Michael Vick sits down with 60 Minutes

I’ve always understood restitution to involve some kind of satisfying payment for wrong done, a recompense if you will for obstructions that we commit. It’s the kind of concept you teach kids and absorb yourself because for thousands of year taking responsibility for mistakes has been a virtue. The laws of the United States are even shaped around this notion that you will pay your debt to society for as long as you owe it. Enter Michael Vick, now a member of the Philadelphia Eagles, as he was interviewed by CBS Sportscaster James Brown.

A remorseful Vick answered tough questions about his dog-fighting operation that was responsible for the gruesome treatment of animals. He blamed himself and not the culture he grew up in. He expressed a desire to establish himself as a voice against animal cruelty in Philadelphia working with the Humane Society. But restitution may still be evasive.

I’ve come to find that restitution is nebulous and elusive when it depends on the validation of humans. If I owe you $40,000 you can take me to court for it and get the value awarded to you by a judge but how do you get people to believe your sincerity if you’re Vick? He did two years in prison and lost $135 million dollars when his contract with the Atlanta Falcons was voided. He declared bankruptcy too but the “R” word remains mythically elusive. Truth is that maybe “making amends” is impossible. People aren’t forgiving by-and-large. They simply aren’t. Forgiveness is the key to restitution and it involves uncomfortable emotions.

It feels good to write people off and it’s easier than listening to a gifted athlete make claims of having been transformed in jail. But writing people off is not how we’ve structured the justice system. The system says pay what you owe and you can be restored to the community of citizens. Granted, some debts are so steep by legal standards that permanent prison sentences remove some from society. Nevertheless, it’s always disappointing when we (the society) condemn them (the “Vicks”) without a willingness to see restoration. Speak this way and people say you’re a “bleeding heart” too soft to invoke the teeth of the law. But isn’t the spirit of any law correction and not destruction? What kind of society roots for people to fail? How sadistic and arrogant are we when God doesn’t even quit on humanity. I can hear the pundits now, “…But I never ran a dog-fighting ring.” No, but you’ve fudged income taxes, neglected spending time with children, dabbled in drug use, had immoral thoughts, lied to your boyfriend/girlfriend, disrespected your parents maybe even stolen merchandise or had multiple abortions. No one deserves a second chance but we get them. I’ve gotten third and fourth chances myself.  Restitution means we exist in the difficult tension of mixing punishment and rehabilitation for the sake of redemption. Michael Vick is just one more test-case to see if America will opt out of its responsibility to the complete purpose of the law.

David Wright, Ian Kinsler and Hiroki Kuroda all have this in common; they have really hard skulls.  All three were hit in the head by baseballs traveling 90+ miles per hour and on Saturday night August 15, they served as visual reminders poise daily confronts the dangers of professional sports. I can conjecture that there is a proverbial dotted line on which you sign when you make it pro and there is likely fine print that says something to the effect that you acknowledge the risk associated with your new lucrative employment.

Fine print doesn’t make what we saw in Major League Baseball on August 15 any easier to behold. Two of the three incidents were due to balls gettnig away from pitchers and tailing off toward the unsuspecting batter bravely standing in the box. The third was Dodger pitcher Kuroda who received his artillery from the bat of an Arizona Diamond Backs batter who hit a come-backer straight up the middle.

It’s been a chippy couple of weeks in the majors with all the beaning of batters, bench-clearing brawls and win-at-all-cost antics. Tempers are flaring and accidents are becoming more frequent but the truth underlying all of this bedlam is that sports are risky and those who compete in them, while privileged, are paid for more than their ability; they’re paid for their poise.

John Wooden, UCLA basketball coach Emeritus, used poise, self-control and confidence as key building blocks in his pyramid of success. Poise was that seemingly ineffable quality that Wooden thought was necessary because it meant you were going to be able to perform under stress. He believed in preparation and in mistakes. Wooden’s mentor was a coach by the name of Piggy Lambert who believed mistakes were unavoidable. Poise is why the two batters and pitcher hit on Saturday night will return to the diamond to do their jobs.

It’s the reason former Clippers guard Shaun Livingston is still in the NBA. According to a Wikipedia article, Livingston injured almost every part of his knee, tearing the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL), and the lateral meniscus, badly spraining his medial collateral ligament (MCL), and dislocating his patella and his tibia–femoral joint. He destroyed his knee on February 26, 2007 but on March 31, 2009, he signed a multi-year contract with the Oklahoma City Thunder. It takes more than talent to play at the highest level of sports and what it takes has nothing to do with banned substances or nepotism. You have to prepare, compete, get hit, get up and do your job…probably in that order.

I played one year of tackle football in 8th grade for the LA County Sheriff’s PeeWee Cardinals. I weighed less than 100 pounds but played Tight End, Punter and occasionally lined up at wide-out. I caught two touchdowns in the first game and not another one all season because I wasn’t used to getting hit after the catch. I contracted the “dropsies” but I had so much fun it was ridiculous and if only I had chosen football over basketball…

I think it was on that team that I learned for the first time that when a coach stops chastising you, he’s given up on you. There’s a saying in ancient literature that goes, “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons.” Raise your hand if you like discipline. That’s what I thought. But on that football team, they yelled and cursed a little bit. If you fought a teammate, they made you line up head-to-head in what we called the bull cage and hit each other until the desire to fight was out of your system. Discipline is probably the thing missing most from sports today and consequently there is very little sonship between coach and player. Even at the high school level I’ve heard stories of boys subbing themselves into the game against the coach’s wishes. The coach allows it. At the NCAA level universities pride themselves on their academic integrity but schools like USC and UCLA have even come under scrutiny for impropriety in the recruiting process. The professionals epitomize the lack of discipline what with the MLB’s frequent but tardy discoveries of banned substance abuse and the regular headlining of NFL players like Plaxico Burress who toted a loaded hand-gun into a night club and is now the subject of pending criminal proceedings.

I can still see the spit spewing from the mouth of dissatisfied coaches who cared enough to pull you aside and explain tactic. There were rules, game day attire, consequences and the threat of dismissal. To say that the discipline was always equitable would be false however. The elites were treated differently, even in 8th grade. And that’s how primadonnas are born. Where there is no consistent and immediate discipline for all members of a team, there can be no sonship, no sense of reverence for authority. From amateur to professional, institutions like the AAU, NCAA, NBA, etc…have not forgotten but neglected one thing – DISCIPLINE. It is not a core ingredient fundamental to how athletes are developed into citizens. There is no sonship. The heads of governing bodies in athletics and coaches must understand that discipline begins at the lower levels when inner-city kids are smoking/selling marijuana at age 12 and younger and/or engaging in promiscuous behavior all the while wearing free basketball shoes given to them by a corporate sponsor. If you play/work/coach alongside a primadonna, odds are that they’ve managed to avoid hardship. There are diva/egotists in the housing projects of Los Angeles as well as Pacific Palisades. From the hood to the house on the hill, the ancient truth holds: “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons…” and it finishes, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.