November 2003

Be Like Mike

What the league needs now is Vick, Mike Vick

by Donnell Alexander

Based on all past models, Mike Vick is just supposed to be winning his starting job right now, not returning as expected savior after an injury that almost dashed the hopes of a franchise on the rebound. There wasn’t supposed to be a league, and all of Madison Avenue, breathlessly monitoring the progress of Vick’s broken fibula.

But 23-year-old, speedy, cannon-armed, left-handed quarterback from Newport News has a tenuous relationship with the realm of football precedents. He is something different, and not just on the football field.

You know about Vick, even if you don’t know football, don’t even watch it. At the nexus where media messages are madeÑ “the ad world”Ñthey’re starting to use the J-word, as in Michael Jordan, to describe the Falcons’ Number Seven. That makes football heavies nervous, because of what happened to Vince Carter and Ken Griffey, Jr. and every other cat ESPN said would be “The Next Jordan.”

Vick’s not them, though. Now that that first month of Vick-less NFL action is out of the way, it’s a gimme that he changes the rules of the media game just like his unpredictable and diverse attack changed the way people view the role of the quarterback.

Last January, Vick’s teammates got a glimmer of the love already out there. Vick was with his kickin’-it partner, Falcons wideout Trevor Gaylor, one Saturday last winter, just before the Falcons took on the Eagles. The two were shopping near their hotel when, depending on who you talk to, either the Falcons couldn’t go shopping on Philadelphia’s main streets without police escorts and stores being shut down while they browsed (per Gaylor) or (as Vick insists) the whole episode was no big deal.

Yeah, no big deal. To Vick.

For the rest of this story, you can order the November 2003 issue of Hampton Roads Monthly magazine.