Michael Vick: A study in contrasts

Hip-hoppers had christened the blighted East End of Newport News, Va., "Bad Newz" long before its most famous resident would so infamously validate that nickname.

Michael Vick's old neighborhood is, as a recent YouTube video tour makes clear, a relentless string of housing projects, hardscrabble ball fields, low-slung vacant warehouses, and drab convenience stores, the depressing visuals punctuated frequently by patrolling police cruisers and packs of idle young men.

If the child becomes the man, then Vick, the scandal-scarred quarterback whose surprise signing by the Eagles on Thursday touched off explosions of outrage here and elsewhere, was shaped by his boyhood in Virginia's Hampton Roads.

The area - which also includes Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, and a few other communities - has long been fertile ground for athletes, former 76er Allen Iverson among them.

"It's a tough place, a real tough place," said James "Poo" Johnson, executive director of the Boys and Girls Club in the East End. "But what Michael came from wasn't any better or any worse than what a lot of people here came from. . . . I've known Michael since he was 7. I know a lot of people don't feel this way, but he's a good person."

Labeled contrite by defenders like Johnson and a heartless sociopath by those who refuse to forgive him for his role in a vicious dogfighting ring, Michael Vick remains a disturbing enigma, one whose real identity is sinking ever deeper beneath the controversy.

Is he the man police said laughingly tortured dogs or the one a college coach called a "wonderful person . . . a Michael Jordan type"? The mischievous elementary schooler or the boy who went fishing to avoid trouble? The fun-loving athlete teammates were drawn to or the one who made an obscene gesture toward Atlanta fans? Is he a man worthy of Tony Dungy's respect or PETA's scorn?

Regardless of the self-hate and remorse Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie and Dungy, the ex-Indianapolis Colts coach who has become his mentor and ardent supporter, said they recognized in him, it's unlikely anyone but Vick has the answers to those questions.

And whatever they might be, they almost certainly lie in Bad Newz or in rural Blacksburg, Va., where the gifted athlete made himself a No. 1 draft choice as a Heisman Trophy contender for Virginia Tech.

People who knew the newest Eagle in both those places seem genuinely stunned by the ugly turn Vick's story has taken, but few have abandoned him.

"In some way you can almost understand what happened because there's a culture of dogfighting in places like the East End," said David Squires, a sportswriter for the Daily Press of Newport News who interviewed Vick last week. "The people here, even those who love animals, seem willing to forgive Michael. But they're also disappointed in him. It's like they say, 'It's OK for us, but not you. You escaped from here. We expected better.' "

Vick was the second of four children born to Brenda Vick and Mike "Pickle" Boddie, a frustrated athlete whose future was short-circuited by the need to support the children he'd fathered out of wedlock.

"He wasn't one of these kids whose fathers were permanently out of their lives," Johnson said. "His mom and dad were very supportive and always at his games. His mom, though, was the backbone of the family."

Vick, according to Johnson and others, was a hyperenergetic child who, unlike so many other young men at the Ridley Circle Homes, never got into serious trouble. Still, his parents, who later married, often were summoned to the principal's office at Hidenwood Elementary School.

"It was never anything major," said Wayne Smith, then the principal. "But as a student, it was clear he needed some direction."

No one had to tell Vick where to go on the athletic fields. The young boy, who was righthanded in everything but sports, was a star running back and quarterback for the Boys and Girls Clubs' Spartans. In 1992, he pitched his team to the Anderson Park Little League title. And he was an outstanding basketball player as well.

"Oogie" Vick - no one is certain of his nickname's origin - never got into trouble during his high school years either and would star in several sports, first at Homer Ferguson High and then, when that school closed in 1996, at Warwick High.

"He kind of got overshadowed a little in high school, because Ron Curry was the star quarterback at [nearby] Hampton High and that school has won 17 state championships," Squires said.

The projects' great diversion was sports. Vick and his contemporaries played whenever and wherever an opportunity arose, with games that included an improvised rugby-football hybrid they called "Hotball."

It was clear to him and others there, friends said, that sports were their ticket out. The college-recruiting Web site Rivals.com recently called Hampton Roads "the best area in the country, by square mile, for dynamic football talent." In 2005, Virginia Tech's two-deep charts included 13 players from Hampton Roads. On defense, nine of the 11 Hokies were from that area.

"Loads of great athletes from 'round here," said Keith Murphy, a onetime neighbor of the Vicks. "Allen Iverson. Aaron Brooks. Ron Curry. But Michael was probably the best of them all."

Ricky Bustle, the head coach at Louisiana-Lafayette who was then Virginia Tech's quarterbacks coach, said Vick "was probably the best quarterback prospect I ever saw in high school."

Virginia Tech won out over East Carolina and Syracuse - where he was introduced to Donovan McNabb on one visit - in the battle for Vick.

When the young quarterback arrived at Tech, in the bucolic Blue Ridge mountains 215 miles from coastal Newport News, it was clear he would require a period of adjustment.

"He was very unassuming, like a lot of college kids," Bustle said. "Because of that, I made sure I kept him very close to me. But things happened very well for him here. He was a fun guy, and the other kids were drawn to him in a way I've never seen in all my years of coaching.

"Michael Vick wanted to do the right thing on and off the field. And he wanted to do the right thing every day. He wasn't one of those people who called attention to himself or needed to be the center of things all the time. But he was a good-looking kid with a great smile, and everyone, young and old, wanted to be around him. He was a Michael Jordan type."

Bustle and head coach Frank Beamer decided to ease what could have been a difficult social adjustment for Vick by redshirting him his first year in Blacksburg.

(Beamer said in a statement Friday that Vick "understands very clearly the wrong that he did and is very intent on making things right.")

In 1999, his first season as the Hokies' quarterback, Vick led them to an 11-0 record and a berth in the Sugar Bowl, the national championship game, which they lost to Florida State.

There was talk of the Heisman Trophy for him in 2000, and, at least one teammate suggested, that was when things began to change.

"Once he got so famous so fast, it became harder for him to go out places," said Matt Wincek, a Wilkes-Barre native who played tackle at Virginia Tech. "So he'd stay in with his friends, playing video games and things like that.

"But we were always close as a team, and he was a big part of it. . . . I still keep in touch with a lot of guys from back then, and none of us are sure what happened to him. It seems like he must have gotten in with the wrong crowd. It seems like he's been made to be a martyr. There are a lot of people who've done worse and paid less."

Vick's younger brother Marcus, who also played quarterback at Virginia Tech, ran into far more trouble there. He was suspended for the 2004 season after a pair of arrests. In 2005, he made an obscene gesture to Hokies fans, stomped on the leg of an opponent, and was involved in several traffic violations. A year later, he was dismissed from the team.

Michael Vick played a second collegiate season and then departed for the NFL and its riches, riches some suggest Vick wasn't ready for or able to handle.

"A lot of things happen when people get money," Bustle said. "Money gets you new friends and new surroundings. That's why I'm always concerned when I see one of these kids going to the NFL before they might be mature enough to handle it."

Now the 29-year-old Vick is trying to convince others that the hideous acts he oversaw, and in some cases performed, were an aberration.

And he is having to do that in Philadelphia, making his case to skeptical fans in a skeptical city.

"You know, sometimes you have to pick your poison," Bustle said. "No matter where he ended up, it was going to be a circus. It's just that some places are bigger circuses than others."