Gladiators’ End (article)

In August 2007 when the National Football League (NFL) was gearing up for its preseason, news reports about Atlanta Falcons’ star quarterback Michael Vick were initially greeted with shocked disbelief. How could this be happening? How could he be doing this? At first he denied any involvement, then he minimized his role. But as the new season was peaking in October, Michael Vick’s life was down in the pits.

Based on rumors of illegal dog-fighting, his property in southeastern Virginia had been raided that summer. The evidence of a dog-fighting venture called Bad News Kennels operated by him and his buddies from Virginia Beach was irrefutable. But the really bad news came out in the treatment of the pit bulls. Some were afflicted with such wounds as punctured heads and were kept in cages. Others turned up in a mass grave. These had been executed: literally electrocuted, hanged, drowned, shot, or slammed to the ground. In his final court appearance in December, a remorseful Vick admitted to participating in two of these killings, and was sentenced to twenty-three months in Leavenworth Prison. Once the highest paid player in the League, he will be twenty-nine or thirty at his release, with his future career very much in doubt.

Why would he throw it all away for some cheap thrills of mutts going after each other? True, there was a lot of betting going on, but Vick would hardly need this sort of venture capitalism on his pay scale. Then there is the “bad companions” angle. Vick had a strong family, but he grew up on mean streets and kept in touch with his old honchos who never got his breaks. Some may discern similarities in O.J. Simpson’s destructive and self-destructive behavior, but these came after his glory days and ruined his reputation, not his career. A closer parallel may be found in the tragic killing of Washington Redskins’ star safety, Sean Taylor, in November 2007. Like Vick, his sudden rise to enormous wealth raised problems with his troubled past and his more recent brushes with the law. He allowed his Florida estate to be used by various family members, and one of his half-sister’s friends took the opportunity at a party there to case the place. Later, with three others he broke in, not expecting anyone to be home. Confronting them with a machete, Sean Taylor was fatally shot. His grief-stricken friends said his only flaw was in being too nice (New York Times, December 9, 2007).

A troubled family history and misguided loyalties may also have played a role in Vick’s dubious enterprise, but there were surely better ways to help old buddies. A more probing explanation has been suggested, and to appreciate it, we need to turn away from the inner city and the dog pits to the arenas of professional football. Concurrently

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with Vick’s plight, a vast and altogether unsavory underside of these athletes’ lives has begun surfacing. Light is being cast on the players’ ethics code of “play through the pain.”

A growing body of medical evidence shows that players’ repeated head trauma results in such long-term brain damage as memory-loss and dementia. Players for the New York Jets are forbidden to discuss injuries, and team doctors appear complicit in letting them stay in the game after concussions while minimizing the severity of these injuries (New York Times, Dec. 22, 2007, p. 1A). But the effects of many of these injuries do not end after the game or career. The long-suppressed stories of hobbled, dysfunctional, and unemployable former athletes still in their middle years are also seeping out. Some of their medical costs are astronomical, but many feel they are getting a cold shoulder from their former bosses and even from the players’ union.

Interviewed for an investigative report on this predicament, Super Bowl veteran Dave Pear admitted, “You can’t take the violence out of the game, and that’s okay, because it wouldn’t be football without the violence, I guess.” Likening his performance to the Roman gladiator, he adds, “Football is not a contact sport. It’s a collision sport.” In his forties, crippled with back and spinal injuries, suffering from memory-lapses, and dependent on pain medication, he says, “I live in a torture chamber” (Michael Leahy, “The Pain Game,” Washington Post Magazine, Feb. 3, 2008, pp. 8-26). Like the gladiator, the football player eventually discovers that for all his prowess and popularity, he is ultimately no better off than a slave.

With this background in mind, readers may appreciate Kenneth Jacobson’s letter to the editor of the Washington Post (Aug. 25, 2007): Michael Vick’s brutal behavior in effect emulated NFL bosses and displays “identification with the aggressor.”

This invaluable, if somewhat overworked concept was introduced into the psychoanalytic field by Anna Freud in her classic The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1946). It has been deeply probed and widely applied in Leonard Shengold’s Soul Murder (1989) and a follow-up. In its basic form, the pain, humiliation, and trauma inflicted by someone in authority with whom one has a mixed relationship of affection and dependency is handled by identifying with that harshly-experienced authority. It is so insidious because the “solution” entails a denial of one’s own self. Often symbolic, the act may be an offering, a sacrifice, or an execution. But the gesture is doomed to fail because the figure of power one assumes is illusory, and the true self is negated in sacrifice. Briefly, one regains a semblance of autonomy by becoming one’s enemy. At his hearing, Vick pleaded, “I hope that one day when this is all over that I can show everybody that Michael Vick is not the person you see or hear about in the media” (Washington Post, Dec. 11, 2007). Whether he in effect sacrificed his own self-representation, he faces a dog’s life in the pen.

A somewhat similar dynamic was played out in the abuse of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The delegating of power was passed down the chain of command to the lowest ranking soldiers who carried out the deed, believing for a spell they were strong as gladiators instead of the slaves to the system they proved to be. When the perpetrators end up in prison or the brig, it is not a role-reversal but a self-realization. However, not the kind anyone would ever wish for.

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