How Racism Helped Ruin NFL Superstar Michael Vick
I grew up both in Williamsburg, Virginia, not far from Newport News, where former NFL star quarterback Michael Vick grew up. I also grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the time Vick was signed to the Philadelphia Eagles after an unlikely comeback from his 23-month jail sentence for dogfighting. Though I understood almost nothing about football—being a basketball, soccer, and tennis fan, my plate was full—the specter of Vick loomed (people talked). But because I was the rare black person in white neighborhoods in deeply-segregated towns, the surrounding narrative painted Vick as alternately god and devil. When the dogfighting scandal broke out in 2006 and 2007, the vitriol was high—all I knew was that a black football player had been involved in something seedy and violent and white people were deeply and personally upset.
Director Stanley Nelson’s two-part ESPN documentary 30 for 30: Michael Vick explores the facts and mythology surrounding the athlete, from his humble beginnings growing up in the projects to his decision to turn himself into the authorities to his grand redemption with the Eagles. Nelson takes care to focus on the racism that affected how white animal activists and football fans reacted to the scandal, as well as the high sentence that was handed down to Vick by George W. Bush-appointed district judge Henry E. Hudson. The film also gets deep into the specifics of football, and the racism in how black football players are often seen as more athletic talents than mentally-adept team players, a skill set required for quarterbacks.
Early in the film, we see a clip of the late sports commentator Jimmy Snyder explaining the prowess of African American male athletes according with a wildly offensive yet common eugenicist’s framework: “The slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman, so that he could have a big black kid, see. I mean, that’s where it all started.” The barely-visible sliver of truth in Snyder’s statement is that there is indeed a slave/master dynamic at play in professional sports, where black players especially are seen as the property not only of the league but of the majority white fans who crowd the stadiums and mainly white commentators who speculate in elaborate studios paid for by major corporations.
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