Is It O.k. To Cheer?

"She told us to stop having parties in February of this year. Kept doin' it. Kept doin' it. Kept doin' it, kept getting by, kept getting by, doin' them quietly. Then: boom."

With Vick's 30th birthday approaching on June 26, Brenda and Kijafa wanted to celebrate with a private, invitation-only party. Instead Vick decided to back his brother's bid to host an "All White 30th Birthday Bash," at $50 a head, announced through Twitter. "Open to the public," Vick says, "make some money." And Brenda huffed again, "You don't ever listen to me."

Vick and Kijafa, the mother of his two daughters, arrived at the Guadalajara restaurant in Virginia Beach about 12:45 a.m. on June 25. The plan was for them to have a couple of drinks, sing Happy Birthday and leave. But when Kijafa thought it'd be cute to smear cake on Vick's face in front of some 400 people, his temper flared. Then up stepped Quanis Phillips, Vick's codefendant in the dogfighting trial. Phillips grabbed the cake and shoved some into Vick's face too. Bad enough that probation, not to mention Image Management 101, bars the two men from being in each other's company. But to insult him in public?

Vick blew up. "Q, what are you doin'?" he said. Vick says the moment never got physical but entailed plenty of "strong" words. "It was just cake," Vick says. "But still, it was embarrassing for me. And my pride just got in the way. But I kept thinking, I just got to go. I need to go. In my younger days we would've been fighting, but I let it go. It took a lot to let it go, but I did it."

Vick grabbed Kijafa and they drove off. Fifteen minutes later he received a phone call saying that Phillips had been shot in the leg at a nearby parking lot, two minutes after Vick's departure. Kijafa burst into tears, apologizing. Vick called his lawyer. The couple barely slept, Vick sure he'd blown his chance one minute (hadn't Goodell and Lurie vowed he would have no margin for error?) and hoping for reprieve the next (didn't he leave when things went crazy?). Separate league, team and probationary investigations would later back Vick's versions of events, and the police dropped the investigation because of a lack of cooperation from witnesses and Phillips. But at the time Vick's future looked grim.

The next 24 hours were wrenching. Vick had to face kids at a football camp he'd been hosting at Hampton University, kids he'd been telling to live the right way. Burning with shame, he cried going in and coming out. Vick steeled himself to call Reid, whose explosion left him blistered: "You shouldn't have been in that environment.... You shouldn't have been out after 12.... I don't know where this is going to go." Vick then dialed Dungy but lasted only five seconds before hanging up in tears. The next call? It should have been Goodell. Vick didn't dare.

"That was so disrespectful," he says. "I should've been man enough to pick up the phone and say I'm sorry. But I was tired of saying I'm sorry—to everybody. You know? It was old. Look: no more excuses for anything. That was a bad situation. Somebody got shot. And I'm just getting out of prison; I'm still on probation; I just got reinstated into the NFL; and this is my first off-season—and this happened? I was ready to deal with whatever consequences I had to deal with, man. Because I was just ashamed, and I knew I was wrong."

Then came his mom, the absolute worst, laying into Michael and Marcus at Vick's Hampton, Va., home.

"I'm sitting on the chair crying, looking all crazy in the face," Vick says. "My brother, he's sitting there, he ain't got no expression on his face because he ain't going through what I'm going through. I'm going through something totally different: I know what I want in life. I'm sure he do too, but I love the game of football. I know what I can do on the field and what I can provide for a team. That's where my heart's at, and it would've killed me to have that taken away. And I could just see in her face, she was tired. She told us it was embarrassing. She wanted to disown us. That's what she told me: She wanted to walk away. She's like, 'You went to prison for 19 months, and you come out and you still ain't listening....'

"Right then and there I told myself, I am changing my life. I'm going to do everything they ask me to do. I'm getting myself away from this madness."