Locker-room liberty: athletes who helped shape our times and the economic freedom that enabled them

Reason, May, 2005 by Matt Welch

From that moment on, Allen's life in Philadelphia was hell. Fans threw so many bottles and batteries at his head that he wore a batting helmet in the field, earning the nickname Crash. Every year he would hold out for more money, sign huge contracts (he was a smiled negotiator), and demand daily to be traded, a request that took five excruciating years to be met. He began showing up at the park drunk, smoking cigarettes in the dugout, earning suspensions, and scratching out messages like "boo" in the infield dirt. When he was finally traded for Curt Flood in 1969 he said: "It was like a form of slavery. Once you step out of bounds they'll do everything possible to destroy your soul." He could still hit the cover off the baseball, but he was missing 20 to 40 games a year due to suspensions and injuries.

Allen's painful tenure in Philadelphia and his trade to St. Louis sparked the legal fight that indirectly changed the face of pro sports. Flood, a marvelous player in his own right, refused the trade at least partly because of Allen's experience, challenging the reserve clause all the way to the Supreme Court in 1974. Although he lost, the owners' winning argument contained a loophole that allowed the clause's fate to be decided in collective bargaining with the Players Union, where it was finally negotiated out of existence the next year. By then, fat television contracts and the skilled arm twisting of union president Marvin Miller had already ratcheted up salaries exponentially, and the individualistic expression that 1970s baseball became famous for was in full flower.

Emboldened by the money, ballplayers began to get freaky. Doc Ellis threw a no-hitter on LSD. Gaylord Perry let everyone know he was throwing a spitball. Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley, a shrewd huckster, cashed in on the counterculture by offering his talented players bonuses to grow luxurious mustaches and accept outlandish nicknames like "Catfish" Hunter and "Vida" Blue. After winning three consecutive World Series, however, the cheapskate A's owner lost his team through free agency, and rebel players like Reggie Jackson went on to charge up several other contentious (and successful) clubhouses. What started out as a decade belonging to the cleans-haven, dress-coded Cincinnati Reds ended up with the free-spirited, sartorially splendiferous We-Are-Family Pittsburgh Pirates, whose championship club disintegrated into a spiral of cocaine abuse.

What Curt Flood was to baseball--the name on the lawsuit that helped change his sport--Oscar Robertson was to basketball. And The Big O also changed the game by the way he played. Robertson v. NBA, while much less ballyhooed than Flood's futile fight, was actually more effective. As head of the Players Union (which he presided over for 10 years), Robertson challenged the legality of the option clause, arguing that it represented a conspiracy to restrain competition for labor. The NBA finally settled in 1976, two years after Robertson retired, eliminating the option clause and creating free agency. This agreement--and not Robertson's triple-double 1961-62 season (when he averaged 30.8 points, 12.5 rebounds, and 11.4 assists), or his 1971 championship with the Milwaukee Bucks is the crowning chapter in The Big O. "I am so proud of what we accomplished," he writes. "Years of struggle were justified, generations of players vindicated".