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Former New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on weapons charges stemming from an incident last November in which Burress accidentally shot himself in the thigh at a New York nightclub, prosecutors announced Monday.
Burress, 31, was indicted on two felony counts of criminal possession of a weapon and one count of reckless endangerment, according to the announcement by the Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
New York Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce, Burress' former teammate who was with him at the club and drove him to the hospital, was not indicted for his role in the incident, according to the prosecutor's announcement.
Michael Vick is back in the NFL. Now all he needs is a team to play for. Vick, free after serving 18 months in prison for running a dog fighting ring, was reinstated with conditions by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on Monday. He could participate in regular-season games as early as October.
Vick can immediately take part in preseason practices, workouts and meetings and can play in the final two preseason games -- if he can find a team that will sign him. A number of teams have already said they would not.
Once the season begins, Vick may participate in all team activities except games, and Goodell said he would consider Vick for full reinstatement by Week 6 (Oct. 18-19) at the latest.
Goodell suspended Vick indefinitely in August 2007 after the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback admitted bankrolling a dog fighting operation on his property in Virginia. At the time, Goodell said Vick must show remorse before he would consider reinstating him.
"I accept that you are sincere when you say that you want to, and will, turn your life around, and that you intend to be a positive role model for others," Goodell said in his letter to Vick. "I am prepared to offer you that opportunity. Whether you succeed is entirely in your hands."
Burress and the Bloomberg
By: Dave Zirin Reprinted From Edge Of Sports
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: all Plaxico, all the time. There's nothing like an NFL player shooting a hole in his own leg in a packed nightclub to become our latest walking, talking weapon of mass distraction. Why ponder the global economic meltdown, two wars, and rising unemployment, when millionaire black athletes like Plaxico Burress walk among us... with guns?
Don't think that this is a defense of the New York Giants star wide receiver. Having a loaded gun in your pants, with no safety, in a crowded club, is about as smart as using a toaster as a bathtub toy. In fact, shooting yourself in the leg is really one of more preferable outcomes. Now Burress faces three and a half years in prison for carrying a loaded handgun in the city.
Right on cue, the moralists are slithering onto their soapboxes to hiss at the latest athletic bogeyman. Hypocrisy reigns supreme.
There's the now-suspended emergency room physician at New York Cornell Hospital, who was persuaded to treat Burress under a phony name and failed to notify the authorities of the shooting incident as state law requires.
There's the New York Giants organization: New York police officials say the Giants let at least ten hours elapse before reporting the shooting. What were they thinking--that the cops wouldn't notice the wall-to-wall coverage on TV?
Next, the Giants self-righteously suspended Burress for the rest of the season "for conduct detrimental to the team"--easy to do when Burress has played next to no role for the first-place team. Suspending Burress is easy. They even did it earlier this season. But there is no talk of suspending Giants middle linebacker Antonio Pierce, who was with Burress that evening, drove him to the hospital and is alleged to have hidden the weapon from police. He was set to explain to police today exactly why he didn't report the shooting either. But Pierce is also an indispensable cog in the team. Suspend Pierce? That might affect their Super Bowl chances.
There's former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, who has made a call for all NFL players with handguns to be suspended without delay. Ditka, who calls himself an "ultra-ultra conservative" and hosted rallies this fall for Sarah Palin, clearly finds the Second Amendment expendable when exercised by these ungrateful... athletes. Here are his comments to ESPN:
"This is all about priorities. When you get stature in life, you get the kind of contract, you have an obligation and responsibility to your teammates, to the organization, to the National Football League and to the fans. He just flaunted this money in their face. He has no respect for anybody but himself. I feel sorry for him, in the sense that, I don't understand the league, why can anybody have a gun? I will have a policy, no guns, any NFL players we find out, period, you're suspended."
But no one is deserving of more scorn than New York City Mayor-for-Life Michael Bloomberg, who excoriated Burress for violating city gun laws. On Monday, Bloomberg seemed to channel Vincent Bugliosi: "Our children are getting killed with guns in the street. Our police are getting killed. If we don't prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law, I don't know who on earth would. It makes a sham, a mockery of the law. And it's pretty hard to argue the guy didn't have a gun and that it wasn't loaded. You've got bullet holes in and out to show that it was there."
All right, Mayor Mike. But there are a few people--including ESPN columnist Jemele Hill--who detected more than a whiff of hypocrisy in the mayor's rant:
"Why wasn't the mayor as willing to stand on his soapbox when New York City police officers shot and killed Sean Bell?" she wrote. "Bloomberg called for a 'thorough' investigation at that time, but he didn't damn those police officers the way he did Burress. (All three officers were acquitted earlier this year.)"
Rage as he has against Burress, Bloomberg displayed no such anger in 2004, when police beat and jailed protesters by the hundreds at the Republican Convention at Madison Square Garden.
Bloomberg's friends on Wall Street have helped precipitate a crisis which we will spend a generation digging ourselves out from. But there have been no sermons on the greed and lawlessness of the financial sector heard from the mayor's bully pulpit.
There's no defending the stupidity of bringing a loaded gun to a place where people party. And so far, Burress hasn't given much of an explanation about his motives. But contributing factors are obvious--growing up in the slums of Virginia Beach, Virginia, he saw plenty of violence. And athletes make easy targets: Giants teammate Steve Smith was robbed at gunpoint just a couple of weeks ago. And it's a terrible irony that the Burress imbroglio happened almost a year to the day that Washington football all-pro Sean Taylor was shot to death in his home by an intruder.
Far too many players feel like they have targets on their backs, and they refuse to surrender their freedom to walk the streets of the country where they are told they are living the dream. Hiring bodyguards or staying home just aren't choices many players want to make.
Guns can't protect professional athletes from real or imagined harm, especially when the gun owner has no clue how to use them. But three and a half years in prison for Burress hardly seems like a solution either. We need less moralistic prattle and more serious discussion about how we have gotten to this point. Too many athletes are like gated communities with legs: fearful, isolated, and looking over their shoulder.
Did Tiger Woods pave Barack Obama's path? Are you joking?
By: Dave Zirin
Originally Appeared In NY Daily News
It's always dangerous, but never boring, when a newspaper sports columnist uncorks a political thesis. Enter Mike Bianchi of the Orlando Sentinel. Bianchi thinks that there are some unsung heroes who deserve credit for helping put a black man in the White House - and they are athletes. "If you're searching for tangible reasons why it became possible for Barack Obama to make his historic run at the presidency ... look no further than the golf course, basketball court or football field."
Bianchi believes that, since sports have conditioned white America to accept African-Americans as heroes and leaders, black sportsmen deserve a pat on the back. He wonders: "Where else but sports can you go to Amway Arena and see 15,000 mostly white fans cheer and celebrate the accomplishments of a team that is mostly black?"
Sounds lovely. But it happens to be embarrassingly wrong - and an insult to the reason that millions waited on long lines to cast their vote.
For more than a century, masses of white audiences have cheered black entertainers and athletes. And for most of that time, blacks struggled mightily to climb the corporate or political ladder. Why? Because being wowed by the ability of blacks to perform on a field or stage is not in the same ballpark as accepting their political leadership. Not even close.
More to the point, the rare black athletes who have dared to make waves have been pilloried for not knowing their place. After men like Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos got too political, the phrase "just shut up and play" emerged - to smack down future jocks for trying to do more than entertain.
This is not just a hypocrisy of the musty past. On Thursday, Denver Broncos wide receiver Brandon Marshall caught the winning touchdown pass against the Cleveland Browns. He then - horror of horrors - wanted to take out a black and white glove to make a statement. "I wanted to create that symbol of unity because Obama inspires me, our multicultured society," he later said.
But we will never know how the public might have received even this tame message because teammates, led by Brandon Stokely, put the kibosh on him. Commentators then came down on Marshall like blitzing linebackers. ESPN anchor Neil Everett said, "It's not about you and what you think. It's about the team."
Our sport-mad culture has hardly softened the ground for black political leadership. If anything, it's produced a value system that prizes material gain and the almighty scoreboard over any kind of collective responsibility.
Bianchi writes, "the two most successful product pitchmen of the modern era - Tiger and Michael Jordan - are both black men who won over white corporate America." But at what cost? These are also the two most aggressively apolitical athletes to ever walk the earth. They live by the creed that taking serious stands gets in the way of good business. If anything, Obama has had to overcome the racial landscape these two have charted, which says you must wear the cool mask and betray nothing.
Dungy is a different case. One of the most respected coaches in the NFL, he is also an evangelical Christian who has raised funds for the Indiana Family Institute. IFI organizes anti-gay marriage initiatives and takes part in the process of what's called "praying the gay away."
In fact, when you think about it, Woods, Jordan and Dungy - signifying respectively disengagement, corporate greed and the right-wing side of the culture wars - hold the values many voters wanted to repudiate.
No doubt, black American athletes unafraid to be political will be part of charting us out of this wilderness. But it will not be those content to be money-making sideshows when the main stage is a real-world battle for change.
