Michael Vick
by Michael Schaffer

If nothing else, Michael Vick’s return to the NFL has been good for the banter in the Schaffer household. Though I live in Philadelphia, I’m a DC native and remain a Redskins fan. My wife, though, never much cared about sports until she moved to Philly; she’s now a sports-talk radio addict and, naturally, and Eagles fan. This has, over the years, led to a certain degree of football-related tension around the house.

Of course,in an over-educated, under-testosterone’d household like ours, sports trash-talk tends to be heavy on references to aspects of a team that may not strictly have much to do with sports–like a team’s owner’s politics, or their uniform design, or, say, whether or not their fans are all a bunch of Republican lobbyists from Virginia/a bunch of violent goons from South Philly. For most of this time, I’ve been on the losing end of the PC arguments, what with my home team’s tyrannical and bumbling owner, its Bush-endorsing former head coach, and that whole pesky racist team name thing. So you can imagine my relief that I can now tease my wife about how she, a woman who tears up during Beethoven, now supports dog-murder every time she cheers on an Eagles touchdown.

In fact, its been kind of fascinating to have been living in Philadelphia as the Vick signing sank in. The debate, if that’s what you call it, has been completely idiotic, albeit in ways that tell us a lot about how we Americans think about everything from pets to football loyalty to, most of all, justice.

On pets, I’d long thought that the extent of our national Vick-hatred was a sign of how much we love dogs: Kobe Bryant, settled out-of-court with a woman who decided against testifying in his sexual-assault trial, is back in the endorsement fray. Vick seemed to me to have done something the public views as even lower. But one refrain since he signed on with the Eagles reminds me that there’s also a dissenting point of view. For all the protesters in front of their practice facility, for all the people vowing to cancel season tickets, all of the brainless man-on-the-street reports on the local TV news featured at least one person saying something along the lines of: Gimme a break–people in this country treat dogs better than humans! (As if one person’s decision to send a pet to a plush doggie day spa counterbalances another person’s decision to bludgeon a dog to death for the sin of costing you money by losing a fight.) Which is all to say that our national petmania is a complicated thing, and not without its own backlash.

On football loyalty, I’m afraid the fact is that Michael Vick’s future reputation will depend, more than anything, on how he performs on the field. He got a standing ovation in his first preseason home game–something that may or may not reflect the city’s broader view, since the sort of folks who go to preseason games tend to be die-hards. But the motivation for the cheers, which as far as I can tell is that everyone’s out to get Vick and so we have to rally around him now that he’s one of ours, is an impulse that extends beyond die-hards. Vick is joining a team that’s been hobbled by injury and will likely not be very good this year. He’s suspended through week six. If his return is perceived as somehow spurring an Eagles rivival, that will assure his place in the good graces of far more fans than I’d care to admit: Look for all sorts of stories about how Vick’s winning pass demonstrates that he’s pulled his life back together, serves as an inspiring example of overcoming, etc etc. We are, when it comes to sports still a very naive country. No number of scandals, shootings, or sex crimes will ever remind us that athletic brilliance and personal tawdriness are not actually contradictions, and that we should maybe seek our role-models elsewhere.

Or else we’re just fatalistic in our team loyalty. My wife won’t be cheering Vick, but she still loves her Eagles. “This is what it means to be a fan,” she says, as if the Vick signing is like a muffed punt or a blown call or a last-minute super-bowl choke. “You get kicked in the teeth every time.”

And in terms of revealing our views on justice, the Vick-signing fallout has been especially interesting. By day two, the entire thing had devolved into a phony constitutional debate, with dim-bulb sports-talk callers saying that Vick had “paid his debt to society” and had the “right” to play. Well, in the sense that he’s served his legally mandated prison term, of course he has! And, insofar as any free adult in the country has the right to hold any non-regulated job that will hire them, of course he does! The same goes for the related arguments Vick’s defenders raise, about compassion and second chances and how the whole criminal system depends on holding out the opportunity for convicts to thrive once they’ve done their time. But that’s not really the point.

The point of a football game may be to score more points than the other guy, but the point of a football franchise is to make money for its ownership. Usually, those two things go hand in hand. They’re not identical, though–teams will sometimes go out and sign free agents who are likely to boost fan turnout or merchandise sales or whatever, and they’ll get rid of players for the same reason. This is true of any entertainment business. It’ll be hard to find leading-man roles at the Cineplex for an actor with a reputation as, say, a Holocaust denier–even though that actor hasn’t committed any crime by espousing his views, and even though he has a “right” to espouse them. In fact, it goes for any firm with a public face. You could be the best car designer in the world, but if you’d done 18 months for drowning, elextrocuting and hanging caged dogs, you wouldn’t get to become CEO of Ford, because the company would rightly fear that the opprobrium would shave a couple percentage points off the bottom line.

The Eagles may not be so worried about this, either because they think winning will quiet the rage, or because they’ve managed to finesse the debate in such a way as to make it seem as if opposing the Vick signing means opposing someone’s basic constitutional rights. Oddly, the whole thing made me think of the chapter in my book about the “dog wars” over off-leash pets in San Francisco city parks: As tempers rose, the debate ceased focusing on what was the best use of the park system for a diverse range of citizens, and instead went straight to the Bill of Rights: Opponents were either fighting your “right” to be a dog-owner, or fighting your “right” to picnic without being bothered by someone’s poodle. As such, like so many things in pet-world, it told us a lot about contemporary America: Our arguments always go back to freedom and rights.

The best bit I’ve read about Vick is from Phil Sheridan, sports columnist for my former employer, the Philadelphia Inquirer. Sheridan opposes the Vick signing in large part because the guy’s a bad fit for the team, which runs a different offense and has a perfectly good back-up. But reacting to the roll-out press conference, where Vick declared his remorse and was vouched for by the tragedy-scarred, Bible-quoting former Colts coach Tony Dungy and by current Eagles coach Andy Reid, whose kids have been mixed up with the justice system themselves, here’s what he also said:

Clearly, Dungy and Reid believe what they said. There is no doubting their desire to offer Vick an opportunity to rewrite his legacy and atone for his actions. There’s a football component here, to be sure, but there is something more.

Here’s the problem. By defending the Vick signing in those terms, Dungy and Reid also imply that anyone who disagrees with the move is somehow not Christian (or forgiving) and not American enough. And that’s just not fair.

It is possible to wish Vick a redemptive and productive future without wanting to spend your Sunday afternoons rooting for him on the football field. It is possible to think he paid his debt to society for his egregious behavior and also think it is a mistake for the Eagles to add him to their team.

Right on.

But of course, I’m not an Eagles fan. So I’ll stick to shouting “dog killer!” at my pro-Eagles friends when our two teams finally face off.