Alike Mike

It was the first time in months that anyone could say Michael Vick looked slow, shuffling across the locker room in slippers, shaking his head.

“Not so good,” he said.

All season long, defensive ends had chased him and linebackers had blitzed to no avail. A nasty stomach flu, that’s what it took to finally hobble the Atlanta Falcon wunderkind last week.

“Throwing up, headache, cold sweats,” he explained in a voice even quieter than his usual half-whisper.

The virus could not have struck at a worse time, the Falcons preparing for a showdown with their division rivals, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. At the team’s training camp, a cluster of modern brick buildings set in the pines halfway to South Carolina, Coach Dan Reeves spoke of “trying to get some medicine in him and some IV’s.” Reporters crowded around his locker.

“I’m trying to eat a little bit,” he said. “My goal is to get myself back to 100% and get back to feeling normal.”

With this young man, normal is a highly relative term.

In his first season as a starter, Vick has transformed the Falcons into surprise contenders by showing glimpses of quarterback play unlike anything the NFL has seen.

He combines a slingshot for a left arm with speed that Carolina Panther linebacker Will Witherspoon calls “pretty close to a cheetah.” Though he was a No. 1 draft pick, no one expected him to be this good, this soon.

Opponents have already begun to refer to him as the Michael Jordan of football.

“You have to understand this guy is changing the game,” Minnesota Viking linebacker Henri Crockett said. “He’s got the same attributes that John Elway had, just five-tenths of a second faster.”

High praise for a 22-year-old who should be a senior at Virginia Tech this season.

Not that Vick flaunts his newfound status. He is somewhat disarming off the field, not particularly lithe or sleek, with a build that skews toward blockish.

His personality also defies expectation, no masses of jewelry or end zone dances, no referring to himself in the third person. Instead, he speaks of being blessed, something he says he lies awake at night pondering. Game by game, his confidence grows with the discovery of what can be accomplished.

“When I take off and I’m in full stride, the game seems so slow,” he said. “I think that I can make any play.”

That, so far, is the secret to his success.

Though Vick has rushed for 662 yards -- including an NFL-record 173 against the Vikings last week -- his quarterback rating is an inauspicious 87.1 with only 10 touchdown passes. He isn’t about statistics. Not yet. He shines in luminous bursts.

A 44-yard touchdown run against Carolina. A 76-yard, flick-of-the-wrist scoring pass against New Orleans. At Pittsburgh, he finished an unlikely comeback with an 11-yard touchdown scramble in the final seconds for the tying score.

“Once he gets in that zone,” Atlanta receiver Shawn Jefferson said, “he just takes over the game.”

At no point was that more evident than last week’s showcase against the Vikings when, after scoring on a 39-yard pass and 28-yard run, Vick produced the play of the season. Break it down:

First came quickness. With the game in overtime, Vick dropped back and sensed pressure. He shuffle-stepped left, took a few strides and escaped from the pocket untouched.

Next came smarts. The defense was in man coverage, its collective back turned, so Vick realized he had room to run.

Add a move. Crossing midfield and streaking to the 30-yard line, he dipped left and steered right, distancing himself from three guys on his heels. But two more defenders had an angle, closing in from either side.

Finally the magic, the quality that distinguishes Vick from every other quarterback on the planet. He found another gear -- a teammate calls it his “invisible juice” -- and slipped between the tacklers, leaving them to collide like bad slapstick.

If the run looked spectacular on television, listen to those who saw it close up.

“We’re amazed too,” Atlanta fullback Bob Christian said. “Sometimes you have to keep from stopping in the middle of a play and just watching and saying ‘Wow.’ ”

Still, the Falcons worry that Vick’s traveling highlight show might distract from his development. As quarterback coach Jack Burns explained, “We don’t want him to be a run-around schoolyard quarterback, we want him to be the total package.”

They want Vick to run wisely and limit the hits that could land him on the sideline. His completion rate has risen to 57% -- accuracy was a question mark when he came out of college -- but when coaches see him throw on the run, off his back foot, generating velocity with only his arm, they think he can be even better with sharper mechanics.

If he can hone that combination of speed and skill, instinct and experience, the true magic of Michael Vick might emerge.

“I couldn’t put a limit on him at all,” Tampa Bay defensive lineman Simeon Rice said. “He’s taking his offense to another dimension.”

Or, as former quarterback and current television commentator Terry Bradshaw said: “He does things differently from other players.”

This week, Vick even outfoxed the flu, looking fit at practice a day later.

He has been waiting two months for this morning’s rematch with the Buccaneers (9-3), who knocked him out of the game with a sprained shoulder and defeated his team, 20-6, in the Georgia Dome in October.

For the Falcons (8-3-1) to win this time, on the road no less, Vick figures he must summon the best performance of his brief career. He grins from behind half-lidded eyes and quietly jokes about his team’s three-pronged strategy: “Plan A is run. Plan B is pass. Plan C is me.”

It is the jest of a young man who is finding his way in the NFL and knows he is on a hot streak. “You can almost feel it at the start of the game ... like you can’t miss,” he said.

That should be enough to make any defense feel queasy.

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The Vick Ledger

In his first season as an NFL starter, Atlanta’s Michael Vick is already making a significant impression. His statistics for the season’s first 12 games:

*--* PASSING RUSHI NG Opponent Result Att Cp Yds TD Int Att Yds TD Green Bay L, 23 15 209 1 0 9 72 1 34-37 Chicago L, 28 17 166 1 0 10 56 0 13-14 Cincinnati W, 30-3 26 16 174 2 0 5 56 0 Tampa Bay L, 6-20 12 4 37 0 0 1 1 0 N.Y. W, DID NOT Giants 17-10 PLAY Carolina W, 30-0 22 16 178 0 0 6 91 1 New W, 24 16 195 0 0 10 91 2 Orleans 37-35 Baltimore W, 24 12 136 0 1 7 -5 0 20-17 Pittsburgh T, 46 24 294 1 0 10 52 1 34-34 New W, 23 11 160 2 1 7 55 1 Orleans 24-17 Carolina W, 41-0 24 19 272 2 0 5 20 0 Minnesota W, 28 11 173 1 1 10 173 2 30-24 Totals 280 161 1994 10 3 80 662 8

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