Let’s pretend for a few minutes that you’re the owner of a small company. As owner of your small company, you’re always on the lookout for new talent to help take your company to the next level, whatever that may be. You keep close tabs on your competitors, attend the local job fairs and even chat with the old men outside the corner barbershop, all in the hopes of scooping up the next great Widget salesman. Or whatever.
And then you spot him. He’s only a few years out of college, but he’s got skeeels. He’s smart, a smooth talker, and is good looking to boot. He’s a widget sales closer, no doubt about it.
Wanting to get a leg up on your competition and start raking in the revenues from your new star employee, you offer to back a dump truck filled with money up to his doorstep and tip the bed. He agrees and you oblige. He’s now the wealthiest widget salesman in the greater Mytown area.
But somehow, all the money changes him. Or maybe he always had it in him, it just took an assload of discretionary income to bring it out. (Like the proper kid who never drank at parties, then on his first official kegger he’s diving naked into the neighbor’s pool, off the neighbor’s roof.)
Within his first year on the job, you start hearing from your staff that the guy is more than a little crazy after work hours, using a nickname when he’s out trolling for tuna: John Canada. Then one Saturday you’re reading the paper and you catch a small blip of a story in the local section, claiming a guy by the name of John Canada infected a fine young woman with the herpes and she’s suing.
The shit hits the fan for him, and it’s more than a bit embarrassing for you when a few of your competitors see you and ask how that ‘John Canada’ fella is working out. But his performance on the job doesn’t seem to be advsersely affected, so you chalk it up to non-worktime behavior and move on.
Then you send him on a short trip to close a big deal with Widget*Mart and things get dicey. Airport security searches his luggage and finds a false compartment in his laptop, and inside is a pack of Zig-zags and a small bag of weed (or a bag where there used to be weed). The King of Widgets decides to do business elsewhere and you’re starting to see the local media turn against you, hounding you at work and at home about this “star employee.”
As if that weren’t enough, shortly thereafter the police show up at your office, arm in arm with PETA and the Humane Association, claiming that a cottage Star Employee owns is playing host to “to the death” rabbit fights . Your star employee denies knowing anything about it, but just yesterday he gave you a business card for his hobby business, “Rabbits-R-Us“, with a mailing address that matches the address of his cottage.
At some point in Michael Vick’s life he turned into a bad human being. A bad and stupid human being. Somehow all the smoke that was blown up his ass in high school and college took hold, and he started believing the hype; that he was above reproach, that he was above encarceration, that he was smarter than the rest of us.
He continues to put himself in extremely embarrassing situations, both for him and for the Atlanta Falcons (or maybe the long, nasty trail of dirt has always been there and is just starting to be exposed, turn by turn). We’re miles past tarnishing the good name of the Atlanta Falcons - this is like your daughter pulling trains in your bed with your neighbors for money, and you doing nothing to stop it. How Art Blank, one of the parents of one of the most respected companies in America, can continue to put this herp-spreading (allegedly), weed-stashing, dog-killing, noodle-armed trailer trash of a QB at the front of his franchise is something I just can’t understand. Mr. Blank, we’re not stupid. But keeping Vick on board sure makes you look the part.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Technorati Tags: Michael Vick, Ron Mexico, NFL, Atlanta Falcons, Art Blank, Oh! Canada!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t there a write up in ESPN the Magazine or Sports Illustrated a year or so ago about Larry Johnson, where if it weren’t for a whitebread family in the KC ‘burbs, who didn’t mind that this very large, tattoed man would let himself into their home unannounced and lift weights in their basement (and they later took him in and hugged him and squeezed him and pet him and loved him), that he probably would have flamed out Ahmad Carroll-style? Not sure we want that kind of stability in Titletown.
Though as a human interest story, I like Moss going to the Patriots. It’s put up or smoke up time for Moss, who for the first time will be playing for a team with realistic expectations of playing in February. Belichick won’t put up with Moss channeling 
