It’s hard to imagine a time when professional athletes worked a second job in the off-season to make ends meet and spent their entire career with the team that drafted them as a rookie, still very wet behind the ears.

Today, players can wheel and deal their way from team to team while their salaries often reach unfathomable figures. A recent Associated Press study found that, in baseball, the average annual salary this season is $2.6 million, mere pennies compared to the grand slam-size deals for San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds ($22 million) and New York Yankee Derek Jeter ($19.6 million), two of the league’s top-paid players.

However, if not for the courage of Curt Flood, today’s professional athletes may not have the easy access to the bling-bling lifestyle to which many have grown accustomed. 

A three-time All-Star and seven-time Gold Glove winner, Flood was a center fielder with the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s. After 12 years with the Cardinals, management decided to trade Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies, a move he was vehemently against. Flood considered his situation and that of every baseball player, to be cut and dried -- they were treated like property, and it was time to make a change.

“He really changed the way the game is paid, not played,” Gary Sales, a sports sociologist from Indiana University, told BlackAmericaWeb.com Monday. “TV contracts, product endorsements, stadium naming rights -- he set all that in motion because [owners] have to be able to afford to keep those athletes.”

As Major League Baseball players gather in Detroit for tonight’s All-Star Game, Sales said it’s highly unlikely that many will realize that Flood literally opened the floodgates to the multi-million deals they benefit from today.

“A lot of these kids are like, ‘Curt who?' They just have a mindset of materialism and success. It’s an ‘I’m-getting-mine' way of life,” said Sales, who served as a consultant with the Milwaukee Brewers for one season. “They’re more focused on the present because this is their time.”

Flood boldly challenged the league’s “reserve clause,” a standard in each player’s contract that virtually bound them with a team for the duration of their career. Backed by the league’s players association and represented by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, Flood filed a lawsuit against then-Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. In filing the suit, Flood, who earned $92,000 a year then, went against the advice of Marvin Miller, executive director of the players association, who said the suit would end Flood’s career. Active players agreed and declined to testify on Flood’s behalf at the trial. But fellow pioneer Jackie Robinson was on hand to support Flood, who, like him, got his start in the Negro Leagues.

The case wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court before being knocked down by the federal court in 1972. The case would eventually set the stage for the advent of free agency, a bargaining tool that allows professional athletes from the four major sports the option to decline a trade or sign a contract with the team of their choice.

Once the legal battle was over, Flood, who sat out the entire 1970 season, signed a contract with the Washington Senators. He appeared in only 13 games and batted .200, a far cry from the career-high .335 he hit in 1967 when he and the Cardinals beat the Boston Red Sox in the World Series.

Sales said every agent who obtains commission from the mega-deals they broker for athletes should have a photograph of Flood on their desk because he truly paved the way for today’s lucrative and liberating free agency process.

It was 1970, a few years removed from the newly-minted Civil Rights Act that granted black Americans a new sense of freedom, when Flood, a native Texan, sought out to free himself and all professional athletes from bondage.

“Essentially, athletes were modern-day slaves toiling in the field of capitalist owners,” Jon Entine, an author and professor at Miami University in Miami, Ohio, told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “Because of what Curt Flood fought for, athletes have now become participants in modern American sports.

“Curt Flood is a legal footnote in most people’s minds, if he’s there at all,” said Entine, who, as a teenager growing up in Philadelphia during that period, vividly remembers the commotion caused by Flood’s refusal to join the Phillies. “The reality is that Curt Flood should be front and center because he is a pivotal figure in how modern sports is run as a business. He is a hero because he was willing to put a lot of talent and the promising continuation of a great career on the line for principle.”

Principle was the last thing many were thinking when Flood came to mind, Sales said, adding that if a white player had been the squeaky wheel, things might have been a bit different.

“Many people were saying, ‘This n**** did not know his place,’” said Sales, pointing to the racial polarization of the times, as well as the racial polarization often found on professional sports teams. “But 'his place' was where he determined that the reserve clause was just modern-day slavery.

“This went far beyond litigation and baseball,” Sales added. “Curt Flood was one of the first athletes to politicize sports.”

Flood was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1996 and died one year later at the age of 59. Numerous former players paid their respects at Los Angeles’ First African Methodist Episcopal Church. During the funeral service, one mourner compared Flood’s social legacy to that of Rosa Parks, whose fearless determination helped set off the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.

Entine agreed.

“He went further than any other athlete in giving players a say in their future,” Entine said. “Not only did Curt Flood give a greater voice to players for their own careers, but they now have a say in how the game itself is overseen and financed.”