As Michael Vick talked to his former Falcons coach Jim Mora about falling from NFL stardom to prison, Mora asked, “What could I have done?”
“There was nothing you could do, Jim,” Vick told Mora in an interview on NFL Network. “The best thing for me, that ever happened to me up to this point, as crazy as it may sound, was me being shipped off to [the federal prison in Leavenworth] Kansas. Because other than that, I wasn’t going to change. I wasn’t going to get all the people away from me that was leeches and wanted to be around. I wasn’t going to stop fighting dogs.”
Vick said that he wouldn’t change his life because, “I was thinking, hey, man, I’m Mike Vick, what’s the worst thing that’s gonna happen to me?”
Vick told Mora he wouldn’t have listened to his coach telling him to change the focus of his life because he wasn’t listening to anyone. Vick says he now thinks his federal prison sentence was God’s work.
“My mom tried to tell me,” Vick said. “In one ear and out the other. There was nothing nobody could have done to change my situation but the man upstairs, who said, ‘Listen, before this goes any further, I’m going to take all this away from you for a while.’”
Mora asked how Vick misled his coaches and the whole Falcons organization about his off-field activities.
“My whole life was a lie, Jim -- everything, A to Z,” Vick said, adding that he went to his dog-fighting facility in Virginia, “Every week -- every week. . . . I just told you, my whole life was a lie, Jim.”