Vince Young, Michael Vick And Cedric Benson,Trouble Are Making

The NFL might be the place to do so. Vince Young, Michael Vick and Cedric Benson, all of whom have had their share of off-the-field trouble are making the headlines again – and not for the right reasons. All three players seemed to have gotten their respective lives in check, but within the last week, news surfaced that all three allegedly were involved in acts of violence after a night at a bar or strip club.Young was seen on tape in the middle of a skirmish, Vick’s 30th birthday party resulted in someone who he may or may not have been with shooting someone and Benson was charged with assault for punching an Austin, TX bar employee in the face. I can understand that these guys want to be live life and enjoy the fruits of their labor, but when you have a troubled past, you become a target. People love to see others fail – especially those in the spotlight. Will these guys ever learn that they have enough money to host parties with elite company on their own grounds.



Benson’s woes are almost certain to lead to a suspension. This leaves the Bengals in a tough spot, as they were counting on the formerly “reformed” running back to build on an excellent 2009 season that included a career-high 1,251 yards and six touchdowns. Given Benson’s scroll of previous incidents, I foresee the NFL dishing out a fairly substantial suspension. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s eight games or even the entire season. A possible solution might be reaching out to the Buffalo Bills and making a play for their troubled running back, Marshawn Lynch.

Ordinarily it would suffice to allow the Michael Vick case to recede into a state of distant memory except that a Forbes magazine poll and the surfacing of a horrific video of a 2002 police murder of an African American youth insist that we revisit both incidents. Recently Forbes magazine, the gatekeeper and chronicler of corporate culture, felt compelled to inform us that according to their yearly poll Michael Vick remains, for the second year in a row, America’s most detested athlete. Apparently white folks refuse to forgive and forget. Oakland Raider’s owner Al Davis, NFL quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and golfer Tiger Woods round out the top five.

NFL quarterback Vick, readers will remember, was sentenced to 21 months in prison and rendered bankrupt after pleading guilty in 2007 of participating in an interstate scheme to engage in dog fighting. Obviously Vick, a young African American millionaire had violated societies boundaries engaging in the long discredited sport of dog fighting. In the run up to his trial, however, mainline media heaped hatred and scorn on Vick to the point one would have thought America’s devil incarnate, Osama Bin Laden, had been brought to justice.

Black talking head for ESPN and the Washington Post Michael Wilbon labeled Vick’s crime as “heinous,” a word that has become the second most overused word in relation to crime, genocide being the first most overused word. The reasoning here is that if everything is heinous then nothing is not heinous.Not that long ago mass murderer Ted Bundy was said to have committed heinous crimes. Today a young black man who bankrolled a dog fighting scheme is held to the same standard of hatred. To her undying credit comic Whoopi Goldberg was one of the very few public personalities who decried the racism involved in the public persecution of Vick.

But why, other than the Forbes magazine poll, revisit this desultory incident? Answer: the Deondre Brunston murder.Deondre Brunston was a 24 year old youth living in Compton, Ca. After a domestic dispute his girlfriend called the police.In a filmed interview Deondre’s aunt, Keisha Brunston explained what happened next.According to Brunston, after police arrived and confronted Deondre things quickly escalated. Reportedly Deondre, for whatever reason told police he was wanted for murder and that he was armed. Neither claim turned out to be true, but neither did police attempt to learn the truth.