Michael Vick: Football Records, Fighting Dogs and, Just Maybe, Redemption
If you think it's all art and design here at The Cold Light Reader, get ready for some football. Last week's Monday Night Football telecast brought us gridiron fans an athletic display so amazing, it will probably never be seen again -- and at the same time, reprised a topic so reprehensible, it will never be easily dismissed. Nor should it be.
Those of us who consider football, not baseball, as America's national pastime, watched in utter amazement as Michael Vick, quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, ran and passed essentially at will, in the rain, humiliating the supposed professional football team from Washington in ways unthinkable.
Vick -- who can run faster backwards than most defensive players can forward -- is surely one of the greatest ever to step on the field. Now, as he regains the prowess he displayed before prison (some might say he transcends it), Vick continues to bring the ugly, depraved subject of dogfighting along with him.
On this rainy night, the soggy football not mattering much, Vick became the only player in NFL history with at least 300 yards passing and 50 yards rushing in the same game. He passed for four touchdowns, and ran for another two.
Among many team records set Nov. 15, the Eagles scored 45 points in the first half, and had the biggest lead (28 points) after the first quarter for any NFL road team since at least 1950.
This magnificent display of offense left ESPN's Monday Night Football broadcast team of Mike Tirico, Ron Jaworski and former Tampa Bay coach Jon Gruden without sufficient superlatives shortly after the end of the first quarter. There just weren't words left.
But there was, however, another subject.
Tasked with commenting on the full story, the MNF broadcast team soberly recounted Vick's 2007 indictment and incarceration for his participation in the Bad Newz Kennels, which bred pit bulls expressly for the ghoulish so-called sport of dogfighting.
They set out the facts that Vick had served his time, and his debt to society, and also had been bankrupted by his involvement, losing all the riches he had gained as an elite American athlete.
In his book The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption, Jim Gorant followed the fate of the 51 dogs rescued from Bad Newz Kennels. All but four of them made it, either being successfully relocated as pets, or finding refuge in rescue kennels for the rest of their lives. Some were retrained as therapy dogs, where they are close with patients needing loving contact.
Those of us who are ardent dog lovers, to the point of habitually embarrassing ourselves in public by greeting every dog we meet with baby talk and gibberish, find the idea of dogfighting so abhorrent, we. too, are left without words.
The sadism involved in this underground world is just a few clicks away on the internet, where sickening photographs are freely available of dogs who have survived these events.
It's incomprehensible that anyone with the slightest shred of humanity could witness, let alone enjoy, such a thing.
Gorant, writing in Sports Illustrated this October, recounts the debts Vick has paid, the inadvertent spotlight he has thrown on the dogfighting industry, and the raw feelings still out there among the public. (It's worth the extra read, here.)
Again, we crazies who find the world in a dog's eyes had more to celebrate with the engrossing recent NOVA documentary Dogs Decoded. (Premiered Nov. 9 on PBS, it's available at Amazon on DVD or VOD, and also streaming online at Netflix.) This hour examined the thousands of years of history between man and canine, each benefiting the other, with dogs being able to read and respond to human emotions, and humans, in turn, responding to dogs with the same hormones as a mother to her child.
It's with no little irony that the NFL recently started cracking down on defensive players taking cheap shots at offensive receivers and running backs in vulnerable positions carrying or catching the ball. For years, these sickening, sadistic kinds of tackles were considered normal, by some even an essential part of the game. Now, the NFL is levying heavy fines on hits that go beyond a tackle.
As a fan, I somehow was always able to block them out, as part of the strategy and group precision of the sport I love. I assume that same ability to disassociate allows me to watch Vick's athletic feats for a time, without the fate of the Bad Newz dogs coming to mind with every play.
The next sports chapter in the Vick saga finds the 6-3 Eagles colliding with the 6-3 New York Giants this Sunday night at 8:15 ET on NBC. The Philly-Giants rivalry is one of the oldest in the NFL, and second to none.
Surely, after last Monday's performance, all will be watching to see another mind-bending Vick performance, without the degree of savagery that has sullied the game for too many years.
Certainly, the survivors of the Bad Newz Kennels got the lucky break they so deserved. With Vick on the field, we'll be mindful of that for a long time to come.