My favorite baseball player of all time is Alex Rodriguez, a man everyone who isn't a Yankee fan hates. They hate him because he's a strange bird, he doesn't know how to be a normal person. A baseball prodigy from a young age, he was put in a bubble and protected from real life. Baseball is all he knows. Going to play a major league game is as common to him as taking a piss is to regular people. Michael Vick has only been a Philadelphia Eagle for 2 years, and already he is a legend in my eyes. Donovan McNabb was the quarterback of the team from the time I was 9 up until I was 19, but Michael Vick has already surpassed him in my mind. He is the greatest Eagle I have ever seen. I have 3 dogs and I love them more than anything. Michael Vick strangled and drowned dogs, and the ones he let live were forced to fight each other. A disgusting, unforgivable act. But I believe in redemption. I believe in taking a shit all over your life then rising up and finding a way to make a salad out of it. Am I biased? Of course, he plays for a team I love, but if he played for any other team, I'd secretly be rooting for him, because I love to root for the guy that no one respects, and everyone writes off. Allen Iverson is my favorite pro basketball player of all time, because I loved what he represented. To me, he represented swagger, carelessness, and most of all he was an unapologetic voice of my generation. I love sports history and have a great respect for it, but after years of older players complaining about players with tattoos, and players that listened to hip-hop, and players that wore baggy shorts, AI basically gave all of them the middle finger and told them to get the fuck out of the way. It wasn't his fault that you were stupid enough to hustle on every defensive possession of an all-star game, or that you believed in being a team player. He was going to play the game the only way he knew how, his way. And if people took it the wrong way, fuck em. Why do I love players like this? Players that the majority of people hate, that they treat with no respect? The answers simple: high school.
When I was a junior in the prison the spin machine that is the public education system calls high school, I was taking a test that I had to make up in the guidance center when a 40 something year old guidance counselor that was trying to make herself look 25 walked up to me to talk about my shitty grades. She told me I wouldn't graduate from high school, and that I would end up serving fast food to my classmates. I didn't say anything, I just starred at her. If it had happened now, I would have told her to go fuck herself and walked out. But I was still too young to have that kind of nerve. Something changed though. Up until that point, I didn't plan on graduating from high school. I decided right then and there that I was going to finish school no matter what, just so I could shove it up the asses of piece of shit bitches like her. So I could walk across that phony stage, take the fake diploma from the phony asshole giving them out, and let her know that she was wrong. I barely got by, but fuck it, I got by. I took night classes my senior year at a gateway school, and when I walked across the stage that June and received a diploma that meant nothing to me, I looked at all the faces of the teachers that told me I was a pain in the ass, or that I was a bum, or that I didn't have my priorities in order. That's why I love Michael Vick and Allen Iverson, because every goodie goodie two shoe that had it easy wants them to fail so they can look down on them and laugh, and guys like Mike look them dead in the eye and say "fuck em."
Fuck em. The two words that I live by. It doesn't mean I don't care about anyone, or that I'm selfish. It means I won't let anyone tell me how to feel about myself, or tell me what kind of person I'm supposed to be. When Mike Vick makes a defense look silly on a 40 yard scramble then flexes his muscles for the opposing fans, he's saying fuck em. When ARod hits a 3 run, 2 out homer in boston with the entire fenway crowd calling him afraud, he's saying fuck em. And when Allen Iverson broke Michael Jordan's ankles on a crossover a few years after almost going to jail, he's saying fuck em. When I'm living in Philadelphia, cooking food in a bar for a living, it'll seem like a modest life to most people. But according to the guidance counselor who told me I'd work at mcdonald's my entire life, it's more than I was capable of.
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