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Monday, August 27, 2007
Falcons move forward, but ghost lingers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Arthur Blank spent the outset of his opening statement Monday explaining why the Falcons were not officially going to cut Michael Vick, even if every ounce of his soul, his retailing prowess and a very itchy trigger finger screamed otherwise.
“Cutting him today may feel better emotionally today,” Blank said at a press conference held after Vick formally entered a guilty plea in federal court. “But it’s not in the best long-term interest of our franchise.”
As it turns out, some people actually think before the act.
So there Monday night in the Georgia Dome was Vick, sort of. A Falcon, in paper only. A ghost.
He will haunt the team this season in merchandising sales and the salary cap. He will remain a part of the franchise until Blank can convince a series of judges and arbitrators that he deserves $22 million in bonuses back — or until Judge Henry Hudson covers Vick with gravy and orders him to run ahead of the Iditarod field, which ever comes first.
To what extent Vick haunts the Falcons this season remains uncertain. But consider their first home game minus Vick the first step in a year-long exorcism.
Joey Harrington threw two touchdown passes in the first half against the Cincinnati Bengals. He had a potential third touchdown dropped in the end zone in the third quarter by Roddy White (whose drops have not yet equated to a felony).
By the time he left the game in the third, Harrington had thrown for 164 yards on 13-of-21 passing with no interceptions (though three sacks). It amounted to a quarterback efficiency rating of 118, which team officials were so proud of that they announced it in the press box.
Life goes on. A team goes on. The Falcons got to wear uniforms and play a game and everything. They even won. Go figure.
“We don’t want to overblow this,” coach Bobby Petrino said. “It was a preseason game. But it was important.”
How about this for a foreign concept: After his teammates had left the team’s facility Saturday for time off, Harrington stayed back to draw up plays and study more video, according to Petrino. “With all of the adversity and controversy, it was important that he come out and play well,” he said.
It was a rare moment of joy for Blank, who earlier in the day looked worn down from another long news conference at his home office. NFL owners just aren’t built for this many off-season spin sessions.
“A lot of people have asked me how I feel about this,” Blank said of Vick’s exit. “But it’s not about me. It’s about animals that have died. It’s about players who were with Michael for six years. … It’s about moving forward.”
His heart tells him to remove any reminder of Vick in this city, even if it means knocking on doors to collect old Nikes and No. 7 jerseys. But he can’t.
Think of Vick this way: He’s a car you financed over five years that broke down after two. The bank says it’s still yours, even though you’re now riding the bus. Or Harrington.
In Richmond, Vick suddenly showed contrition when he addressed the media after his plea. But Blank has experienced Vick saying one thing and doing another. It’s not about words, it’s about actions.
If there was any doubt about how Blank feels, it became apparent when somebody asked him about Vick claiming he had “turned my life over to God.”
“You have to match that up with personal responsibility, in addition to turning your life over to God,” Blank said. “This isn’t a religious sermon. But I don’t think God is saying, ‘OK, it’s up to me from this point forward.’ God gives us the ability to make choices and what we do with those choices is our responsibility, not God’s responsibility.”
Meanwhile, back down here on Earth, an NFL team tried again to move on. The replacement quarterback looked passable. The offense functioned, certainly better than some on the defense (cornerback DeAngelo Hall didn’t appear to be all here in coverage, in mind, body and spirit).
In two weeks, the Falcons will start things for real in Minnesota. Vick will still be awaiting sentencing. Before long, he’ll be in a cell. For now, he’s a ghost. Some spirits you can’t get rid of so easily.
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There’s still hope for Vick
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Richmond, Va. — Once he posed for this newspaper dressed in a Superman shirt. On Monday he stood in a courtroom and later in a hotel ballroom, no longer invulnerable or impervious, a god-like hero revealed as all too human.
On the day he became a convicted felon, Michael Vick indicated that he, perhaps contrary to popular belief, has both a heart and a conscience. When he turned toward his family after court was adjourned, his look was one of abject shame. His blue suit seemed a size too large, adding to the sensation that this 27-year-old athlete was somehow just a little boy gone way, way wrong.
Forty-five minutes later and two blocks away, Vick met the assembled media for the first time in 3-1/2 months. He deflected nothing. (“I’m not pointing fingers,” he said, twice.) He kept using the word “totally,” saying, “I’m totally disappointed in myself” and “I’m totally responsible.”
He didn’t read from a text. He walked to the podium and said, by way of introduction, “Most of my life I’ve been a football player, not a public speaker.” Then he made as graceful a speech as anyone will ever deliver on the worst day of his/her life. He apologized often. He admitted lying to Arthur Blank and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. (“I was ashamed,” he said.) He condemned dogfighting as “a terrible thing” and said, “I do reject it.”
And then this: “I offer my deepest apology to everybody out there in the world who was affected by this, and if I’m more disappointed with myself than anybody by this, it’s because of all the young kids I let down … I hope that every young kid out there … will use me as an example to using better judgment and making better decisions.”
In sum, he said all the things we’ve waited to hear Michael Vick say, and he said them not as part of some legal bargain but as a plea to the rest of humankind. In his conspicuous devastation, he evinced the universal desire to be understood and, yes, forgiven.
He said he’d “found Jesus” and “turned my life over to God,” and skeptics will note that a disproportionate number of religious conversions occur when the convert is about to become a convict. Somehow, though, nothing about Vick rang false this day. He kept saying, “Yes, sir” to Judge Henry Hudson, even as Hudson delineated all the rights a convicted felon forfeits — to vote, to bear arms, to serve on a jury — and then noted that, the plea bargain notwithstanding, he could serve the full five years if the judge so ordains. Did Vick understand?
“Yes, sir.”
Could this have been, as his lawyer Billy Martin said, our first post-dogfight look at “the real Michael Vick”? (Martin: “What we’ve seen is an aberration.”) We can only hope. Vick will go to jail and serve his NFL suspension, and then there’ll be the rest of his life. It need not be a tale of woe. With the right amount of contrition (from him) and compassion (from us), it might even become a heartening story in three acts: The rise, the fall, the redemption.
Vick: “I will redeem myself. I have to.”
The guy typing this should stipulate that he thought he’d come to know the real Michael Vick years ago. The guy wrote, several times, that Vick was a decent fellow who cared deeply about doing the right things. On Monday the guy walked within three feet of Vick on the way out of the courtroom and tried twice to make eye contact. And twice Vick looked away, as if to say, “I’m sorry I wasn’t the person you thought.”
It was a sobering spectacle, seeing this worker of athletic wonders admit to being a criminal. And if that’s the last we ever hear from Vick, this will have been, as Martin averred, “a tragic situation.” But as Michael Vick stood before the cameras, a humbled man trying not to cry but in no way trying to duck, here’s what the same guy thought:
There’s hope for this one yet.
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