This has been a summer of scandals. Between the NBA with referee Tim Donaghy having been implicated in fixing games for the mafia, baseball and the number of HGH cases coming out from players like Rick Ankiel and Troy Glaus and football with its own HGH case and more recently, the Patriots videotaping other sidelines for defensive plays. Though the Donaghy case is the bigger detriment to its sport, the biggest scandal of the summer goes to Michael Vick and the dog fighting ring. This story received so much media coverage; it clouded the entire month of August of other sports stories, primarily the baseball playoff races. The story seemed to eat up a major chunk of airtime on both SportsCenter and sports talk shows like Around the Horn, Pardon the Interruption, and Jim Rome is Burning. Everywhere you turned, you could not get away from this story. Even the major news media outlets were covering this story to a good degree.
When this story first broke, everyone was up in arms over it. PETA started to form protests against Reebok, Nike, Topps and other major sports outlets to have Michael Vick removed as a spokesperson. Everyday people who might not had known who Vick was, were saying that he was a horrible person for having done these things to dogs. In response, Nike, Reebok and Topps all removed Vick from their products. The Michael Vick name was worth over $100 million dollars before Vick tainted it with this case. No one would be willing to use his name on any product. This case ruined Vick’s career not only financially, but professionally as most NFL teams will not want to pick Vick up after he serves his year in prison, assuming he is not banned from the NFL all together.
Most pundits, where they are political or sports related, feel that this case has a good deal to do with race, as Vick is African American. Race could have been a large factor in how this was handled, but there is something bigger at work here; a larger problem that most people are overlooking or don’t see all together. Michael Vick would fall in the celebrity status of our societal hierarchy. In this case Vick was not treated like was above the law. We see people like Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie commit crimes and get three weeks or less for them, but Vick loses his sponsorships, sent to prison for a year and will most likely be banned from the NFL. Even other NFL players who have committed crimes of a harsh nature did not receive such a large penalty.
Ray Lewis, inside linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, was accused and later acquitted of murder charges a few days prior to Lewis playing in Super Bowl XXXV. Lewis did not receive any punishment for this offense and ending carrying the Ravens to a victory over the New York Giants and winning Super Bowl MVP honors. So why does Vick get hung out to dry and Lewis gets a Super Bowl ring? Because we have created a double standard for the double standard we created for celebrities already. But the question now is whether the reaction to this incident is a trend towards telling celebrities that they are not above the law or a mere blip on the radar screen. In time we shall see, but if it only is a blip because of a social issue people can rally around, we as a society have our priorities mixed up. If a famous person can be accused of murder of a human being and not get much of a response from the general public, but when someone kills a dog and people go crazy and want the person removed, what is that telling us? It is a sad day to think we have more respect and desire to save a dog then a human being.
The Michael Vick scandal will hang over the entire NFL season like a dark cloud over a picnic. It is a shame when scandals ruin a season before it even starts. Sports are supposed to transcend us into another place, away from reality, not bring us further into it.
