Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete

This chapter chronicles the lives of two influential athletes: Curt Flood, of baseball, and Larry Johnson, an NBA star.

Flood, Rhoden maintains, was not only the probable inventor of the planation metaphor but a superior athlete in his own right. He replaced Willie Mays as the “greatest centerfielder in baseball,” Rhoden writes. “Flood, like Mays, wasn’t just great—he was cool and great” (231). Regardless of his success, Flood was traded, as athletes commonly were (and are); but Flood, at the risk of losing his $92,000 salary, was the first to simply refuse to be traded. Rhoden credits Flood with writing an unprecedented letter to the baseball commissioner in which he insisted that he was not “a piece of property to be bought and sold” (232).

Flood, and other athletes, were victims of Major League Baseball’s Reserve Clause, a government-sanctioned exception to fair play in business that kept players from testing the market. Flood would eventually sue, despite the warning that his filing would end his career in baseball. Though his case reached the Supreme Court in 1972, he lost, due in part to the fact that, Rhoden argues, “no active players showed support” (236).