Had professional sports long ago enforced morals clauses against players instead of embracing and protecting goons for their moneymaking prowess, the National Football League (and National Basketball Association, too) wouldn't be notorious for overpaid, under-cultured, semi-illiterate thugs whose off-field diversions include rape, beating women, fathering children in one-night stands, shooting or knifing each other and demonstrating a slovenly contempt for civilized behavior.
Now the NFL's tolerance for criminal conduct has rewarded the league with the most depraved, ghoulish, bloodthirsty player in sports history—Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, indicted by a federal grand jury for running an interstate dog fighting gambling enterprise that included drowning, shooting and electrocuting wounded or feeble dogs that survived the ghastly fight-to-the-death contests.
Initially, it seemed the tin-ear, culture-blind NFL would ignore the storm of national protest demanding Vick's ouster. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell finally was shaken from his stupor: He ordered Vick to stay away from the Falcons training camp while his fate is decided. How brave of Goodell. Would any Falcon really want to practice with a man who relishes slaughtering dogs?
Don't confuse the NFL's quasi-legal prerogatives with Vick's innocent-until-proven-guilty rights in the judicial system. The NFL can order Vick canned for life.
Railroading Vick out of sports would restore the NFL's spine for serious discipline and repair its smutty image as a haven for degenerates and brawlers. The NFL would show commendable prescience, too: Vick is likely to be eventually found guilty and sent to the slammer. (Vengeful dog lovers might prefer turning him loose in a cage of pit bills trained to kill.)
If the NFL and Falcons seem reluctant to do the obvious—banish Vick—it's because amoral professional sports have a single motivation—money. If Vick is booted, Falcons performance will suffer. Fans without a lick of concern about Vick's fiendish brutality will demand he remain active until legal appeals are exhausted—presumably including the years an appeal takes to reach the Supreme Court.
If Vick remains, he'd become a precedent for other NFL barbarians to justify lesser crimes. Vick would also be a premier reminder of the NFL's capacity for indecency every time he took to the field.
Thanks to reporters of the San Diego Union-Tribune, the public has a glimpse of just how unruly NFL players are. They compiled a list of more than 300 arrests on serious charges of NFL players between January 2000 and Vick's indictment on July 17 (http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/nfl/arrests.html).
These jailbirds are the models some young boys will emulate as NFL stars of tomorrow.
