Eight Feet Deep

Lately, the local sport talk radio sta­tion has been one of my more fre­quent stops on the FM dial.

It is a good time for sports talk. Foot­ball sea­son is on the hori­zon and major league base­ball is wind­ing down with the play­offs in the not-too dis­tant future. Besides, one has lit­tle to pick from when it comes to music on FM in the Beaumont-Houston area. And on AM, of course, it’s prac­ti­cally all right-wing radio unless you get in just the right geo­graph­i­cal spot and can get the Cajun sta­tion out of South Louisiana.

A lot of the radio sports guys have recently spent a lot of air time on the fate of Michael Vick, the one-time Atlanta quar­ter­back who was recently rein­stated into the NFL after serv­ing fed­eral prison time for orga­niz­ing dog fights.

As a story — be it sports or just news — Michael Vick’s is a com­pelling one given the stan­dard for news sto­ries these days. It is a story tinged with race as well as that of ani­mal cru­elty. If gay abor­tion­ists were some­how involved in the story you would touch just about every hot-button out there.

The sports talk­ers are, not to a man, mostly miss­ing the boat when it comes to the fate of Michael Vick. Many of these talk show folks I have heard want Vick back on the field where he belongs (their sen­ti­ment). There also seems to be a good-sized ele­ment of the African-American com­mu­nity who feel Vick is being, par­don the pun, black-balled from play­ing foot­ball. After all, Vick was one of the top NFL quar­ter­backs before his trou­ble with the law began.

I can’t speak for the sports guys and cer­tainly not for blacks. I do believe though that the for­mer are swim­ming against the tide in a great cul­tural gulf. Some of the sports talk­ers can’t under­stand why, if the NFL com­mis­sioner has rein­stated Vick, that he has not been auto­mat­i­cally snapped up by the league’s teams. Some have even gone so far to say the team exec­u­tives must be wor­ried about PETA show­ing up on their 50-yard lines.

But my guess is that the con­cerns go way beyond PETA. Some of the same folks who abhor ani­mal cru­elty show up on Sunday’s in the seats and sky­boxes of the NFL’s sta­di­ums. Count­less oth­ers are chomp­ing down on hot wings and drink­ing Bud Light at home while the games tele­vised into their liv­ing rooms fea­ture young guys knock­ing the beje­sus out of each other. Yet many of these same fans go bal­lis­tic when they see aban­doned or abused pup­pies on the evening news.

Dur­ing my career as a, full-time, jour­nal­ist I cov­ered dou­ble homi­cides, wrecks killing or maim­ing hand­fuls and other mis­cel­la­neous may­hem. But never, ever, did I get as many phone calls and e-mails than the next day after a story I did involv­ing stray dogs and cats.

This guy had become a one-man ani­mal res­cue and he kept tak­ing in dogs and cats until ani­mals had occu­pied one house and mostly took over another. I was out at this guy’s house when sheriff’s deputies came to take the ani­mals away because this oth­er­wise Good Samar­i­tan couldn’t prop­erly feed or oth­er­wise care for these strays. It was as sad as it was vile, if you can imag­ine noth­ing but dogs and cats every­where and doing pretty much as they do when not housebroken.

I notice that the local tele­vi­sion news reporters lately also jump on ani­mal abuse sto­ries like a duck on a June bug. These sto­ries run at the top of the news­casts, ahead of fatal car wrecks, Saturday-night stab­bings and armed rob­beries. That’s because they know such sto­ries play on the basest of human emo­tions. That is, at least for those who have the com­pas­sion to under­stand what is tak­ing place.

I won’t dwell on the racial aspect of it because that is some­thing which I per­son­ally know lit­tle about. How­ever, there is also the “gangsta” ele­ment in the dog­fight­ing cult that ticks off peo­ple of more than one race. Some peo­ple just can’t abide by crack-smoking, drive-by shoot­ing, thugs for some reason.

NFL own­ers know the tightrope they are walk­ing. Should they give Michael Vick another chance? And then that one lit­tle nag­ging thing: What if he lost some of his umpph while he was in the joint?

I have thought that per­haps Vick deserves a chance at some point in time but only after he has shown sin­cere remorse for his actions. I thought per­haps his talk in Atlanta to some kids over the week­end might have been a start. Although, some folks see it more as self-serving.

In the end, nei­ther the sports talk guys nor Jesse Jack­son nor PETA nor I, will have the say as to whether Vick suits up again for the NFL. Whether that is the case, ulti­mately, is another story.