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Michael Vick and the Silence of the Dogs

“Announcers never mention “the dog thing” when Michael Vick is on the field, ever, even in passing, even by way of background,” Tom Junod writes in Esquire magazine.

“He’s ‘moved on,’ and so has everybody else, and although I’ve come around to the belief that Michael Vick is in many ways a changed man, everything I feared about his ‘redemption’ has come to pass — namely, that redemption would give way to forgetting, and that the forgetting would be bought and paid for, along with the silence of the dogs.”

Junod’s insightful article talks about how the once “untouchable” Michael Vick is not doing so well on the football field these days. He keeps getting knocked down, seems more human, and no longer even looks like the best player on his own team.

And as for any discussion of “the dog thing,” Junod says, “The silence was eerie, the forgetting complete, and one of the richest and most disturbing human stories in the history of American sports had dwindled back down to the size of a football game between two mid-level NFL teams struggling to keep themselves in the playoff picture.”

Read the whole article on Esquire.