As a sports writer and a lifelong Eagles fan, I get asked one question a lot lately. There are many variations on the question, but they all boil down to this: “What do you think about Michael Vick?”

For those of you who live under a rock, Michael Vick was a star NFL quarterback and a vicious dog-fighting ringleader. In case the last sentence wasn’t clear, I meant “vicious” to refer to Vick, not the dogs. Anyway, then he was a star NFL quarterback and the center of a distracting media circus. Then he was a federal inmate who had lost every penny he had to massive lawsuits and high living.

Now he is a backup NFL quarterback and a free man, getting paid millions of dollars a year to play a few downs a week during the NFL season. Vick also recently was in the vicinity of a minor fracas in which one of his codefendants, one who happened to turn State’s evidence on Vick. The codefendant ended up with a little bullet in his leg, no biggie. The shooting was so incidental that the victim and witnesses refuse to talk to the police about it, so there will be no charges against anybody.

Although the question that I’m asked is essentially the same every time, the questioners come from three distinct camps. There are the “This is all racist; the press wouldn’t persecute (fill in the name of a successful white athlete here) like this,” fans who are so blindly devoted to Vick that you cannot reason with them. There are the “He’s a scumbag; he should be hanged and flogged immediately,” PETA crowd that are so blindly hateful of Vick that they cannot be reasoned with.

Then there are the “He’s a (pick one: great/washed up) player. Who cares what he did off the field?” gang that either love him or hate him based on their perception of him as a player. You can generally at least have a discussion with these fans without hysterical accusations of racism/species-ism.

Wow. That took more words than I would have expected to just set up the frame of reference for the question. Next week, I’ll try to actually answer the big question: What to think about Michael Vick?

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