Column: Time to let the past be the past for Michael Vick

On Monday, New York Times sports columnist Juliet Macur wrote about Michael Vick.

Her doing so wasn’t odd, in and of itself. The 33-year-old Philadelphia Eagles quarterback is nearing a crossroads in his career, having been relegated to a backup role in favor of the younger Nick Foles. Vick, though, apparently feels he still has something to offer as a starter for some NFL team and so wants to move on.

What’s notable about Macur’s piece is the angle she takes.

The headline, “Before signing a strong arm, teams should heed Vick’s dark past,” is reasonable enough. It makes sense that a potential employer would look closely at someone who ran a multi-state dogfighting syndicate, no matter the profession. Especially in the realm of professional sports, when a slip-up by a player could cost an employer millions of dollars and massive amounts of negative publicity.

But then, after two introductory paragraphs of setting the scene, Macur says something confusing.

“Animal lovers everywhere can cheer Vick’s departure from this city,” she writes. “Especially those who have had to watch him play here since 2009, less than three months after he served time in a federal prison for his role in a dogfighting ring.”

What?

Oh, right, the despicable crime Vick committed that happened more than six and a half years ago. The offense for which he served his time in prison (19 months of a 23-month sentence) and has since, by all accounts, stayed on the right side of the law.

If this column was written in 2009 following Vick’s release from prison and the expiration of his suspension from the league, it would make more sense. Vick was still one of the faces of the league then, which made his misdeeds more newsworthy. But, as of Sunday, he was not even the face of the team for which he plays.

“He stood like a spectator on the sideline, looking helpless and anonymous in a long black coat and an Eagles knit cap,” Macur wrote.

All of what Vick allowed to happen and engaged in with the dogfighting was horrible, and Macur erases any possible doubt of that with her detailed descriptions in the story.

“In the backyard of his Virginia home were mass graves of pit bulls that had fought for him or had been torn apart serving as bait dogs in practice sessions. The surviving dogs were found barely alive, beaten, starved, tortured and chained to concrete slabs,” she wrote.

That’s just the first of five consecutive paragraphs on the subject. It’s the most powerful segment of the article, but it shouldn’t have been included.

Back to Philadelphia fans “cheering.” They can cheer when he leaves, but will they?

Are Vick’s past actions still tormenting animal lovers so much that the mere act of him leaving one team to potentially sign with another in free agency is cause for celebration? It doesn’t appear so. And if that’s the case, it’s devoid of logic.

It would be more constructive to move on to addressing the issue of dogfighting at present. Even better would be to shift that energy toward the players who have committed more serious offenses.

Donte Stallworth killed someone while driving under the influence. He played for three seasons after that. He’s a free agent currently and the same age as Vick. Where was this journalist’s plea to everyone after Washington cut him last summer?

The same goes for Adam “Pac Man” Jones, who is an active member of the Cincinnati Bengals and has been involved in two shootings, one of which resulted in an innocent bystander becoming paralyzed from the waist down.

So, why Vick?

Macur has met his victims. In one of those gripping paragraphs, she recounts meeting a number of dogs rescued from that hellish situation in 2008, referring to them as “Vick Dogs.”

Is it possible that she has taken it upon herself to seek some sort of revenge on Vick for his gross actions toward those dogs?

It comes off that way.

“Teams evaluating Vick should say, ‘Can’t we give our fans someone better to cheer for?” she writes.

Yes, of course they should. However, the idea of people with power in the NFL caring about ethics and morality is a concept based in fantasy. Such naive idealism, even if meant as an ironic or rhetorical device in the story, is misplaced by Macur, who covers sports for a living and surely knows as well as anyone how the NFL operates.

Indeed she does.

“If you can throw a football, if you can catch a football, if you can call plays that win big games, then nothing else matters,” she writes.

Macur uses the missteps of Vick’s teammate Riley Cooper and those of New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton as a way to frame Vick’s situation in the context of the laissez-faire administration of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, but it doesn’t help her argument.

With that said, what she writes about her subject isn’t solely negative.

Macur volunteers ways that Vick has used his second chance to try to raise awareness of animal cruelty and educate the public so that his mistakes are not repeated.

He has worked with the Humane Society of the United States since 2009 in the hopes of stopping people from doing what he did.

He supported a national legislative bill aimed at making the act of bringing a child to a dogfight a felony, because he was exposed to the activity at a young age and credits that experience with the beginning of his backwards understanding of what dogs are for.

The Vick family now has a dog, which they got in 2012 — a privilege earned after Vick completed his probation. 

Yet it appears that all of this evidence is not enough to convince Macur of Vick’s change and urge the author to abandon her vitriol.

“Signs of a changed man? Maybe,” she writes.

But, that’s not what’s important. She has a solution.

“But the Eagles should make it easy for their fans. They should replace Vick with someone devoid of a dark past, someone who hasn’t been in prison for such a reprehensible crime. It’s a pathetically low bar, but it ought to be the bare minimum,” she argues.

Uh, okay.

“Vick told me on Saturday that he had grown up since serving time in prison and had done a lot to redeem himself in the eyes of the public.

“‘I’ve changed in so many ways, so many — why don’t you write that?’ he told me.”

Forgive but don’t forget, Ms. Macur.