Michael Vick snuck out of prison (legally) today and is driving 18 hours back to Virginia from Kansas.  Once home he will put a ankle monitoring unit on and stay home for 2 months approximately.  He will only be allowed to go to church, work or to visit his probation offer.  In the grand scheme of things, it is a slow news day and no one really cares. 

Michael Vick is 28 years old and many people feel that he could still be fit enough (physically) to play in the NFL for at least a couple if not a dozen years to come.  After protecting his wealth with a penthouse in Florida and vast cash withdrawals of a couple million dollars by analyst estimates, Vick filed bankruptcy.  He apparently needs the money and the biggest ticket out there for an ex-con that likes to kill dogs for sport is the NFL.

It is true that the NFL and each of the team franchises around the country are businesses.  A business owner can really do what ever they like within the law.  That said the service these ‘businesses’ provide is the service of entertainment for football fans around the country.  Those fans come in all shapes and sizes, in all three sexes (male, female, & mixed), they come in all ages from babies to the elderly. 

They come to watch the game, they come to watch the players, and many come dreaming of what they could do themselves or in some cases could have done themselves if they had been gifted with the skills, ability, and opportunity to play in the NFL.  Many of those fans idolize players, just like many people idolized Michael Vick.  They spend millions if not billions of dollars on everything from tickets to food to clothes and shoes to jerseys and wide screen TVs.  All that money flows into the NFL and to sponsors and the NFL and sponsors pay some of that money to players to keep it coming in and build on the idolization of fans.

Michael Vick was not only a star player, but a star attractor of sponsored money.  In fact he might have been better at attracting big dollar sponsors than he was at attaining actual results on the field.  He WAS definitely a very good player, but he was never much of a team player nor much of a leader.  He was too caught up in his own bad boy image and persona most of the time, too much a lone wolf, and the Falcons suffered due to his inability to rise up to his potential not only as a person that was good at taking money from companies but as a football player that was good at delivering wins.

Michael Vick squandered his opportunities over and over and over again during his years in the NFL.  His own actions have proven that he is a very troubled individual.  Maybe growing up poor in a difficult neighborhood was too much for him.  Maybe the fame and fortune were too big a burden for him to handle.  Maybe the women and drugs and gangster lifestyle were just to appealing for a young guy in his early twenties with more money than good sense.  It would not surprise me to learn someday that he is a gambling or drug addict.

Gambling and drugs can be objects of what is known as a victimless crime.  A society holds something up on a pedestal and states it is immoral to engage in this thing.  If you do partake or engage, then you are committing a crime.  But these crimes when committed often do not have a victim that suffers. 

When Michael Vick sneaks pot through an airport so that he can get high at home or on the road, no one suffers at his hands.  When Michael Vick places a bet through a bookie, no one suffers at his hands.  But when Michael Vick gets high and then goes out and beats his dog, that’s a little different.  When he takes a couple million dollars and finances a dog fighting club, pulling in kids, teenagers, and young men off the street and introducing them to celebrity and money and criminal elements that is different.  When he applies his celebrity to what amounted to a traveling animal cruelty freak show on the road that is different.  When the people in his entourage start getting assaulted or threatened or in Bud Melton’s case murdered, that is different.  These two things of drugs and gambling when grown into a racket move past the victimless crime of individual consumption, and they start hurting real people, not to mention the dogs.

There were two key ingredients that made Michael Vick’s dog fighting escapades possible.  NFL money and NFL celebrity.  The NFL money kept the wheels and gears moving and the NFL celebrity gave dog fighting some sick sense so legitimacy for the teenagers and twenty somethings around the country that got sucked in.  It wasn’t just a notion, ‘lets go fight our dog to the death today’, it was a celebrity appeal, ‘My dog is tough, wouldn’t it be cool if my dog could beat Michael Vick’s dog?’ 

Michael Vick’s presence gave people in these dog fighting rings more drive to push their own dogs to the limits, to seek out a victory over Michael Vick with their dog as surrogate that they could not achieve physically playing football. 

Of course when their dog died, when they lost thousands of dollars gambling, turning to drugs would be a natural outlet, especially for those players that financed their own dogs with drug money. 

Michael Vick seriously damaged the NFL.  I’m not trying to say that we should hold football players on a pedestal, but too many people do and the NFL not only encourages this, it is part of their business model.  Michael Vick essentially leveled the NFL field down to the level of drug dealers and animal abusers.  He showed teenagers, well you might not be like Mike when it comes to playing football, but if you have a pet dog, teach that dog to fight to the death some day and you might end up being like Mike then.

Instead of the message of work hard at football, work hard in school and one way or the other you’ll do well in life, he conveyed the message of work hard at football but if that doesn’t pan out, deal drugs a bit, raise some dogs as killers and you can hang with me.

So as I have stated before, I do not want to see Michael Vick return to the NFL.  From my perspective that makes about as much sense as giving Osama Bin Laden a free ticket on an airplane to NYC.  Michael Vick is out of prison, he is not reformed (hence the house arrest and probation).  Hopefully, he will reform some day, but the NFL should not give him a ticket back into the situation that helped corrupt him and that he used to corrupt so many others.  Let him have a second or third or fourth chance, let him seek help, and let him heal himself but lets not let history repeat itself.

EDIT

After writing this article I came across this video of Mike Tyson.  Consider the problems that Tyson faced whenever he tried to repeat his own history.  Definitely seems to be on a better track now that he is doing something new and different.