Michael Vick was released this week from his stint in the pokey, and will start his job soon as a construction worker. I honestly don't know whether I should feel pity on him that he has squandered his talent and his money, and now faces the prospect of being shut out of the NFL forever, or whether I should feel satisfied by the fact that he is being punished for what he did.
On the one hand, the only skill he has (presumably) is playing football. His major in college wasn't finance or electrical engineering, and the only marketable talents he developed during his two brief years in higher education were football-related. If he isn't re-instated by the NFL commissioner, he'll have to follow some other path to earn a living (recall that he filed bankruptcy and has no money), and anything that does not involve him padding up and taking the field on Sunday mornings is going to be far less lucrative, so, being a Second Chances kind of guy, I feel pity. A little.
On the other hand, this dog fighting thing wasn't Vick's first brush with the law. Early in his NFL career, a truck that he owned was used by a couple of his friends to deal marijuana. Vick was never charged, but Falcons coach Dan Reeves used the opportunity to lecture the young QB on the importance of having high quality people as friends, and told him that he needed to associate himself with better people than he had been used to. The advice was apparently disregarded, as soon thereafter some members of his entourage were busted on tape stealing a watch at the airport in Atlanta, although Vick was never charged. These run ins with The Man should have alerted him that he needed to straighten up. He ignored the warnings and eventually was arrested for acts far worse that stealing a watch.
One nagging thing that rolls around in the vacuum of my mind is this: If Michael Vick were as good a football player as Kobe Bryant is a basketball player, and if he played for the Dallas Cowboys rather than the Atlanta Falcons, would his career have been interrupted? Would there have been the outage and sentiment to punish him? Considering that in Kobe's case he was able to pay off his accuser while Vick had no such opportunity, I am left to wonder
