“Even Sugar Got Free…”: Black Athletes and the Contradictions of Free Agency

“Even Sugar Got Free…” *: 
Black Athletes and the Contradictions of Free Agency

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

One of the common narrative frames of the 2012 playoffs was how the Oklahoma City Thunder did things the “right way.”  Ignoring the team’s move from Seattle, a fact that left Sonics fans with a bitter taste in their mouth, Thunder mania stemmed from the fact that the bulk of their roster was made-up of draft picks and players who arrived via trade.  Embodying a “rags-to-riches” ideology, one that celebrates individuals and institutions that supposedly pull themselves up by their bootstraps (or draft-picks), the celebration of the Thunder makes perfects sense given our national imagination about sports.  In praising the Thunder for choosing to trade several players to acquire endless draft picks (a fact that surely also had to do with the pending sale of the team and dumping salary), fans and media pundits reimagined the Thunder as creating their own destiny. 

This celebratory tone was amplified during the 2012 finals, which pitted the Thunder against the Heat, an organization imagined as everything wrong with sports.  “The fact that we equate the Heat with evil and the Thunder with good reveals one big truth: sports fans and media hate it when a player chooses where he plays, and love it when a player has no choice over where he plays,” writes Nicholas Schwartz. “Writers and fans simply approve when a player has absolutely no choice over where he can play — like the Oklahoma City players dealt through trades — and disapprove when a player has a choice in which uniform he puts on. The criticism of the Heat ‘model’ for winning reveals that sports fans simply don't want athletes to have any power over the course of their careers.”

What is clear from this “logic” and the celebration of the Thunder is that fans and media alike don’t like free agency.  Worse yet, they don’t approve of players, particularly young African American men, determining their own future.  In wake of LeBron James’ decision to take his talents to South Beach, William Rhoden noted the oppositional nature of free agency for the black athlete: “There are many lessons contained in the James free-agency drama. The first is controlling the game, not allowing the game to control you. Here is James, a 25-year-old African-American man with a high school diploma, commanding a global stage.”  The response that he should “shut up and play” where he is told to play reflects the hegemony of white racial framing.  The message is clear: professional basketball players are lucky enough to earn millions of dollars for playing a game, and that the least they can be is grateful, appreciated and loyal to their fans and city. 

The contempt for player movement within the NBA has been on full display in recent years.  The condemnation directed at LeBron James both typified this mentality all while perpetuating the idea that free agency is destroying the league.  On The Bleacher Report, Asher Chancey named James the #1 worst traitor in sports history (the Sonics/Thunders’ owners are no where on the list). “By holding a prime-time news conference to announce to the world that the City of Cleveland was losing one the best athletes in professional sports, LeBron showed all the qualities we suspect our favorite athletes possess but hope they do not,” he notes. “LeBron showed the entire world that he has an enormous ego, he cares about himself first and all others second, and that the game of basketball is just that to him, a game.” 

In other words, in holding a nationally held press conference that millions of people chose to watch, by raising money for the Boys and Girl’s Club, and in exercising his rights under free agency, he was denigrated (and dehumanized) as a traitor.  He was said to be worse than owners who moved their teams to other cities or franchises that fire its workers because of a lockout. 

Telling, no? 

With jerseys burning in the background and fans ranting in virtual spaces, Dan Gilbert made clear his feelings about James and the enterprise of free agency:

As you now know, our former hero, who grew up in the very region that he deserted this evening, is no longer a Cleveland Cavalier.  This was announced with a several day, narcissistic, self-promotional build-up culminating with a national TV special of his “decision” unlike anything ever “witnessed” in the history of sports and probably the history of entertainment. Clearly, this is bitterly disappointing to all of us…. his shocking act of disloyalty from our home grown “chosen one” sends the exact opposite lesson of what we would want our children to learn. And “who” we would want them to grow-up to become. But the good news is that this heartless and callous action can only serve as the antidote to the so-called “curse” on Cleveland, Ohio. The self-declared former "King” will be taking the “curse” with him down south. And until he does “right” by Cleveland and Ohio, James (and the town where he plays) will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma.

Ray Allen’s recent decision to join the Heat has prompted similar outrage.  Fans have burned his jersey; Jarrett Jack took to twitter to call him a traitor; he has been called “Benedict Allen;” “Judas Shuttlesworth” has become such a common reframe that t-shirts are now available.  He joins, James, Carmelo Anthony and Deron Williams, who both found their way to New York (although traded, they are still condemned for not being loyal), and Dwight Howard, whose indecision has not masked his determination to leave Orlando, as the cited examples of what is wrong with today’s NBA player.  Absent from the list of “traitors” bandied about within the national media has been Steve Nash, who despite ample criticism from fans and media within Phoenix is not required to take the loyalty litmus test.

Charles Moriano sees the power of whiteness within these differential treatments from the national media:

To simply honor Nash’s greatness without studying the incredible white privilege that he receives is to disrespect and dishonor his NBA colleagues. Nash is not only the most under-criticized NBA superstar to never reach the finals, but his smooth escape to LA, candor about the importance of money, and bold statements on “no true loyalty in sports” with no national debate has redefined “Disney World” for Dwight Howard [1].

Allen knows better than to utter Nash’s words, and Lebron’s act (not manner) of joining other stars to chase a ring brought labels of “coward“, “fraud“, and “scared little kid” deserving of an “asterisk” on future titles — and that’s just one article! If Steve rides Kobe’s coattails to a title, will it be tainted? Will it even be debated?

Such actions from Black ballers are regularly met with “get-back-in-your-place-you-spoiled-ungrateful-fill-in-the-racial-code-word-blank” media backlash. Whereas Steve Nash seems to get a pass because he is doing it “for his kids,” the (black) ballers of the new generation are once again cast as selfish pollutants to the league.  

Whether citing loyalty or noting rivalries, owners, fans and sports media continually display their contempt for player movement?  While acknowledging the right of players to take their talents anywhere, Jemele Hill waxes nostalgically for a time where rivalries was part of the NBA fabric:

But I don't know if I'm comfortable with such cozy collaborations among supposedly irreconcilable foes becoming the norm in the NBA. If a player could so easily jump to a team that just beat him in the Eastern Conference Finals -- even if part of the motivation was sticking it to the team that tried to trade him -- that doesn't say much about the state of player and team rivalries in this league,” writes Hill.  “In-season rivalries haven't blocked career decisions in some time, but can you blame me for being Pollyannish and wishing that they still did?”

Players going from one team to a rival is nothing new – Rodman to Bulls and then the Lakers; Horace Grant to the Lakers; Karl Malone and Gary Payton to the Lakers; Robert Horry to the Lakers and then the Spurs; don’t forget Shaq?  Additionally, beyond presuming that the players have all the power in the process, why isn’t Hill and others demanding changes to the collective bargaining agreement, which encourages players to seek out big markets (to make money outside of the sports) all while limiting the ability to teams to retain its role players.  The failure to address these various issues reveals the discomfort and anxiety about (black) players determining their own futures, exercising power in the face of overwhelming white ownership, overwhelmingly white media commentators, and white fans.

One has to wonder if CBS or NBC asked any sports commentator to join their enterprise, would they cite loyalty in declining their offer?  Where is the outage at coaches that coach for rivals, CEOS that parachute from one company to the next, or companies that race to the bottom?  I know they are too busy lamenting Ray Allen to the Heat but the hypocrisy and double standards are thick. 

In 1970, Curt Flood’s life would forever changed and so would the American sports fabric when he wrote the following to Bowie Kuhn:

After twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.  I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several States. It is my desire to play baseball in 1970, and I am capable of playing.  I have received a contract offer from the Philadelphia club, but I believe I have the right to consider offers from other clubs before making any decisions.  I, therefore, request that you make known to all Major League clubs my feelings in this matter, and advise them of my availability for the 1970 season (Flood, 194-195).

Denounced as disloyal, as leading to the destruction of baseball, as being selfish and everything wrong with athletes of his day, Flood’s courage brought about free agency across the sporting landscape.  One has to wonder how those who often celebrate Flood, who invoke his name as evidence of a once politically engaged athlete, can denounce and demonize the players who are merely standing on the shoulders of Flood and Spencer Haywood.  One has to wonder how the blogosphere, how the twitter generation, and how the 24-sports industry that spans ESPN and sports talk, would have treated Flood.  The contempt for player movement and the outrage directed at players who “take their talents” elsewhere is telling in this regard, begging the question of what is “free” in “free agency.”  

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was just published by SUNY Press.

* Paul Mooney

Death Isn’t a Slave’s Freedom: The Historic Erasure of Curt Flood’s Life

Death Isn’t a Slave’s Freedom: The Historic Erasure of Curt Flood’s Life

by David J. Leonard | special to NewBlackMan

Nikki Giovanni once write that “death is a slave's freedom” aptly surmising elements of Curt Flood’s life and his struggle against America’s (white) baseball establishment.  Denounced for his efforts to challenge baseball’s slave-like conditions and crucified for his efforts to connect baseball to slavery, to American racism, Flood experienced neither vindication nor compensation in part until his death, at which time Flood tasted freedom in a certain way – freedom from the death threats, abuse, ridicule, and American racism. 

Yet after watching HBO’s recent documentary The Curious Case of Curt Flood, I am less sure that “death is a slave’s freedom” in that Flood was unable to escape demonization and ridicule, as the film turned his life into a spectacle of sorts.  In an effort to illustrate how the human cost faced by Flood and his family, to highlight the difficult path to redemption, the film spends an overwhelming amount of time on Flood’s personal tragedy.  Evidence in the divorce from his initial wife shortly after he fought to live in an Alamo neighborhood and the financial, emotional, and physical impact on Flood during and after his suit against Major League Baseball, Curt Flood’s life is a testament to the costs of resistance and struggle.  

Yet, the film goes too far in this respect, turning Flood’s life into a spectacle, a train wreck that the audience is suppose to stare and marvel at for the duration of the film.  Focusing on alcoholism, fraudulent paintings and the personal demons that haunted Flood, The Curious Case of Curt Flood highlights the narrative grip that confines Flood in our contemporary moment.  In “The Way It Is: HBO’s The Curious Case Of Curt Flood,” Nasir Muhammad & Stephane Dunn elucidate the film’s flaws in this regard, seemingly questioning its narrative focus on the tragedies experienced by Flood and his ultimate redemption, turning an important history into a “E’ Hollywood” story.  They quote Stan Hochman, whose critiques of the film illustrate the powerful ways that death is not a slave’s freedom:

The courageous athlete who dared to challenge an unfair system is depicted as an alcoholic, a womanizer, a woeful husband, a dreadful father, a lousy businessman and a fraud who never really painted those portraits he churned out that enhanced his image as an artist . . . .In the history of warts-and-all biographies, this one slithers near the top of the list.

Curt Flood was a freedom fighter.   That didn’t begin with his challenge to Major League’s Baseball Reserve clause or his rhetorical links to a larger history of slavery.  Curt Flood had a long history of fighting for justice.  At one level, the film successfully documents how Flood’s challenge was not simply about economics but humanity and civil rights.  In 1964, when he sought to move his family to Alamo (CA), only to face an owner (and his gun-toting enforcers) that refused to rent to them, Flood took the matter to court.   Questioning why they called the street they lived on La Serena (serenity), Flood noted that there was nothing peaceful for a black family because of “fear of some maniac with a gun will sneak up on your kids.”  The Floods received a death threat and had been called the N-Word shortly after to moving into his dream home.  The beauty of the American Dream was unattainable for Flood confirming that his economic success did not affirm his humanity or freedom.  

This act of resistance, alongside of his involvement with the civil rights movement, his family history of challenging white supremacy (his mother had to flea the South after she defended herself against a white woman), his challenges to racial discrimination in the allocation of player raises or his involvement with the player’s demand that owners disentangle pension contributions from television and radio money, illustrate a larger body of work for Flood.  Flood described his political orientation in the following way:

I’m a child of the sixties, I’m a man of the sixties. During that period of time this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Good men were dying for America and the Constitution. In the southern part of the United States we were marching for civil rights and Dr. King had been assassinated, and we lost the Kennedys. And to think that merely because I was a professional baseball player, I could ignore what was going on outside the walls of Busch Stadium was truly hypocrisy and now I found that of all those rights that these great Americans were dying for, I didn’t have in my own profession.

The linkages to the 1960s, to a larger struggle for human rights, are evident in Flood’s effort to connect baseball to a history of slavery. He was not alone in comparing the exploitation and experiences of black athletes to those of African Slaves of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries.  Harry Edwards, Tommie Smith, Muhammad Ali, among others, all sought to contextualize the exploitation and abuse experienced by black athletes within a larger history of white supremacy.  He was thus a product of a larger struggle for black humanity and therefore he embraced the language of that movement.  In failing to offer this context, we get a curious interpretation of history that individualizes and dehistorizes the struggle for black freedom.   

Moreover, Flood’s efforts to challenge baseball make sense given his efforts to secure equity and freedom for all Americans.  His determination to transform baseball (and America as a whole) was clearly a manifestation of a lifetime of experienced indignities, from the refusal of a locker-room attendant to clean his uniform along with the white players to his movement from the team hotel to the “colored section.”  The courageous stance that Flood took was thus understandable given his commitment to social justice and the stated impact that a history living inside of American Apartheid had on him.  While acknowledging some of this history, the film’s focus on the peculiarity leaves viewers with the impression that Flood was “odd” and “different” (which had “positive” and “negative” consequences) rather than a product of a system of class and racial exploitation. 

The critiques here are snot imply about the lack of “positive” representations in the film, the erasure of the racism that resulted from his refusal to play by THEIR rules, or even simply about historic accuracy, but rather that the choice to focus on the tragedy and redemption erases not only the contributions of Flood but the ways in which his story provides a historic marker for the larger history about the struggle for racial justice.  

In “‘Death Is a Slave’s Freedom:”’ Curt Flood and the Fight against Baseball, History, and White Supremacy” (Reconstructing Fame: Race, Sport, and the Redemption of Once-Tainted Reputations, eds.,   David C. Ogden & Joel Nathan Rosen – University of Mississippi press), 2008) I explore the ways in post-death media commentaries and political posturing celebrated Curt Flood (as part of efforts to demonize contemporary black athletes and celebrate American racial progress), his contributions to baseball, and his courageous stance against Major League Baseball.  In this article, I wrote the following:

Be sure, the story of Curt Flood is certainly one of courage and resistance, but it is equally a story of power, of the powerful and the great lengths the powerful have gone to maintain that control, those privileges and traditions that guaranteed their hegemony.  In the end, however, only death could save him from the demonization, from the alcohol and drugs that invariably served as an antiseptic for the pain and poverty, from the letters and stares, from the exile, banishment and denunciations.  This part of the story found little place in the reclamation projects that dominated the landscape following his death, but they certainly bear our attention in a time of increasingly reactive and certainly even reactionary narrative. 

Even the respect that his legacy has garnered in the days and years after his death (although despite his contributions on and off the field Flood unjustly remains outside of the Baseball Hall of Fame) has not resulted in a full appreciation of the life, courage, and humanity of Flood.   It results neither in Flood’s freedom nor for the freedom that he fought to secure during much of his life. Meager honors given in death do little to alter the persistence of racism and injustice inside and outside of sports.  Lip service in the afterlife will not suffice nor will memory, especially when historic memory is confined by stories of personal tragedy and redemption; such memorials are unable to secure justice for Curt Flood, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Ella Baker, Dorothy Dandridge, or any of the nameless people history selectively remembers.  Death will be the only potential avenue for freedom should the injustices done to Flood, and myriad forgotten others, continues.     And even that will remain illusive because for Curt Flood death isn’t freedom because if it were we would be talking about courageous activism in the face of racism and the hall of fame not that other stuff.    

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard blogs @ No Tsuris.

HBO’s The Curious Case Of Curt Flood

Saturday Edition

The Way It Is: HBO’s The Curious Case Of Curt Flood

by Nasir Muhammad & Stephane Dunn | special to NewBlackMan

HBO’s project was long overdue and an exciting prospect – an overview of Curt Flood’s life and exploration of the historic stand he launched against Major League Baseball’s reserve clause in 1969. While the documentary introduces Flood and his infamous suit against baseball to those who are unfamiliar and tries to fill in some blanks about what led to it, The Curious Case of Curt Flood condenses a complex personality and history so much that it distorts some essential details about Flood’s long struggle for players’ rights in MLB. It also commits a serious error in steering clear from dealing with the ‘elephant’ that remains in the room when it comes to Curt Flood’s legacy in MLB history: Despite free agency’s defining role in contemporary MLB, the league is still uneasy about Curt Flood’s challenge to the hierarchy of America’s Pastime - so uneasy that the respect that Flood really deserves as a player and a trailblazer in the Civil Rights struggles of the time continues to be denied.

MLB’s measure of legacy is integrally tied to election into hallowed historic ground, the Baseball Hall of Fame. So far, Flood has not been so honored. Through a select array of photographs and video clips that offer a close-up primarily of Flood at his worst, the documentary mostly presents a strikingly sad portrait of a man headed for self-destruction. Curious Case raises the issue of Flood’s legacy but doesn’t really go there, preferring instead to overshadow and fill in the more significant aspects of Flood’s challenge to the power status quo with sensationalist gossip about his legitimacy as an artist, financial troubles, and a demon [alcoholism] he shared with a long line of sports greats, including Babe Ruth.

The problem with HBO’s effort begins with it’s obvious over reliance on one dominant source, Brad Snyder and his book on Curt Flood, A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight For Free Agency. What’s curious is the documentary’s neglect of Flood’s own thoughtful examination of his journey to suing MLB, The Way It Is (1970), an autobiography published during the time period encompassing his suit. While the documentary smatters in Flood quotes from interviews and some of his most frequently used statements, Flood’s very detailed take on his experiences and opinions about the inner workings of MLB in The Way It Is hardly appear and the book is generally invisible save for widow Judy Flood’s liberal borrowing from the text to inform some of her comments.

Missing too is mention of such key defining relationships as Flood’s extraordinary relationship with Johnny and Marian Jorgensen, a white couple, who became family to Flood and his brother Carl. Marian came to live with him some time after Johnny’s brutal murder and basically took care of Flood, his home, and affairs during some of his roughest times. In relying overly on Snyder and Flood’s widow, who became his wife in his later years, the documentary suffers in not putting into context enough how Flood’s experience with owners’ tyrannical mistreatment of players generally and the racial discrimination that confronted black players helped lead to his resolve to resist the reserve clause despite being a major, well-paid star. For example, the documentary fails to accurately connect Flood’s support of players’ collective efforts to improve players’ lot with the fall out that led to owner August A. Busch’s trading of Flood.

Much is made of the ’68 World Series loss attributed to Flood; Snyder offers this and Flood’s demand for more money as Busch’s main motivation. However, Busch’s anger with his “favorite” player was most certainly tied as well to Curt acting in concert with other players in the MLB Players Association in ’69 against owners efforts to in his words “sever the traditional link between the pension fund” and money from radio and television. According to Flood, the players refused to sign their contracts until the owners agreed to better pensions for players and key Cardinal players, among them Lou Brock, Tim McCarver, Bob Gibson, and Flood demanded substantial salary increases. This incensed Busch, who blasted his players at a public meeting with media present.

Toward its conclusion, the documentary chooses to focus heavily on Flood’s personal downward spiral into alcoholism and the tragic portrait he presented of his former self. It ends by concentrating on his journey back into living a functional life and fashions a sort of triumphant recognition of his historic stand before his death from cancer in 1997. The documentary offers those watching who don’t know much about Flood a deceptive reason to feel moved and ultimately good about the seeming respect it suggests he finally received. Yet, the absence of two of the greatest living legendary baseball players, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, and the current commissioner of MLB suggests the truth. The scorching Philadelphia Daily News review of sportswriter Stan Hochman, who was interviewed for the documentary but whose insights do not appear at all, isn’t too off base in summing up the E’ Hollywood like treatment of Flood:


The courageous athlete who dared to challenge an unfair system is depicted as an alcoholic, a womanizer, a woeful husband, a dreadful father, a lousy businessman and a fraud who never really painted those portraits he churned out that enhanced his image as an artist . . . .In the history of warts-and-all biographies, this one slithers near the top of the list.

Curt Flood’s historic Christmas Eve letter to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn is in the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum, but Flood is not in the Hall of Fame. This fall, the Baseball Writers Association has the power to select Flood as one of ten players to appear on the Golden Era ballot where that sixteen member committee can finally genuinely welcome Flood back into MLB. The documentary raises the issue of Flood’s legacy but it shies away from probing two vital questions critical to a film presuming to treat this major chapter in Flood’s and baseball’s history: Is MLB ready to reconcile its important history with Curt Flood and do the right thing? Or will the silent punishment of Curt Flood be allowed to continue?