No Dogs were Hurt in the Writing of this Column.
On Sunday in Atlanta, NFL quarterback Michael Vick took the field against his former team, the Atlanta Falcons. Once the highest paid player in the sport and the face of a franchise, Vick is now a back-up limited to a few plays a game. Many of his former fans booed him as he jogged onto the artificial turf of the Georgia Dome for the first time since serving a two-year prison sentence for running a dog-fighting operation while the Falcons’ franchise player. By the second half, they were cheering him as he launched a fifty-yard scoring bomb. They decided they were ready to forgive. Vick basked in the applause of the crowd.
Meanwhile, Tiger Woods licked his wounds in private, refusing still to speak publicly about his numerous infidelities. And not really asking for our forgiveness.
At least not to our satisfaction.
Tiger Woods transformed a sport. Michael Vick promised to transform the most important position in our most popular game. Both of these athletes suffered humiliating public downfalls for actions not related to their play – they didn’t take steroids, they didn’t cheat or gamble on their own games. Beyond that, they might seem to have little in common. But they’ve both been attacked in the news, their stories covered relentlessly by the mainstream and sports media and followed hungrily by fans and non-fans alike.
The significance of Tiger Woods is well-documented. He blazed a trail through a sport previously monopolized by the white and the wealthy. It wasn’t too long ago that some country clubs categorically refused to accept Black members. And then came Tiger Woods, a young athlete of Black and Asian heritage, with his prodigious swing and his mega-watt smile. More than even Michael Jordan, who ruled a sport long populated mostly by African-Americans, Tiger Woods was hailed by the media as a ground-breaking figure. He revolutionized not just the game, but the culture of the game. He changed not only the face of Golf but the face of its audience. He was a sporting hero who proved nothing was impossible, and his ability to succeed against all odds confirmed everything we love about ourselves as a people. This was more important to his rise to celebrity (and to his mega-million dollar endorsement deals) than his unbelievable skills. A middle-aged white man could feel comfortable, even vindicated, rooting for Tiger Woods. A middle-aged white man could feel at ease with his kids’ posters of Tiger, swinging a golf club and wearing a polo shirt and slacks. A middle-aged white man could look at Tiger and see himself. And, in a way, the cynical could argue that Tiger embraced White America as much as it embraced him. After all, he chose to play the whitest of sports, and after his rise to super-stardom, he married a stunning woman so white she was even whiter than most Americans – she was a Swedish model, for crying out loud. Tiger Just Did It.
But these large-scale fantasies, in which we as a people project ourselves onto athletes of nearly mythical proportion, leave little room for reality, little room for human error. Even before Tiger’s indiscretions came to light, chinks started appearing in his previously perfect armor. He suffered a knee injury and his game dipped temporarily from its superhuman level. Sportswriters chided him for losing his temper on the course, for throwing his clubs around angrily. Would Jack Nicklaus ever curse on the green and chuck his clubs around, sportswriters asked? Tiger needed to act his age, Tiger needed to be a better example, and Tiger needed to stop and sign autographs like Phil Mickelson does instead of striding by the masses, untouchable. It became clear that Tiger was being held to an impossibly high standard.
And then, finally, he made his great mistake. He gave them something really prime to chew on, and they pounced like dogs fighting over a juicy steak. A one-car accident in the wee hours on Thanksgiving Night. Toppled Fire Hydrant. Smashed Escalade Window. Angry White Ex-Model Wife.
Tiger, like Vick, found out the hard way that White America holds its Black Superstars to a Very High Standard. But then again, he already knew that before the accident. The pressure was getting to him – his former mistress reported to a hungry tabloid that Tiger admitted to feeling ‘overwhelmed’ by his life. So Tiger proved to be all too human after all.
Now, hold on a second : isn’t Michael Vick a totally different story? His actions were subhuman, we say. But who precisely are we, and through what lens are we viewing his dog-fighting? He came into the NFL at a time when only two Black quarterbacks, Warren Moon and Donovan McNabb, had enjoyed sustained, long-term success in the league. But maybe Michael Vick could change all of that. He could revolutionize the quarterback position. With his fleet feet and his cannon arm, he could be unstoppable. And at times, he was: he could chuck a fifty-yard bomb down the sideline, as he did this last Sunday in Atlanta, for a touchdown. Or he could elude tacklers and run for a fifty-yard score. The only person that could stop Michael Vick was Michael Vick.
Unfortunately, he did.
Or did he?
What if a young, white, superstar quarterback had been found guilty of dog-fighting? Would he have been jailed for two years? Would he have needed to prostrate himself before Roger Goodell, the NFL’s white commissioner, and beg for reinstatement in the league even after a two year prison term, as Vick did? Hadn’t Vick been punished enough?
Or was Michael Vick, like Tiger Woods, being punished for something else?
Jerry Ruiz is a writer and theater director originally from Brownsville, Texas, and now based in NYC. He has directed and worked at respected NYC theater companies including Repertorio Espanol, HERE Arts Center, Second Stage Theater, and The Public, and at regional theaters across the country.
