It’s still not clear whether Michael Vick dog fighting co-defendant Quanis Phillips was an invited guest or a party crasher when he was shot outside Vick’s birthday celebration last week. But people who have followed the chronicles of the Vick family will remember the name of one of the guests who definitely was invited: Delicia Cordon.
Cordon, for those who don’t remember, was arrested along with Vick’s brother, Marcus Vick, in 2008. In that incident, Marcus Vick was arrested for drunk driving and Cordon was charged with being drunk in public. Cordon was described by the Palm Beach Post at the time as “a deadbeat, according to court records [who] has six racy MySpace pages in her name.”
Cordon’s name appears on the invitation to Vick’s party, alongside Redskins cornerback DeAngelo Hall (who says he wasn’t there), Olympic 400-meter champion LaShawn Merritt, Colts safety Antoine Bethea, former NBA star Allen Iverson, rapper Pusha-T, a woman named Mia Michelle (who, like Cordon, has plenty of racy photos of her available online) and The De Creme Models.
Vick and Phillips are both forbidden, as a term of their probation, from associating with each other, and that means that unless they just happened to run into each other at the party by pure coincidence, they were violating their probation. When NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell reinstated Vick, he made a specific point of telling Vick to adhere to “limits on who you may associate with.”
But even if the birthday party guest list doesn’t draw the ire of Vick’s probation officer, it still suggests that Vick just doesn’t get it. Vick is showing -- at the very least -- poor judgment by publicly announcing that he’s partying with a woman who has previously been arrested alongside his brother. (And a woman who seems to have a knack for causing headaches for NFL players -- she also once filed a lawsuit against Dolphins running back Ronnie Brown.)
Vick hosted a football camp last week and reportedly told the children who attended, “Pick and choose your friends carefully. You just can’t put yourself in vulnerable situations.”
It’s long past time for Vick to take his own advice.