Making Sense Of The ‘New’ Michael Vick Experience
ESPN has certainly hitched its’ promotional wagon to Michael Vick, but first things first: don’t blame Touré for the question, “What If Michael Vick Were White?” – or for that pic above of said hypothetical “White” Vick.
“I had no knowledge of or say in the title of the story and the horrific, misguided picture of Vick in whiteface, which dismayed and disgusted me when I saw it,” he explained in a column for CNN. “I think careful readers will note that the story and the image don’t really interact. They’re like two people who kinda know about each other but don’t really know each other. But this has happened to me before.”
He made a similar disclaimer on Twitter, according to Colorlines:
My essay on Vick is nowhere near as inflammatory as the pic of him in whiteface which contradicts me saying you can’t imagine him as white.
I wrote an essay about Vick & race. ESPN the mag titled it & added art without me (normal procedure). Judge me on the story not the art.
In his CNN piece, Touré also mentioned that he wanted to talk about football more in his Vick column, but that ESPN “was less interested in that.” Reading his essay on the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback again, I think his editors let him down in the process.
Touré’s column starts by describing the “deeply African-American approach” of Vick’s game:
Vick’s style reminds me of Allen Iverson — the speed, the court sense, the sharp cuts, the dekes, the swag. In those breathtaking moments when the Eagles QB abandons the pocket and takes off, it feels as if he’s thumbing his nose at the whole regimented, militaristic ethos of the game.
Denied the chance to place Vick’s game into a historical context, this graf makes Vick seem like the NFL’s answer to Julius Erving, when really he’s not even the first mobile black quarterback on his own team. Surely Touré didn’t forget about Donovan McNabb or Randall Cunningham?
Instead, it’s David Fleming who gets to make that connection in an otherwise hagiographic profile of Vick’s comeback, mentioning that he has become “the next link in a quarterback chain that runs from Fran Tarkenton to John Elway to Steve Young to Randall Cunningham.”
Crucially, three of the four quarterbacks in that chain are white. And all but Cunningham are in the NFL Hall of Fame. What would probably be different, if Vick were white, would be that the gaggle of football pundits ESPN employs to opine on the National Football League – always referred to by its’ first, middle and last name, like it was an unruly child or a serial killer – would frame his exploits differently: instead of showing “preternatural poise,” as Fleming puts it, White Vick’s mobility would show “how hard he works in the off-season;” his on-field celebrations would show us he’s “just having fun out there.” And so on.
So what Vick is doing on the field isn’t new; he’s just doing it at a higher level than anybody else right now – in large part because he’s a team that encourages him to do so, a fact Vick himself acknowledges (even if, as he told GQ, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell nudged him in Philadelphia’s direction.) So it’s unfortunate that Touré didn’t get the chance to discuss Vick’s professional good fortune in his column.
It’s also unfortunate his editors stuck that column with not only the re-colorized Vick pic, but a headline asking a question Touré himself shoots down:
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