Dunlap: Vick Hate Can Still Mean Steelers Love
Not everything in this world is all or nothing.
The latest situation, if you stand back and take it all in, is this whole setting wherein quarterback and convicted dogfighting ringleader Michael Vick will pull on a Pittsburgh Steelers football helmet and wear a jersey of one of the National Football League's most storied --- and, yes respected --- franchises.
I can despise Vick and simultaneously feel exactly the opposite about the Steelers franchise as a whole. And more people need to start coming around to such an opinion.
After a morning hosting The Fan Morning Show and fielding ear-bending and largely line-drawn-in-the-sand calls from callers either outright defending Vick and telling people to, essentially "get over it" or voices extolling others how evil the Steelers are for employing such a man, I seem to have arrived at a compromise.
I'm allowed to totally dislike Michael Vick (because I think he did things only a deplorable human would do) and still like the Pittsburgh Steelers.
You get that?
It doesn't need to be an all or nothing proposition.
Doesn't need to be all one or all the other.
If I detest Vick, I can still have adoration for that glorious Steelers franchise because I've come to realize signing a guy like Vick is simply a mechanism of Keeping Up With The Joneses in what has become a pretty damn seedy bidness.
That's what it is, that's how it is in this current climate in the NFL.
I understand how Vick has paid his debt to society and I get how he was put in jail for almost two years, but no amount of rehabilitation will ever convince me he's a good guy.
Good guys don't do what he did.
Some will say he shouldn't be made to wear some Scarlet Letter for the rest of his life but I'm comfortable arriving at the decision (a personal one) that the things Michael Vick did involving that dogfighting ring make him an unpardonable and reprehensible human being ---- for the rest of his life.
Go ahead and tell me not to judge; I'm OK judging Michael Vick.
I am also OK judging the Pittsburgh Steelers.
This is an organization, run by the Rooney family, that has done exponentially more good than bad for our region since it was founded in 1933.
The Steelers --- and their success --- kept a region rallied together as the steel industry disintegrated in the 1970s when it was a grim task to find anything with the semblance of positivity happening in this city.
The Steelers have created countless jobs in the peripheral businesses in and around the North Side on home game weekends for decades.
The Rooney family has been integral in charitable initiatives in Pittsburgh for a long, long time.
And while there is no such thing anymore --- and I wonder of there ever was --- as "The Steeler Way," the men who play for that team have, by and large, kept their noses clean when measured against their contemporaries around the NFL.
When weighing all that, it becomes profoundly obvious the Pittsburgh Steelers do much more positive for this community than they do negative. It has always been that way and, I'm guessing as long as someone with the surname Rooney is in charge, it will always be that way.
The Steelers took a public relations risk by reaching out to Michael Vick and eventually having the quarterback sign a one-year deal with them.
That said, however, good companies all across this globe employ bad people for various reasons --- sometimes it comes down to utter necessity. That's what it is was in this case, simply an apparatus of being sure that if something would happen to Ben Roethlisberger, the team would be in the best position to still win games.
It just so happens the best person for that job is, in my estimation, a terrible human. But in the current climate on the NFL, that's kind of what you need to do sometimes to keep up.
So I can absolutely think Michael Vick is disgraceful, inexcusable and an unforgiveable person while at the same time thinking the Steelers are a marvelous franchise.
I can think that. And, as a matter of fact, I do.
Colin Dunlap is a featured columnist at CBSPittsburgh.com. He can also be heard weekdays from 5:40 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Sports Radio 93-7 "The Fan." You can e-mail him at colin.dunlap@cbsradio.com. Check out his bio here.
