What a waste

Michael Vick's career, once full of promise & potential (so much so that it earned him a contract worth $130 mil), now lies in smoldering ruins. The question is not why it has ended up in a permament state of shambles, but rather how. When someone with such God-given talents as Vick has had lets his career - everything which defines the man himself - go to waste through bad decision making & other whatnot, it's hard to get a clear-cut diagnosis on what precipitated his descent to rock bottom. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of factors behind Vick's downfall & with it plenty of theories to parse out at will.

The most prominent theory, which former Falcons coach Dan Reeves & Vick's grandfather James Boddie both share is this: much of Vick's legal troubles can be tied to his continued association with buddies he has known since childhood, buddies it must be said whose pasts haven't exactly been saintly by any stretch. These same buddies of his, unsavory pasts & all, decided to do some table turning & testify against Vick in hopes of getting less time behind bars...amazing how friendships can change in the blink of an eye. But the awful truth which court papers gleefully point out is that Vick's legal troubles are his own doing, the final result of his own bad decision-making. If Vick only did what was right from the start, Vick's father Michael Boddie said on Monday, "...He could have saved a lot of people a lot of heartache..."
And Michael Boddie is right: his own son could have done himself & countless others a whole world of good if he would just do more positive stuff with his life instead of letting his old sidekicks & so on influence him in any way, shape or form.

Michael Vick is in some real hot water, this much we know with frightening certainty. We could say his enablers (friends, business advisers, etc.) brought him to this legal predicament of mass proportions; others tell a quite different tale which ending isn't promising - that Vick himself is responsible for his own mess as his various roles in the dogfighting ring aptly confirm. Anyways, this is the worst demise, that being of the non-injury-related type, which any star professional athlete can go through. "What a waste of talent & potential..." so his critics, former fans, etcetera bemoan Vick's fate, a fate which could sentence him to 12-18 months in prison,a suspension from the NFL & much worse.

What a waste, indeed. And a career full of so much spark now dashed to flame, to ruins.