NFL commissioner Goodell mum on proposed meeting with Michael Vick
COMBINED DISPATCHES
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell isn’t revealing when he’ll decide whether to reinstate Michael Vick now that the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback has been released from federal custody.
“The process is ongoing, and I hope to make a decision sometime in the near future,” Goodell said Tuesday, a day after Vick’s home confinement ended.
He wouldn’t define what “near future” means.
Vick served 23 months on a dogfighting conviction.
NFL training camps open for veterans next week. Goodell would not say when he’ll meet with Vick.
“We’re not going to give any details right now,” he said after a news conference announcing singer Marc Anthony’s involvement with the NFL.
The commissioner has said he wants to see remorse and evidence of change from the player he suspended indefinitely.
Even if Goodell reinstates Vick, the 29-year-old quarterback would still have to find a team willing to sign him.
Meanwhile, animal-rights activists are concerned with the nature of Vick’s ongoing rehabilitation.
Vick has committed to working with the Humane Society of the United States in speaking out against the practices that precipitated his spectacular fall from stardom and wealth.
Twice in the past two months, Vick has met with Humane Society president/CEO Wayne Pacelle to arrange community-based efforts with at-risk urban youth, delivering “Don’t do as I did” sermons.
“If he’s just touching a base and moving on,” Pacelle said, “he’ll not dissipate the feelings of anger against him. What we’re saying is that he should have a chance to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. He has a professional interest in redeeming himself, and that’s something of an insurance policy to us.”
Should an NFL team sign Vick there remains the possibility of animal-rights activists picketing stadiums and pressuring team or league sponsors. But Pacelle, although he acknowledged that “no group had been tougher on Vick” for his crime, said he “deliberately avoided” meeting with Goodell on such matters.
“We’ve been agnostic about Vick’s return to the NFL,” Pacelle said. “We don’t want that to be seen as a motivation for us.”
Likewise, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), in a release from president/CEO Ed Sayres, said that although “most people will be seeking a cut-and-dried answer to the question of whether Mr. Vick should be allowed to return to the NFL … it is simply not my place to make such an assertion.”
Sayres added that it is “critical that Mr. Vick take advantage of the opportunity granted to him by Wayne Pacelle and the Humane Society of the United States … to address those many years of horrific judgment and finally demonstrate responsible community behavior.”
As radioactive as Vick became to the NFL and his former team, the Falcons, Pacelle readily recognized what he called “the perfect storm of circumstances that elevated this issue to tremendous prominence.
“It was not just [Vick’s] celebrity, it was also the lurid nature of the crime. A lot of people thought dogfighting was a relic and … there were more urgent animal cruelty issues. But [with revelations of Vick’s dogfighting gang], not only were dogs being fought but they were being killed if they didn’t perform well, and that led to a remarkable anger toward Vick and an awareness of dogfighting on a widespread basis.”