Mike Vick was convicted and sent to jail for dog fighting. He's fortunate his NFL career was waiting for him when he got back. That kind of thing can totally derail anyone's career, no matter how talented. Vick was extremely talented, but he almost lost it all.
He admitted recently on Tyreek Hill's podcast that he regretted a lot about the situation. Naturally, after returning to the NFL he had remorse and guilt over the entire thing, but now, much older, he regrets something else.
He lamented the lack of a figure that he could look up to that would have told him that dog fighting was a bad idea. He said via NBC Sports:
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“I wish I had a father figure or somebody in my life — and I did, too, for the most part — but not to the point where somebody was like, ‘Yo, man, you can really screw all this up.' Ain’t nobody came and said, ‘Bro, you can screw all this up.’ One person [did], I won’t say his name.”
Despite that one unnamed person's attempts, Vick went through with it and ended up in jail. He nearly lost everything he had worked so hard to build because of his inability to listen to advice.
Mike Vick nearly lost it all
Mike Vick has proven to be a trailblazer at quarterback. Without him, there's no Cam Newton. Without Newton, there's no Lamar Jackson, Russell Wilson, Kyler Murray, and others.
Vick also said that he thought his return would be better, but he figured out pretty quickly that that's not how life works:
“The whole time like I was gone I thought they was gonna wait on me, but that was wishful thinking. Like, I really thought like they was gonna wait for me to get back and all this would be over and then I step back in, be the starter, and we just move on like nothing ever happened. But that’s not reality. And I was hoping for something that just couldn’t happen.”
He was lucky enough to even have a spot in the NFL after returning, which he now understands much better.
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