Mike Celizic

Here’s a bit of advice for all you kids out there who used to want to grow up to be as cool as Michael Vick: Never set your moral compass to people whose job it is to be your friends and whose only source of income is your wallet.

In other words, if you’ve got to have a posse because to do otherwise would be a failure to keep it real, understand that those childhood chums are hanging around 24/7 because they have no marketable skills and even less pride. They may be good people at some level, but if they have no desire to get real jobs, they’re losers.

This is the problem with the whole concept of keeping it real and not abandoning your roots. At one level, it’s a noble and charitable instinct to want to take care of the people you love. But at another level, it’s destructive to them and you.

It’s a growing problem in sports. A couple of generations ago, the problem with athletes mostly involved alcohol. A generation later, it was drugs. Now it’s posses and that idiotic but understandable concept called street cred.

Having experienced the Age of Aquarius, I can understand. Back then, to have the respect of your peers, you had to have no respect for authority and spend too many of your waking hours under the influence of mind-altering substances. That ethos made us all easy targets of the police, who picked on people simply because of the way they looked — if you can believe that. And, of course, because we were picked on, we became even more determined not to give in.

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But what we didn’t have in those days were superstars who paid us just to be around. Our heroes usually had even less money than we did; in fact, in some circles, the less money you had, the more status you enjoyed.

The athletic establishment didn’t think much of us, but there came a day when a lot of hair and a very casual attitude about sex, drugs and rock-and-roll became the norm on the playing field. And as long as the paying customers didn’t seem to mind and no one actually went to prison, the folks who ran things tolerated it.

Nothing’s changed. The NBA was the first league to not just tolerate but embrace the newest social norm to hit the court. And it took a long time for the white-bread administrators to realize that what they were actively encouraging and celebrating in their ads wasn’t just funky music and the latest edition of street talk, but a culture of gangs and guns and violence and misogyny; a culture of keeping it real.

So don’t ask where Michael Vick came from. He’s only the product of his times and culture, a culture that was celebrated by the sponsors, welcomed by the leagues, encouraged by the agents and enabled by the posses.

NBC News video Vick's career in jeopardy Aug. 21: Michael Vick will plead guilty to federal dogfighting conspiracy charges, a deal that could mean jail time for the Atlanta Falcons quarterback. NBC's Kevin Corke reports. Today show

Vick came along at exactly the time that the keepers of the games have realized exactly what they bought into and are trying to find a way out. The NBA has led the way, cracking down on clothing and conduct. The NFL, tired of seeing more players in the police blotters than in the celebratory team coverage, is doing the same.

And it’s about time. When you wake up and find that one of your biggest stars is raising fighting dogs and killing the beasts that don’t measure up — and gambling heavily on the fights, to boot — you’d better do something before you don’t have a league to govern anymore.

In a way, I feel sorry for him. He had so much talent and so little insight into his own life. He had a great instinct for helping kids and no instinct at all for the true nature of kindness. Most of all, when he landed the big bonus and the big endorsements, he never noticed that the guys with whom he was keeping it real were destroying everything he’d worked so hard to get.

And in the end, when the feds came down on him like a pack of, well, pit bulls, his buddies forgot all about keeping it real and thought only of keeping their own worthless backsides out of jail. Their keen sense of self-interest led them to attach themselves to Vick’s wallet like moray eels. That same sense made it easy for them to turn on him.

But that’s what always comes of buying friendship instead of earning it.

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