashed it.

Carl would later serve a prison term for bank robbery and struggle with heroin addiction. After this incident, though, Curt mended his ways.

Early in , Flood graduated from Oakland Technical High School, where he had transferred from McClymonds High after moving in with his divorced sister Barbara so he could care for her children while she worked. He also hit 29 homers and drove in runs. Called up to the Reds, he went 0-for While his average dropped to. In three games with the Reds at the end of the season, he stroked his first major league hit, a homer off the Cubs' Moe Drabowsky, in three at-bats.

Instead of joining neighborhood friends Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson in the Reds' outfield the next season, Flood was traded to the Cardinals on Dec.

The deal ended the experiment of Flood as an infielder. In , after hitting. Louis team that finished above. In retrospect, the move seemed destined to failure. During his hiatus from baseball, Flood had done nothing to stay in shape. He no longer had an incentive to remain sober each day. Petersburg to begin light workouts. He had difficulty completing even the most basic drills.

He was clearly out of shape. Many felt Flood did not have his heart in the comeback; he had, after all, returned primarily for financial reasons. He stayed to himself and drank heavily in his hotel room at night. He kept his distance from most teammates. They liked him and admired him, but also pitied him. They knew he was not the player he had once been.

Nevertheless, Flood was the Opening Day center fielder. He batted second in the game against Oakland, getting a bunt single, walking twice, and scoring two runs. After that, things on the field quickly deteriorated for Flood.

He failed to hit with any consistency or power. He had lost the gracefulness that previously characterized his outfield play, and he could not throw with any strength. Williams benched him after just five games, relegating him to pinch-hitting duties and occasional late-inning defensive substitutions.

His inability to perform on the field in the glare of the public spotlight pushed him over the edge. On April 26 he left the team without warning, deciding instead to flee the country to escape the mounting pressures. From the airport in New York, he sent Bob Short an apology in the form of a telegram, saying only that he had been away from the game too long and that he had serious financial troubles.

Flood went 7-for Flood eventually settled on the Spanish island of Majorca. He was in dire straits financially. Beverly had sued him again to try to recover a significant sum in back alimony and child support, and he was still responsible for judgments arising out of his failed businesses in St. He invested in a bar, the Rustic Inn, in the town of Palma with a new-found girlfriend. The island was a popular resort and American tourists, including vacationing Hollywood crowds, and military personnel stationed in the Mediterranean frequented the bar.

Howard Cosell, the broadcaster, went so far as to send videotapes of boxing matches to Flood to show at the bar. In Flood was forced to give up the Rustic Inn and leave Majorca.

He later claimed that the Spanish police suspected illegal activities because of the heavy traffic at the bar. Flood went to the tiny principality of Andorra, located between Spain and France, where he continued to drink heavily and lived out of a duffle bag with whoever was kind enough to offer him a place to stay.

Hitting rock bottom on October 1, Flood tried to rob a department store while in a drunken stupor. The charges were dropped because he had been drunk and had not taken anything.

He was immediately deported to Barcelona, Spain, where he was hospitalized for alcoholism. Spanish authorities, working through the US State Department, released Flood a few weeks later when someone in his family provided a plane ticket for him to return to Oakland. Flood was destitute. His childhood benefactors in Oakland tried to help him. He struggled in that job, in part because of his alcoholism, failing to engage the audience with the kind of insight expected of a color commentator.

Bercovich did not renew the rights after the season and Flood was out of a job. He also coached the American Legion team he had played for years earlier. Another former mentor, Bill Patterson, got Flood a job with the Oakland Parks Department as commissioner of its youth baseball program.

Curt enjoyed some success in this position; he arranged coaching clinics with a number of current and former major-league players and by all accounts was quite successful at raising money and obtaining donations of equipment.

In Flood entered a rehabilitation center and, for a while at least, he found sobriety. In , after 15 years apart, Flood rekindled his friendship with Judy Pace and moved to Los Angeles; they were married in December Judy was able to get him more help with his drinking; by the early s he had achieved, and was able to maintain, his sobriety. In Flood was named commissioner of the Senior Professional Baseball Association, a Florida-based league of retired players.

He was inducted into the Bay Area Hall of Fame in That same year, he was diagnosed with throat cancer.

He died in Los Angeles from the effects of that disease on January 20, No then-current players attended the services. Flood received one final posthumous accolade in , when Time magazine named him one of the ten most influential athletes of the past century. There is no doubt many of his wounds were self-inflicted.

But was it worth it? Did he have any regrets? Publicly, he never complained about the fact that he did not benefit from the changes that took place after his lawsuit.

What seemed to bother him the most about his lawsuit was the lack of support he received from his peers during the district court trial.

The national pastime is clearly better because of that. But more important, so is the nation, because it has learned one more lesson about the foolishness of fearing freedom.

For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here. Marvin Miller. Charles P. Bowie Kuhn. Brad Snyder. Stuart L. George Will. Instead, he would send photographs of his subjects to one Lawrence Williams in Los Angeles, who would do the portraits and ship them back to Flood, allowing Flood to take all of the credit for the paintings.

This includes the Martin Luther King portrait for which Flood was so widely acclaimed. His junior high school art teacher and his high school baseball coach became important mentors, and continued to inspire him long after he had left Oakland. Flood signed his first baseball contract with the Cincinnati Reds at age seventeen and reported in for spring training at Tampa, Florida, deep in the Jim Crow South.

Other painful experiences with racism awaited him during his minor-league seasons in North Carolina and Georgia. He faced hostile crowds even at his home ballparks and was not allowed into restaurants or gas station restrooms when the team bus stopped during road trips. Despite this, Flood showed he was a good player, earning late-season call-ups to Cincinnati in and to play in his first few major-league games. After the season, the Reds traded Flood to St.

Although he was upset by the unexpected trade, he went to spring training the following season with the Cardinals, a struggling team that had not won a pennant since In earning a spot on St. Over the next few seasons the team got better, and Flood established himself in center field.

In the Cardinals, sparked by a midseason trade for another talented black outfielder, Lou Brock, finally returned to the top of the National League standings. Flood was at his peak as a player in these years. Listed at just five feet, nine inches tall and pounds, he did not hit many home runs, but he regularly batted over. Other Cardinals credited him with being a model teammate, and he was named a team co-captain starting in Their closeness may have helped them finish ahead of other teams that did not have the same kind of unity within their clubhouses.

He fought a personal battle against racism two years later when he and his wife, Beverly, met opposition in integrating a northern California suburb, Alamo, where the Floods wanted to live in the off-season. Seeking a stronger leader for their union, the Major League Baseball Players Association, the players hired Marvin Miller, a lawyer with years of experience leading the United Steelworkers in labor disputes, in By , Flood and the Cardinals were on top of the baseball world.

Defending their championship, they cruised to a second straight pennant, and then won three of the first four games in the World Series to stand one victory away from repeating as champions. But Detroit rallied in the next two games to tie the series, forcing a winner-take-all Game Seven. Hopes of bouncing back in fell flat as St. Louis flopped to a fourth-place finish.

The strong-willed beer executive, who had insisted that the Cardinals become racially integrated after his company, Anheuser-Busch, bought the team in , held less sympathy for labor issues concerning his players.

Off the field, he was burdened by growing problems in his private life. Missouri Sports Hall of Fame Inductee.

Louis Cardinals. Curt finished out his playing career in , with the Washington Senators. William J. Clinton, The White House, October 27,