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Saturday, July 28, 2007
Falcons are Vick’s team, good or bad
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Flowery Branch —
According to owner Arthur Blank, whose team is in the midst of a barking storm created by You Know Who and illegal dogfighting, the Falcons aren’t about one player. Head coach Bobby Petrino echoes his boss. The same goes for players throughout the roster.
Said offensive tackle Wayne Gandy, analyzing the situation with his 14 seasons of NFL wisdom on Saturday after practice at the Falcons training camp, “Eventually, [the media] is going to have to report on somebody else on this team. We have Warrick Dunn and Keith Brooking and Lawyer [Milloy] and Alge [Crumpler] and Todd McClure. Plus, whenever you hear something or read something now, it’s always just ‘Michael Vick.’ It almost has stopped being ‘The Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick.’ “
Yeah, well.
Sounds good.
How else can you respond when your team, your franchise and your whole essence in the minds of everybody else really is about one player?
There was 2003, for instance, when the Falcons did something they hadn’t done in 22 years. They sold every ticket for all of their home games before a season began. Soon afterward, Michael Vick — as in the starting quarterback, Mr. Electric, You Know Who and that one player who has spent his six NFL seasons as absolutely everything for the Falcons — broke his leg during that preseason. Just like that, courtesy of an epidemic of empty green seats at the Georgia Dome, the Falcons challenged the league record for no-shows.
Translated: Vick IS the Falcons. That’s for good and for bad. Among other things involving the bad these days, Vick just was indicted in a highly explosive federal case involving the strangulation, drowning, electrocution, hanging and beating of losers in dogfights held on his Virginia property. So, since all of this is threatening to have Vick’s image kicked, sacked and punted for just shy of forever, that means the image of the Falcons also is headed for ugliness from now into the unforeseeable future.
With apologies to Blank and the rest, Vick has helped turn the Falcons into a PR mess, because everybody associated with this organization is joined to the hip of Vick’s controversies. We’re talking about all of them, and there have been many, but none worse than this one that could make Norman Bates cringe.
As a result, with animal-rights groups and U.S. congressmen still howling their disgust across the country, Reebok did the unprecedented by announcing it is halting the sale of jerseys bearing Vick’s name. The Reebok folks didn’t do such a thing regarding Ray Lewis, the Baltimore Ravens linebacker who was cleared but nevertheless associated with a double-murder case. Or regarding Pacman Jones with his various arrests, near arrests and pending arrests. Or regarding any Bengals player in Cincinnati, where a felony is always waiting to happen.
Just regarding Vick, the same player who also had Nike stop selling any of his products. Others also have joined the anti-Vick moment, including the Falcons organization in a subtle way.
You almost needed a magnifying glass to find Vick stuff inside the large tent that serves as the Falcons merchandise store at their training camp. It’s called “Falcons 365,” and you’ll find two prominent pictures on an inside wall of Brooking and Dunn. There are pennants featuring DeAngelo Hall, and more than a few jerseys with the names and numbers of Jerious Norwood, D.J. Shockley, Jamaal Anderson, Joe Horn and nearly anybody else who isn’t You Know Who.
Well, there is that obscure section of the tent that has enough Vick jerseys to fill about a fifth of a rack. Said Gandy, shaking his head, “When I started in 1994, people used to kind of celebrate bad boys. Not that Vick is a bad boy. It’s just that it used to kind of be the thing to be the tough, hard-nosed leader who might curse the cab driver out or something like that. Now they want to outcast the bad-boy image.”
The bad-boy image can become the bad-team image.
See the Falcons.
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USGA chief born for the job
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Betty Driver can hardly wait for Feb. 9 to get here, when the clock strikes the evening hour of seven. No, it’s not an anniversary, or somebody’s wedding date. It’s the moment she gets her husband back, out of the trenches of the USGA, which stands for the United States Golf Association. Golf, “the gentleman’s game” that evolved into something more ballistic during Walter Driver’s tour of duty in the presidency. Being president of the USGA is the trophy at the end of the well-ordered ascendency of a faithful servant, from board director to general counsel to vice-president in the case of Walter Driver Jr. It’s officiated by the well-bred whose names oftimes begin with an initial, or are concluded with a Jr. or II or III. As in C. Grant Spaeth or James D. Standish Jr. Walter W. Driver Jr. was the perfect fit — especially with his awesome name. On top of that, he was an accomplished player, scratch at the time of induction, and an alumnus of Stanford University, the pipeline which gave us such celebrated golf personages as Lawson Little, Tom Watson, Tiger Woods and Sandy Tatum. It appeared earlier in life that Driver was destined to make his mark with a racquet, not a club. Then he broke his arm and while mending followed the course of so many that led to golf: He took to reading Ben Hogan’s “Five Fundamentals.” His father, a real estate broker in El Paso, deposited him at Stanford, and there he made the golf team. Playing professionally never beckoned. “I saw fellows getting beat who had beaten me, so I turned to law,” and thus to law school at Texas. Arriving in Atlanta, he became a member of the distinguished firm of King & Spalding, but just two years ago switched interests to the investment firm of Goldman Sachs, Southeast manager no less. Twice he won the club championship at Peachtree, the shrine to golf that Bobby Jones inspired. Once he became involved in the USGA it was inevitable that he should eventually rise to the presidency, succeeding as he did a former U.S. Amateur champion, Fred Ridley. He got a forewarning of the storm ahead when at the Open at Shinnecock Hills in 2004 he served as chairman of the competition committee and took the blame for high winds, fractious weather and a course as slick as an interstate. Truth is, he merely represented the membership; two hired staff employees, now departed, were responsible for the condition of the course, Tom Meeks and Tom Moraghan. Driver was a susceptible target, tall, well-constructed and rather handsome in a rustic sort of way. Media were looking for a scapegoat and laid it on him, laced with an overdose of resentment. They haven’t laid off yet, through his two-year presidency. At Oakmont this year, he was unable to arouse a chord of harmony. Bob Verdi, a good man and old friend, wrote of him in Golf World, the “president who can strut even while standing still.” Oakmont members take pride in the cussed toughness of their course, and in the end most every pro joined in. There was still a chorus of writers looking under rugs for reasons to indict the USGA on an unspecified charge, and Walter Driver. In the end, though, Oakmont drew a harmonious response from the competitors, sort of an unofficial gift to the outgoing president. He still has his favorite championship left, the Walker Cup, to be played in Northern Ireland. “That’s a championship I can get teary about,” he said. There have been internal matters that rattled the furniture at the USGA headquarters in Far Hills, N.J. Driver has seen fit to whittle on some of the staff benefits and came to cross swords with Marty Parkes, the senior director of communications. There has been crossfire about equipment standards, whose terminology is like trying to translate something off a cave wall to me. Then there was the matter of travel by private jet, which, as it turned out, was a practice Fred Ridley left behind. On another matter, Driver’s game has suffered. His handicap is now a plus-two. Meanwhile, back at the homestead, Betty Driver counts the days. It’s sort of like the time when the kids, now grown and out, waited to get a glimpse of dad. “Work, work, work,” they would say, “golf, golf, golf, that’s all daddy does.” Reg Murphy, now a resident of Sea Island, preceded Driver in the office 12 years ago. “There are times when you need a steward and there are times when you need to change,” he told Golf World. “Walter is a change agent.” Wonder if they really understand what he’s saying in the media center, or if they’re still wondering “if the USGA can survive Walter Driver?” as Golf World headlined its report.
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