The Quarterback Who Won't Come Clean

Until Michael Vick and three other men were charged last month with running a dogfighting operation, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback was, to me, just another physically gifted, highly paid athlete in the National Football League who, through his behavior on and off the field, was helping to ruin the game.

Some of Vick's supporters may have thought it was funny when he gave the finger last year to Atlanta fans who were booing his performance. The NFL didn't think it was funny; neither did I. His out-of-court settlement with the young woman who accused him of knowingly giving her genital herpes didn't amuse me either.

But not being a Falcons fan, I don't have to watch him play.

Besides, there are plenty of Washington pro football players going out of their way to bring low comedy to the sport with their asinine showboating on the field. They are enough to keep my mind off Michael Vick.

Dogfighting, however, is another matter. "Depraved" is the right word for it. Dogfighting is not, as some animal rights folks have declared, the same as eating bacon.

Starving dogs to make them more hungry for the other dog; filing their teeth; leaving them scarred and malnourished; killing losing dogs by drowning, electrocution, strangulation, hanging or shooting -- that's barbaric.

Thus the seriousness of the federal charges filed against Vick, Tony Taylor, Purnell A. Peace and Quanis L. Phillips on July 17. The indictment put Vick in the middle of a conspiracy that may cost him the enormous fortune he's accumulated since joining the Falcons in 2001.

Which gets us to that April day when authorities raided Vick's property in Surry County, Va., and found blood-soaked floors, dozens of neglected dogs and evidence of dogfighting.

But first, a stipulation.

Few of us have led lives of such purity and innocence that we would be pleased to have all of our personal history published on the front pages of newspapers or broadcast on the news. Faced with that, most of us would end up in bed with the covers drawn over our heads, contemplating a hefty swig of hemlock.

Who, after all, likes shame and ridicule?

But saner heads realize that we humans fall short of the glory of God, with some of us (moi included) falling farther than others.