Extreme Elimination Challenge: Michael Vick Edition

I am not a sports fan. This won’t come as a shock to anyone who has ever talked to me for more than 15 minutes. I like to go to Busch Stadium once a summer or so to watch the Cards play, but that is mostly an excuse to drink beer and eat nachos. Hockey games are fun, but not worth the effort to actually procure my own tickets. Football bores me witless, although now that I’ve been divorced for a couple of years I no longer have an active antipathy to the game. On a boredom scale from 1 to 10, with a 10 being a 15 minute orgasm and 1 being a typical workday here lately, a conversation about sports rates about a 2 or a 2 ½. If I’m lucky.

So, the fact that I’m also going to wade into this whole Michael Vick thing really says something. It says, “I am sick of sports assholes.”

Having read the indictment, I would very much like for some enterprising reporter to figure out where the man was at the times alleged; I wouldn’t mind giving Vick the benefit of the doubt, assuming of course there is any doubt from which to benefit. I would hate to overstate myself or oversimplify the situation.

The fact is, though, I don’t much give a rat’s ass if he was actively involved in dog fighting or not, although the evidence in the indictment seems to point to the fact that he was far more than a passive dipshit who let his cousin freeload on his property. Best case scenario? Michael Vick is negligently stupid, buying property for a shitbum cousin and then failing to do anything to make sure said shitbum didn’t commit any felonies while crashing there. You know what? As a landlord, I feel that one does have some responsibility to make sure that one’s tenants don’t turn one’s property into a meth lab or a whorehouse or a dog fighting kennel.

I don’t know if Vick was legally responsible to make sure that the bruised fruit from his family tree wasn’t engaged in various and sundry illegal activities on his compound in the sticks, but he was morally obligated to do so. It’s not like the cousin was found with a bong full of weed in the kitchen, or even a patch of weed out in the woods (neither of which would even make me bat an eye). Nope. He was found with a farm full of fighting dogs. Unlike, say, a patch of weed out in the woods, dogs make noise. They smell. They do dog things. If anyone ever visited the property, he or she would have to know there were many, many dogs there. The rest would not require Mensa level reasoning to figure out.

I assume Michael Vick isn’t retarded. I assume he’s just a bastard.

I would like nothing more than to see him kicked off the Falcons and bounced out of pro-football. He doesn’t deserve it. I don’t look at it as holding him to a higher standard because if one my Corporate Comrades was similarly worthless, I wouldn’t want to work with him, either. Of course, should my Corporate Comrades do something stupid, I feel certain the powers that be would be unable to suspend or fire him unless he was convicted of an actual crime. Just being a careless, callous cocksmack does not bar one from employment in corporate America.

The National Football League has different rules, though. They can suspend and dismiss their players for their behavior. Even if Vick were not ACTIVELY engaged in dog fighting (a claim which I don’t buy because my brain has not been replaced with paper bags and hairballs), his behavior was so outrageously negligent that it hardly bears thinking about.

Why doesn’t the NFL and their pro-league brethren, I dunno, make it a policy that players facing felony indictments are suspended pending trial? If they are exonerated, let them come back. Convicted? Pack up your cleats, son. Enjoy your life. For the bajillion dollars these dudes get paid to run, sweat, lift, and engage their god-given talents to chase balls around, it’s not to much to ask that they keep their questionably criminal behavior under control for the decade or so they get to play.

Sounds like a fucking plan to me. It's just another form of asshole tax.