Several hours after that, reports of the shooting appeared on Los Angeles news Web sites.
In another news cycle or two, it will be another athlete, another place.
It was impossible not to think, almost immediately, about Michael Vick, and how lucky he is to still have a job. A couple of weeks after his latest brush with infamy - when, minutes after leaving his public birthday party at a Virginia restaurant, one of his former dogfighting accomplices ended up getting shot - things have settled down. Barring the unforeseen, Vick will again be the Eagles' backup quarterback this season.
Given the entire balance of circumstances, keeping him is the right decision. Unless he gets caught in a lie - to the police, the Eagles or the NFL - the truth is that he was guilty of nothing more than stupidity by attending the party in the first place. There are people who believe that stupidity alone should be enough to get Vick fired - but they are pretty much the same people who did not want him hired in the first place.
Gotcha is not the standard for firing somebody, not even a man who has admitted to killing dogs and bankrolling a dogfighting operation. Still, nobody should kid himself about the future here. The truth is, if that shooting after the birthday party had killed someone, Vick would not have survived the public outrage - and that is true whether or not Vick was gone from the party when the shots were fired. The truth also is that if this incident had taken place during the 2009 football season, just weeks after his reinstatement by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, Vick also likely would have been canned.
In this case, though, nearly a year of goodwill - his teammates really do like him; they were the ones who voted for him for that Ed Block Courage Award, and no one else - has mattered.
