Sick of Favre, Vick? Blame us

DETROIT — A friend of mine wrote this week that a lot of people seem to be cheering for Michael Vick’s success and Brett Favre’s failure, and he found that odd. It certainly seems odd: Vick killed a bunch of dogs and Favre just wants to come out of retirement again.

But I don’t think this is about right and wrong. Sports writers tend to frame things that way, but I don’t think fans do. And Favre and Vick represent an interesting case study of sports and the media in 2009.

We want Brett Favre to go away because we are sick of the story. We want everybody to leave Michael Vick alone because ... we are sick of the story.

Both stories have spun out of control to the point where they aren’t even about dogfighting or waffling about retirement anymore. They are stories because they are stories. The media (I include myself in that) have made them so big that we can’t bring ourselves to ignore them, even for a few days.

The Favre “circus” — that’s what Vikings Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton called it in a recent radio interview — is a good example of how things spin out of control. Everybody likes to blame Favre, and understandably so. But it is a little more complicated.

Favre has a long history of accommodating reporters. When he became addicted to Vicodin, he talked about it. When his father died, he talked about it. When his wife got breast cancer, she wrote a best-selling book about it.

For a player of his stature — until the last two years, he was probably the most popular NFL player of his generation — he was shockingly open. And in turn, everybody would say what a wonderful person he is, to the point where he throws a stupid interception and people say, “Hey, that’s what happens when you throw with your giant heart.”

Naturally, Favre bought into his legend. He started to become detached from teammates in Green Bay, but because he was such an icon there, people ignored it. Then he went to New York, acted the same way, and a couple of his Jets teammates publicly ripped him for it.

I don’t think Favre is addicted to being on television. I just think that, like a lot of celebrities, he is increasingly living in his own world, and he is oblivious to the cumulative effect of his actions.

Maybe Favre thinks he is being the same guy he always was: granting interviews, playing football because he loves it. But he comes off like he can’t let go of his sport or the media attention.

Vick, meanwhile, made a royal mess of his life. And now the world seems divided into two groups: those who think he should be punished for the rest of his life, and those who wish the first group would shut up already.

What can a fan do? Obviously, you can shut off ESPN and stop reading all sports content except for my column. But if you want to follow sports, you have to wade through the same annoying stories (Favre, Vick, Plaxico Burress, Kobe Bryant, Alex Rodriguez) to get to the stuff you want.

ESPN and other sports-media outlets keep talking about those guys because people keep paying attention. It is an addiction we have unapologetically created for everybody else.

And if you think you can’t possibly read or hear another opinion about Michael Vick or Brett Favre, guess what? You just did.

X Michael Rosenberg is a columnist for the Detroit Free Press.