In Locker-Room Liberty: Athletes who helped shape our times and the economic freedom that enabled them, Matt Welch explains how free-agency led to other freedoms:
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 clean-shaven, 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.
Joe Namath has always been quite a character:
Joe, the grandson of Hungarian immigrants, was already such a notorious partier and pool hustler as a teen that even the never-say-a-bad-word-about-our-kids local sportswriter felt forced to pen a story addressing rumors that the Hungarian Howitzer “sawed a cow in half in the auditorium of the high school, punched a pregnant woman, punched a school administrator, bombed school board members’ houses, poured gasoline on a fifth grader and set him afire, [and] threw eggs at Richard Nixon.” And that was before Namath, who had Harlem Globetrotter–style skills on the hardwood, walked off court in the middle of a varsity basketball game to protest his coach’s old-fashioned pass first, never dunk dogma. His grades were never any good, and he flubbed the SATs so badly (scoring below 740) that he couldn’t get into the University of Maryland, whose football program was geared toward grooming quarterbacks. Instead, mostly through inattention (and his mother’s insistence that he attend college rather than accept a $50,000 signing bonus to play pro baseball), Namath headed down South in 1961 to the University of Alabama, home of the legendary ball-busting coach Bear Bryant, who almost never called pass plays.