Like many prodigiously talented professional sportsmen, at the age of 27 Michael Vick had everything.

The quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons American football team was one of the game’s most exhilarating players. He was never destined to be a great passer, but he had an extraordinary athleticism that meant he could run — fast and fearless with the ball — through opposing defences, notching up records at an improbably early stage in his career. Think of a cross between Rio Ferdinand and Jason Robinson.

The rewards were unfathomably large — $13 million (£7.5 million) in salary; a possible $37 million bonus; millions more in endorsements. And with it all the glamorous trappings of the modern sporting aristocracy — a handful of suburban mansions, a fleet of truck-like sport utility vehicles; buckets of diamonds and gold jewellery.

But for Vick there was something else. Most weeks he would meet some old friends and take part in a wholly different sporting experience. Under cover, at a secluded farm in Virginia, they would organise grisly, fight-to-the-death bouts in pits between raging pitbulls, gathering in secret to gamble a few thousand dollars on the outcome. Worse, Vick himself ran the operation, training the dogs. Animals that underperformed were often killed and were sometimes left to swing helplessly on ropes in Vick’s yard.

Vick pleaded guilty yesterday to federal charges of arranging dogfighting, charges carrying a sentence of at least a year in jail. Within hours of his plea, the National Football League suspended Vick without pay. His professional football days are surely over.

Amid all the revulsion and the justified opprobrium heaped on him by his employers, by the press and by the public, the most difficult question remains this: what induces someone of such talent, wealth and potential, to engage in such a sordid, gruesome, low-life activity such as dogfighting?

Only Vick himself can truly say what personal depravities drove him to this destructive destination. But part of the answer lies in the strange and conflicting juxtaposition of loyalties that young American black men feel as they ascend from incarcerating poverty to liberating wealth.

Like so many black stars, Vick came from nothing. He grew up in the poorest and most miserable part of Newport News, the giant shipbuilding port in southeastern Virginia.

In hip-hop nomenclature, the housing projects his family occupied were known as “Bad Newz”. Vick worked hard to stay out of trouble and, thanks to his talent, won a scholarship to Virginia Tech, where it was instantly clear he was a prodigy.

He moved from there to the National Football League at 21. But for Vick, it seems, as for many others, the more successful he became the stronger was the sense of belonging to what he had left behind. He maintained connections with dubious friends from home. His brother, Marcus, another footballing talent, was part of a group at Virginia Tech who had tattooed on their arms “757” — the telephone area code for Newport News — serving as a visible reminder, however grand they got, never to forget their roots.

In another sign of the pull of their miserable origins, Vick’s dogfighting team called called themselves “Bad Newz Kennels”.

Young black men who make it big in sport, or music, talk much of the pressure from their former peers. It is called “Keeping it Real”, the injunction to remember that, whatever sporting triumphs or Hollywood contracts come your way, the lot of many young black men is a life of crime and poverty and an early death in some drug- infested backstreet. Brenden Hill, a fellow footballer at Virginia Tech, told The Washington Post, “I want to make it clear that who’s gotten him involved in this situation, what brought him into the hot water, I would say, is because of the fact that he’s loyal.”

None of this justifies Vick’s crimes. Not everyone, of course, who emerges from black poverty to unimagined success becomes a violent criminal. Even most of those who do, do not seek to demonstrate their loyalty by leading a gang of animal torturers.

But the Vick case is another sorry reminder that too many young black Americans want to believe that you can take the boy out of the ghetto, but the ghetto should never be taken out of the boy.

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