NEWPORT NEWS -- They call Michael Vick's end of town Bad News.

It's as if the 950-plus units in Richmond's Mosby Court and Creighton Court public-housing projects were crammed into an area of about a dozen blocks.

Row after row of aging two-story apartment buildings, pressed close to the Interstate 664 bridge and looming black piles of coal.

Close enough to the water for a whiff from the seafood packing plants but not for a fresh breeze.

Just enough space for a walkway and clotheslines between the buildings -- but not for a basketball court.

And not a dog to be seen.

If Michael Vick is involved in siccing pit bulls on one another in dogfights, as a federal indictment alleges he did at Bad Newz Kennels in Surry County, he didn't learn it in the neighborhood he grew up in, residents there say.

The pit bulls there now seem to be a new phenomenon.

"There weren't any of those dogs around until maybe five years ago," said Marita Harris, who lives a few blocks away, near the 16th Street pier where as a youngster Vick liked to fish in the green and silver waters of Hampton Roads.

Vick left the Newport News housing projects in 1998, on the wings of a college football scholarship, after the aspiring young quarterback led his Warwick High School Raiders to a 7-3 season.

He went on to Virginia Tech, where he became a star. In his second year at the university, a Sports Illustrated photographer shot a picture of him playing with a pit bull named Champagne, the barrel-chested animal leaping up shoulder-high to try to snatch a football out of Vick's hands.

The ESPN network in May reported, using an anonymous police informant, that Vick placed a $5,000 bet on a dogfight in 2000 -- that is, while he was still at Virginia Tech.

"I hadn't heard that story," said Tech head football coach Frank Beamer.

"Again, my thing is that I know him as a very good person, a very caring person. I think a lot of things get going during these periods of time. But I'm going to wait until this is all said and done to make any further statements."

According to the federal indictment issued July 17, Vick bought acreage in rural Surry County, about 30 miles from his old neighborhood, not quite two months after signing a $62 million, six-year contract with the Atlanta Falcons, including a $3 million signing bonus. The idea, the indictment alleges, was to train pit bulls and stage fights in a business venture with three friends.

"It's just shocking," said James "Poo" Johnson, a Boys Club official who has known Vick since he was a child.

"I've never even seen him with a dog."

In the projects where Vick grew up, there isn't much money for buying and betting on dogs, said Kevin Brown, a minister who has organized a storefront after-school program called Operation Breaking Through.

"Folks in this community are just in survival mode," he said. "They don't have money for gambling."

To him, the charges don't make sense.

"No, there's no dogfighting around here," said one 25-year-old man hanging around with a group of a dozen friends by the Harbor Homes on Jefferson Avenue.

Yeah, he and a couple of others say, asked if they knew Vick. "He don't know us, though," one says. None wants to give a name.

"We need to wait and see what the truth is," said Harris, watching the sunlight play off the waters that Vick used to fish.

Vick has said he started fishing when he was 10 or 11 as a way to get away from the violence and stress of daily life in the projects.

"Sometimes," he told the Daily Press newspaper of Newport News in 2001, "I would go fishing even if the fish weren't biting, just to get out of there."

A sense that he was special, even as a 7-year-old throwing three touchdown passes in a Boys Club league, led coaches and his parents to keep a special watch over Vick. In high school, he would spend weekends at his coach's home with teammates.

His coach paid for tutors for his SATs. His mother took away the box full of the college recruiting letters he started getting in the 10th grade when he came home with a report card with three D's and two F's, Vick recalled in a 2000 interview.

He knew sports was a way out.

It's a dream for many. And even if it isn't, sports is a way for children in the Newport News projects to stay out of trouble, says Jimmy Whitby. His kids, ages 9 to 15, like to play at the basketball court four blocks away, over on 21st -- though gunfire sometimes sends them scampering back home.

There is drug dealing, drive-by shooting and killing in the neighborhood, Whitby says. Plenty of good people, too.

Asked about Vick, he says only that it's a shame when people from Newport News projects do make good, they forget about back home.

Then, he scuffs a foot on the hard-packed, bare dirt by his stoop.

"All this is nothing but sand down here, can't even grow grass," he says, raising his voice to be heard over the highway's roar.

"You're stuck in a little hole down here." Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or dress@timesdispatch.com.

Staff writer Darryl Slater contributed to this report.