A day with Dave & Dave

I drove home from the airport yesterday listening to the local sports station. The afternoon show was hosted by well-known sports commentator Dave Pratt and former professional football player Dave Benefield. The main topic of conversation (those of you who are sports fans will not be surprised to know) was Michael Vick.

I am sick to death of stories about Michael Vick! But here I am writing another.

For those of you who wouldn't know a hockey puck from a basketball, I'll briefly explain that Michael Vick is a very talented football quarterback who plays for Atlanta in the National Football League (NFL). He was recently charged with participating in the very cruel sport of dogfighting through financial and other kinds of support. While denying that he placed any bets on the fights, he did finally admit that he participated in the execution, by hanging, drowning and electrocution, of several underachieving dogs. For this he was suspended indefinitely by the NFL and could go to prison for anywhere from one to five years.

Dave and Dave went on at length about Michael Vick and why someone so talented and wealthy would risk it all by participating in a "sport" denounced (quite rightly) as heinous, cruel and inhumane by a U.S. attorney. They did not draw any parallels to similar but legal forms of cruelty like bullfighting. Nor did they digress into another sport that is covered routinely on their station and that has been known to cause serious injuries, permanent brain damage and even the death of human beings, that of boxing.

But interestingly enough they did find the time to question the decisions of a couple of other sports figures who have been denounced (although not arrested) for fathering too many children. These are footballer Travis Henry,who has fathered nine children with nine women (none of them his wife) in four southern states, and basketball player Shawn Kemp, an underachiever compared with Mr. Henry, having produced a mere seven children out of wedlock with six women.

I found this intriguing. Some kind of equivalence was being made between the actions of Michael Vick, who was guilty of tormenting and killing dogs, and two gentlemen who were paying out a lot of child support for their indiscriminate impregnating of groupies. I will give Dave and Dave the benefit of the doubt that they were not drawing a moral equivalence between killing dogs and having babies. I suppose that they were suggesting that all three athletes showed poor judgment in doing things that would cost them in the court of public opinion (and in Vick's case the court of law as well).

Ironically, if the two prolific biological fathers had talked their "girlfriends" into aborting all those babies, we probably would never have heard about it. Many people, in fact, would have seen abortion as a good alternative to letting the babies live. The athletes are paying support for these children instead. Yet they were being mentioned in the same breath as Michael Vick. Does anybody else find this strange?

I was gratified to read the very common sense remarks of former BC Lions football player Mark Nohra in a column written by his one-time teammate Jason Claremont in the Vancouver Sun ("Every dog will have his day in the court of public opinion," Vancouver Sun, August 2, 2007). Quoting in part:

"I am as much an animal lover as the next guy. I have even contemplated becoming vegetarian because I am starting to feel remorse for the animals that must die to make up my diet. However, people, let's please put things into perspective. The amount of attention and outrage directed towards Michael Vick is absurd when looking at the grand scheme of things....I find it hard to relate to the emotional hierarchy where people put a pet's life above a human's in many contexts. Hundreds of people die in Iraq every day....America is in the middle of a health-care crisis where fifty million of their citizens do not have health care....I wish this emotional outpour was directed towards more substantial issues...."

Well said, Mark my man. And I would like to take your logic one step further. Why do we criticize men and their girlfriends for making a life choice and providing support for their babies rather than aborting, and jailing a man for killing dogs, while giving Henry Morgentaler an honourary doctorate at a prestigious university for championing "reproductive freedom" (i.e., legalizing abortion)?

Or to put it harshly, what do Henry Morgentaler, boxing promoters and bullfighters have in common? I must phone in to Dave and Dave for an opinion.