LABOR WARS

For over a century, professional athletes were treated as property, not people.

A club could trade a man without asking him. It could cut his pay without warning him. It could end his career simply by deciding not to renew his contract, and there was nothing he could do about it. This book tells the story of how that system was built, why it lasted so long, and how a small number of players risked everything to tear it down.

You will meet the men who changed the game long before it was safe to do so. John Montgomery Ward, a Columbia trained lawyer who used his own legal mind to challenge the reserve clause in 1890, decades before anyone else dared try. Danny Gardella, banned from baseball for daring to accept a better paying job overseas. Curt Flood, who gave up the best years of his career and took his fight all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost, only for his sacrifice to pay off for every player who came after him.

This is a history of strikes, lockouts, courtroom battles and quiet acts of courage that reshaped baseball, football, basketball and hockey. It follows the fight for free agency, the rise of player unions, the salary cap wars of the 1980s, and the long overdue push for pay equity in women's sport. It also looks at the fight that is still being fought today, in college locker rooms, in data privacy disputes, and in the ongoing struggle over how much of a league's fortune should belong to the athletes who actually create it.

Written in plain language and grounded in real events, this book is for anyone who has ever watched a game and wondered what it took, and what it cost, to get professional sport to where it stands now.