I'm prompted to write this diary because of the controversy surrounding Michael Vick. Vick has accepted a plea agreement on a federal dogfighting charge that, when filed on Monday, may land him in jail for one to five years. Vick has been suspended indefinitely without pay from his team, the Atlanta Falcons, and his endorsement contract with Nike has been terminated.
All of this for what is essentially a charge of cruelty to animals.
Disclaimer: I'm not a sports fan. I would recognize Kareem Abdul-Jabbar if I bumped into him on the street, and I know OJ Simpson because of the, you know, double murder and trial and all, and I know Dennis Rodman because he wore a wedding dress out in public somewhere once, and that's about as far as it goes. Oh, and I know that Keith Olbermann thinks Barry Bonds is a bigfatcheater. And that's about as far as it goes. So this is not being written from the perspective of someone who knows or follows sports on teevee or in the newspapers. This is the perspective of someone who sees pro athletes being talked about in the 'regular' news, and who sometimes recognizes the name or face, but more often doesn't.
Back to Michael Vick. Don't get me wrong. Those of you who pay much attention to what I write here know that my love for animals runs deep. What Vick and his partners did was seventeen kinds of heinous, and he richly deserves everything that's coming to him, and more. And nothing of what I'm about to write should be interpreted as downplaying the gravity of the crimes Vick committed.
I just want to throw in a little perspective here, is all.
Jeff Benedict and Don Yeager's book Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL asserts that crimes against women are the most common offenses committed by professional football players. The editorial review of the book at Amazon.com says this: "21 percent of the NFL's players have been charged with a serious crime. How serious? The docket begins with assault, rape, and domestic violence and keeps spiraling out of control." The review names names of players who've committed some form of violence against women, be it domestic violence or sexual assault: Cornelius Bennett; Cortez Kennedy; Nate Newton; Warren Moon; Jake Plummer. (It's interesting to note that only Warren Moon's Wikipedia entry mentions him being charged with DV. The rest of the entries are silent on the issue of criminal charges against the players.)
Let's add to that list. The Family Violence Prevention Fund's Celebrity Watch Hall of Shame lists the following professional athletes and the offenses of which they stand accused and/or [occasionally] convicted:
- Pedro Astacio (assaulting his estranged wife)
- "Stone Cold" Steve Austin (assaulting his wife)
- Riddick Bowe (assaulting his wife)
- Jim Brown (vandalizing his wife's car and threatening to kill her)
- Kobe Bryant (sexual assault)
- Sean Burke (assaulting his wife)
- Rae Carruth (hiring someone to kill his pregnant girlfriend)
- Dwayne Carswell (assaulting his girlfriend)
- Ramon Castro (sexual assault)
- Duane Causwell (assaulting his wife)
- Raphel Cherry (killing his wife)
- Bobby Chouinard (terrorizing and threatening to kill his wife -- Chouinard was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison, which he served in three-month increments during the off-season, so as not to interrupt his time on the playing field)
- Wilfredo Cardero (assaulting his wife)
- Dale Ellis (assualting his wife)
- Scott Erickson (assaulting his girlfriend)
- Joe Frazier (assaulting his girlfriend)
- Marc Gastineau (assaulting his estranged wife)
- Ahman Green (assaulting his wife)
I could go on, but I'm not even halfway through the list, and I think y'all get my drift by now. Not everyone on the FVPF list is a pro athlete, but most of them are. Interestingly, and in the interests of fairness, there are also mentions of a couple of women who were accused of assaulting their professional athlete husbands/boyfriends, including Diane Bodine (wife of NASCAR driver Brett Bodine), and Tawny Kitaen (wife of baseball player Chuck Finley).
And then there's Chris Benoit, the pro wrestler who murdered his wife and son and then killed himself on June 25, 2007.
Those are the stories that made it onto my radar this year: Michael Vick, dogfighter extraordinaire, star of what seems to be the biggest story in professional sports right now, and has been the biggest story for weeks. And Chris Benoit -- the murder/suicide got a lot of airplay when it happened, but I don't remember it lasting very long. Certainly not as long as the Vick story has. With the Benoit story, I remember there being a lot of talk about steroid abuse. I don't remember a single mention of domestic violence -- at least not in the mainstream coverage of that particular tragedy. I can't speak for what the sports shows and sports pages had to say about it.
The other names on the above list? Most of them, I've never even heard of. And, as I've already noted, if you go look them up in Wikipedia, there is usually no mention of their criminal history.
So, the list goes on and on. Name after name after name of professional athletes who have threatened, stalked, assaulted, and even killed their partners. Name after name of men that, until I started writing this diary, I'd never even heard of. But Michael Vick? Even I could not escape the media shitstorm surrounding him and his animal abuse.
What brought this issue into very sharp relief for me was a conversation I had a couple of days ago with a colleague who works, as I do, in a DV agency. This woman is organizing a big fundraiser which is going to feature both live and silent auctions. She was talking about how she's been trying to get pro teams from the area to donate signed jerseys or other memorabilia. Without saying anything about pro athletes and DV, I asked her why she was so interested in sports memorabilia. Her first reason was that she thought that such items could potentially bring in large bids -- okay, fair enough. She then went on to talk about how playing team sports has been such a character-builder for her own kids. Fair enough, too, I suppose, although I have a brother who played basketball from the time he was a kid all the way through college and then went on to a pro league overseas for a few years, and he never got much character-building in the process; quite the opposite, in fact. It seems to me that what he learned was that as long as he played basketball well enough, he'd never have to take responsibility for anything else in his life. He also verbally and physically abused me every day for years, until I got out of the house and away from him permanently, but that's another story. But, anyway. My colleague thinks that team sports are doing wonders for her kids. Okay, I won't argue that point. Not every athlete starts out, or ends up, like my brother.
My point is, these athletes get the superstar treatment, just because they are successful athletes. When they commit crimes, those crimes don't always get overlooked by their employers, their fans, the mainstream media, and the general public, but most of the time they do -- particularly when the crime consists of the assault of a wife or girlfriend. They are held up as role models to kids, and when they are made examples of for bad behavior, most of the time it's for things like being accused of steroid use. It's the crimes like dogfighting that get the attention and generate the outcry. Beating their wives? As the Wikipedia entries above show, that's hardly worth a mention. I didn't notice that George Mitchell was tapped to head up an investigation into the epidemic of violence against women in professional sports. I didn't notice a panel of athletes being hauled in front of a Congressional committee to testify about crimes against women. And when a crime like Chris Benoit's does get the public attention? Well, blame the steroids. That's the ticket.
In the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1866. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded in 1875. It wasn't until 1871 that Alabama and Massachusetts became the first two states to make wife-beating illegal, and it wasn't until the 1960s (no, that's not a typo) that the first shelters for battered women began to open their doors in the US. Interestingly enough, the earliest DV agencies turned to the ASPCA for help and advice in getting themselves set up and operating.
And in some states, to this day, the legal penalties for animal abuse are more severe than the penalties for spousal abuse.
There is something very, very wrong with this picture. I have no problem with the outcry over what Michael Vick has done. I just don't understand where the outcry is when professional athletes like Michael Vick abuse their partners and family members. Can someone please explain to me why that doesn't count?