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Monday, November 27, 2006
Vick seems uneasy on the throne
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Flowery Branch — “It will never happen again,” a contrite Michael Vick said Monday, but the greater revelation was that it happened at all — that the man who has reigned as prince of his adopted city is now being heckled at home. For six seasons Vick has loved Atlanta and most of Atlanta has loved him back, and now this.
Apologizing twice in two days.
Looking not at all like the triumphant passer who exited Cincinnati a month ago having achieved what owner Arthur Blank deemed “a breakthrough.”
Six years on, you wonder if there are any breakthroughs left for Michael Vick. You wonder if he’ll ever find the right system or the right coaches, or if such things even exist. You wonder if the backlash that set in last season and reached full force with the elder Jim Mora’s “coach-killer” soliloquy has taken such a bite out of this buoyant man that he’ll never bounce quite so high again.
“From Day 1 this city has embraced me,” Vick said Monday. “There’s been a lot of love here for Mike Vick.” But then: “I never thought that, six years into my career, something like that would happen to me.”
He meant Sunday’s double-barreled postgame salute. (Directed, Vick said, to a single fan who was ripping the Falcons en masse, not No. 7 in particular.) We can get all self-righteous and say that nobody in such a prominent position should ever stoop so low in digital response, but let he (or she) who has never been cut off in traffic cast the first stone. Vick was wrong, yes, but the issue going forward isn’t what he did but why he felt moved to do it.
“I’ve never experienced a situation where we were getting booed and the fans were unhappy,” he said, and the displeasure doesn’t exist only on the periphery. Blank issued a call for accountability in Sunday’s AJC. Jim Mora the coach has had to answer for Jim Mora the ex-coach. Vick himself has grown so uneasy with the offense that he vented on HBO. The frustration index has reached a Blank-era high, and Sunday’s loss to New Orleans seemed a clear case of a tight team coming unstrung.
Longer-term Atlantans are used to seeing the Falcons fall to pieces, but times began to change on April 21, 2001. That was the day of Vick’s drafting, the day the future grew rife with potential. Lately, alas, potential has begun to yield to limitation. Can Vick ever be a pocket passer? (The Cincinnati game seemed to prove he could, but nothing good has happened since.) Can a team win at the highest level when its performance — and, being brutally honest, the performance of its $130 million quarterback — fluctuates weekly?
Six years on, you’d have thought Vick would have found an enduring happier medium. Six years on, it seems unthinkable that his best passing season came in 2002, his first as a starter. Six years on, is it possible we’ve already seen the best of Michael Vick?
It would be foolish to discount a player so talented and so driven, and indeed there are games — Cincinnati was one, Miami last year another — when Vick takes pains to refute the skeptics. But a career cannot run on pride alone; there must be precision involved. For all his gifts, he hasn’t thrown a fourth-quarter touchdown this season. Yes, his receivers are dreadful — who drafted these guys, anyway? — but at some point an NFL quarterback must complete the requisite passes.
Of Sunday’s game, in which he rushed for 166 yards but threw for roughly half that, Vick said: “I try to win. That’s why I ran the ball as much as I did. I put my heart into it.”
He has done as much from the first, but now he’s learning that heart isn’t enough. He’s learning that fans who happily buy his jersey are less happy when his team loses. He’s learning that the love of a city is a conditional thing.
The gestures he made Sunday and will rue for years to come? Those were fingers of frustration.
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