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Flood Was a Man for Every Season

In a recent letter to Frank Slocum, executive director of the Baseball Assistance Team (B.A.T.), Curt Flood wrote: ''The 1996 holiday season brings mixed feelings of joy and sadness. Therefore, we'll take the advice that mother Laura gave to me when I was a kid. She'd say 'Start counting your blessings, Squirtis, by the time you've finished, you won't have time for anything else.Flood, who was 59, died yesterday after a yearlong battle with throat cancer, and it is the players who came after him in the major leagues who should count their blessings for having had a man of his stature and dignity and courage precede them. Professional athletes, for the most part, live for their time. They generally don't care what happened before them and, worse, they often don't know. Sadly, many baseball players wouldn't even be able to identify Flood, wouldn't even know that he was the forerunner of Andy Messersmith, another name they wouldn't recognize for the impact he had on their lives. But on a day in Atlanta in the last month of 1994, the players in the meeting room of the players association executive board knew about the man who was to speak to them. They saluted him with a standing ovation before he spoke.

''It almost made me forget what I was going to say,'' Flood said afterward. ''It caught me a little short. I felt a lump in my throat.'Flood was in the room that day in his capacity as vice president of the United Baseball League, a venture that did not reach fruition. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1969, he appeared before another players association executive board seeking support for the task he was about to undertake. The St. Louis Cardinals, for whom he had played for 12 years, had traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies, and he didn't want to go.

Richard Moss, who was the union's general counsel at the time, recalled yesterday that Flood came to him and Marvin Miller, the head of the union, and told them he wanted to challenge the system that he said ''treated people like they were pieces of property.Marvin and I weren't sure if he was serious, if he had some other agenda,'' Moss said. ''We arranged for him to come to the board meeting in Puerto Rico. The idea was to let him talk to the board and convince them that he was for real, that he really believed this and he was sincere.With the board's support, Flood took his challenge all the way to the United States Supreme Court. He lost, but his effort eventually emboldened other players, Messersmith in particular. Unfortunately, besides losing the case, Flood saw his career die. After sitting out the 1970 season, he played briefly for the Washington Senators in 1971.

He knew he wasn't the same player he had been, and he walked away from the only job he had known. A pariah in an owner-dominated business, Flood was not welcome to wear a baseball uniform. Instead, he drifted from place to place, first to Majorca, where he opened a bar and became an alcoholic, then back to the United States, then to Sweden, then back home again. In recent years, Flood operated a youth center in Los Angeles. He enjoyed working with children. He would have enjoyed working with young professional baseball players, too, but he never had the opportunity. Nevertheless, he retained his dignity and, in the last year, his courage.