Nightward, Michael Vick went to jail for dogfighting but has recently been reinstated by the NFL and will play this year.
My bad. I remember there being a fair amount of outrage at the time over what he was caught up in, and I assumed the "ban him for life" stuff was official.
Still, I stand by what I said. Vick should have been banned for life- the law in America is trying to prevent dog fighting and cruelty to animals, yet that wingnut gets to be rewarded with adulation and a high salary, hardly the message you want to be sending to society.
Closer to home, though, the NRL has been up on its high horse about the way its players (and society at large) should treat women. They were probably backed into a corner by Bird and Stewart, but that doesn't make their denunciation of violence towards women any less correct. Cometh the hour, cometh the man? I guess we'll see.
I, for one, am tired of high-profile players being given a pass for their actions. Even though what the Broncos (my club) did last year was found to not be illegal, it still damaged the standing of the club and the game at large- in my mind, though, the worst part was that the three players involved behaved as though
they were the victims, rather than the girl who was at the centre of things. I believed then, as I do now, that they should have all been stood down immediately; they admitted they were there (eventually), and they admitted to what they stood accused of, but argued it had been consensual. Shane Webcke was right; the Broncos took it easy on them after throwing the book at lower-profile players (Costigan, Lacey,
et al), which was simply not on.
Whether it's the most elite and adored player doing the wrong thing, or the fringe player who appears sporadically is, in my view, entirely immaterial. It's long past due that the clubs, or the NRL if they fail to act, took a zero-tolerance approach to asshattery, on the field or off.
