Eagles quarterback Michael Vick waits for the start of NFL Pro Bowl football practice held at Kapolei High School, Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2011, in Honolulu. (AP Photo/Eugene Tanner) (Eugene Tanner, AP / January 25, 2011)
It’s probably the biggest spiritual conversion story since St. Paul got knocked off his horse in Damascus and became a Christian missionary instead of persecuting folks for a living.
Less than two years after being released from federal prison, the Eagles quarterback is making his fourth Pro Bowl appearance…and Vick says he is not only thankful, but “ecstatic”… And for the cherry on top, the NFL surprised Michael Vick with the ultimate perk on Tuesday: the 4,200-square-foot presidential suite at the official hotel of the Pro Bowl in west Oahu…On Wednesday, Vick stepped off the team bus at Kapolei High School and was cheered by approximately 100 fans who lined the entrance to the school’s stadium. And meanwhile, advertsing endorsement offers are starting to pour in for the Michael Vick brand name again.
Remarkable. What’s even more inspiring, according to everyone who really knows him and his family, is the apparent reality of genuine growth and conversion to the Light in Vick’s soul.
There are still many skeptics among NFL fans who don’t believe a young man’s soul can change in a positive way so drastically. They drag out the old bones and chestnuts, to wit, “…if you are willing to do some time in prison you can do anything horrible and still go back into sports and make millions and be treated like a god if you have some athletic talent… It is a poor reflection on our society. A lot of people don’t want to deal with the fact that finding joy in torturing and killing any living thing is the worst that humans can do. Vick has a right to a life, but to praise the guy is obscene.”
Vick faces some remnant of this holier-than-thou fan attitude daily, but the restraint he has shown consistently in dealing with such mob-mentaility judgement is further proof to me—he really has changed.
I think Vick really is trying to save his soul. And I think Tony Dungy agrees with me.
I recently assessed things this way in an independent piece for the “Vick Revolution” newsblog, a sister project of RBI Baseball……
More and more, the Eagles public was becoming educated to the circumstances of a young boy from the poorest rural ghetto of Newport News, Virginia, who was birthed by 16-year-old parents, who was raised poor and passed around a lot to well-meaning relatives, and who was raised within a community that valued dog-fighting as a legitimate sport… and who was gifted with such athletic talent and instinct as a child he was able to leap-frog the million-to-one odds he would ever amount to anything.
To Andy Reid and the Eagles, by August 2010, it appeared Vick could outgrow or outlast the mistakes and the misguidance of his impoverished upbringing…maybe he really was trying to change and grow. There was no denying he had his legs and stamina back to the level of his Atlanta Falcons and college days. That in itself gave inspiration to the Eagles brass to slow down on the idea of auctioning Vick to the highest bidder.
Something happened with the Vick social experiment of the Eagles and their owners…at some point between the 2009 and 2010 seasons, Andy Reid and the Luries realized: hey, maybe this guy really has changed…maybe, finally, Vick is ready and able to redirect his career and his soul toward new horizons of achievement.
Certainly Vick was in far better football shape physically than he was when he joined the Eagles in the summer of 2009 fresh out of Leavenworth. And for the first time in his life, Vick was observed studying a playbook far into the night.
Now it’s just a matter of Vick’s attaining detachment from his ugly past…and acceptance by his team’s fans as a good person and a good role model for redemption. It’s also a matter of realizing this could all end again in a heartbeat…whether by injury, or by falling backwards into old sociological patterns.
The way I see it, for Vick’s “redemption” as a role-model player (and evolution as a human being)— for the naysayers to be convinced, and for Vick’s story to maintain continuity and command of fans’ attention— he must somehow prove he has really grown emotionally… That he truly understands his own ignorance of the forces that brought him down in Newport News and in Atlanta, and that he is powerless against such forces without self-knowledge and self-discipline, is crucial to his winning the confidence and admiration of Eagles fans and NFL fans alike.
In other words, Vick as a marketable and loveable hero with a long-term future as a charismatic quarterback is still an unproven commodity… The physical gifts and talents are undeniably still there. Vick is 30 years old now, but barring crippling injury of the ACL variety, you could reasonably project his playing quarterback at the current sensational level for another 5 seasons. The real question is: can Vick sustain his personal and emotional growth amid all the renewed distractions of fame and big money that are coming to him now — the same distractions that led him down a pampered path of eventual self-destruction from his days as a superstar at Virginia Tech and with the Atlanta Falcons? Those days of emotional stupidity which included the Ron Mexico saga and secret dogfight gambling and absolute irresponsibility to his team owner and fan base are really not that long ago.
By all accounts of his new mentor Tony Dungy, Vick is like a child actor who got too much adulation too early in life, long before his already fragile emotional understanding of his impoverished origin and his compensating ego were equipped to handle it. Dungy compares it to the mind of a frightened orphan child trapped in the chiseled body of a mature male who discovers he has super powers. It does not occur to the child he must suddenly reorganize his entire perspective of the universe in a balanced way for the health and welfare of himself and those around him. No, that would be called emotional maturity…and that doesn’t happen until the orphan child is first adopted, then taught to achieve self-discipline, by a wiser and loving parent figure.
Vick and his brothers and sisters were not really “orphans”… let’s just call huge chunks of their childhoods “orphan-like”…
Fortunately for us all, Michael Vick the troubled man-child was “adopted” in a way by the parent-figure Dungy, at a time when Vick the superstar had hit rock bottom. Dungy had seen enough of Vick’s good childhood traits (such as his generosity to relatives, friends and charities) over the years to know there was a decent soul worth saving, somewhere underneath all the crap…and that maybe, just maybe, there was a young man inside Vick smart enough to know it was time to put away the insecure madness of the child’s sick ego. Abandoned and broke, and facing a stint at Leavenworth, Vick was at age 27 finally ready to learn how to grow up and become a real man.
That’s the real Vick soul revolution going on now… a second chance to rearrange the world within himself and around him. It’s not an easy revolution. Even Vick knows it’s always going to be a hard-sell to some folks who just won’t let go of the publicized mistakes and mindless behaviors of his past.
But put me down on the guest list that believes Michael Vick’s soul is changing for the better…for real.
He might slip up and go backwards, or seek out old habits of the ‘hood just because they’re familiar…or comfortable. We worried about that during his little Virginia Beach birthday party adventure last June. Tony Dungy says the temptations of celebrity are often irresistible to the mind of an “orphan”, and that he expected setbacks while Vick learns to clean out the left-over junk and the emotional clutter of a previous life.
“I’m sure he’s on the right path now, and I know he will make it,” said Dungy last month. “If it were easy, it wouldn’t mean much. The good thing about Michael, he wants to be liked, and he wants to take care of his family. That’s the kind of man he wants to become and be remembered for, a guy who finally figured out doing right by others is the key to happiness.”
When we revisit the rise, fall and rise again of Michael Vick’s football stardom, it’s easy to fall into the whimsical trap of rewriting history. When times are good, it’s a natural tendency to want to find an orderly progression of events that “caused” prosperity to happen. If Michael Vick has truly found his soul, it didn’t just cause his new prosperity…it IS the prosperity.
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