All posts in Sports Psych

(My friend Jonna wrote this piece about rooting for Michael Vick and my comment got so long it was embarrassing. So here we go.)

Michael Vick is unquestionably one of the most talented quarterbacks in the National Football League.  He might be the best. I’m bad at gauging that kind of thing.

Anyway.

Michael Vick also, unfortunately, arranged, condoned and participated in not only the forced violent fighting of pit bulls that often led to the death of these animals, but he also signed off on the nauseating strangling and electrocution of others who maybe didn’t make the cut or got too messed up in fights to go on.

The disgusting fruits of Michael Vick’s labors haunt me worse than eleventy billion Sarah McLachlan pet rescue videos, y’all, and I can’t even watch those all the way through. I don’t give a damn about Michael Vick’s incarceration, redemption, team spirit, contribution to the National Football League or prowess as a quarterback.

I.

Don’t.

Care.

Michael Vick got caught carrying on with some outrageous behavior that caused the suffering and death of living beings, dogs who get a bad rap in large part due to jerks like him and his friends. He was convicted of this disgusting dog ring nonsense. He served some time in prison. He got out, and super shortly thereafter got snapped up by a team who was willing to deal with his baggage.

So, he gets out of prison. He gets to make more than a million dollars. He gets to do what he loves. He gets the adulation of a city that wants a Super Bowl more than it cares or stops to analyze the reason why the potential catalyst is there. He even gets awards for teamwork, first year out.

Oh, and he will tell you time and time again how much he’s suffered, yes he will:

I’ve overcome a lot, more than probably one single individual can handle or bear. You ask certain people to walk through my shoes, they probably couldn’t do. Probably 95 percent of the people in this world because nobody had to endure what I’ve been through, situations I’ve been put in, situations I put myself in and decisions I have made, whether they have been good or bad.

Last Sunday, after the Eagles’ stupid ass loss to the Washington Redskins, a Facebook friend went off about how people should LEAVE Mike Vick alone, and he’d DONE his time, and BLAH and BLAH and BLAH and everyone shut up.

It irritated me, and the only thing I’d said was a random comment on my cousin’s Facebook — in response to something she said — about how what I heard when he got hurt was the sound of a hundred pit bulls lauging their asses off.

Yes, I knew he got injured in the game against the home team around here. No, I wasn’t especially sad that he was hurt. But that was that. I didn’t take to my Facebook or Twitter account to tell anyone else how to feel or what to say about Michael Vick. Because guess why?

I feel how I feel about him, and I move on. I don’t care how you feel about Michael Vick, or you or you or you. I’m neither going to “leave him alone” nor boycott the Eagles because they hired him. I listen to my co-worker talk about the Eagles and I don’t roll my eyes at him or ask him how he can bear to still support his lifelong home team.

Because it’s none of my business. And I don’t want him spouting anything off at me about how I need to let my feelings about this guy go, because how I feel about him is none of his business either.

I fail to see what kind of problems face Michael Vick. Sure, he went to jail. I’m sure that was upsetting. A lot of athletes go to jail for various infractions large and small. But my feelings lie with my belief that not only did he do what he did, since he got out he has been more or less an apologist for animal abuse. The way people talk and write about it, it’s just something you have to go to jail for awhile for doing, and sure, your operation is shut down and that’s awesome for the dogs who won’t be strangled and electrocuted on your watch. But people who condemned him, who dare to say anything negative or dare whisper “think of the PUPPIES” are painted as  unforgiving PETA-freaks who don’t understand that he has done his time.

His time that he earned.

He came out of jail to the tune of millions of dollars, back to a job and a public that, by and large, will not see him as a convict first.

So I think he’s going to be fine whether I root for him or not. And yes, I’ll cop to some minor satisfaction during reports today of how he wouldn’t be playing this week and probably next although he desperately wants to go back to Atlanta and face his former team. It’s just that I’m saving my cheers for people who to my knowledge would never have been capable of doing the stuff he did in the first place. I believe in redemption to a point, but not just because someone tells me that jail and a spanking new seven- figure salary helped a quarterback to heal himself. How anyone else feels about it is her business.