By Reid Collins on 7.14.09 @ 6:06AM
Steve McNair put to rest.
They say five thousand Nashvillians turned out to moan and mourn
the passing of Steve McNair, encouraged perhaps by the headline
on the Washington Post front page tease as "the city in
which Steve McNair achieved stardom." The tease adds that the
"positive memories of his life far outweigh the troubling details
of his death."
Those troubling notions are further outlined in the main sports
section story, which is also headlined: "Accentuate
the Positive." We get a hint from the staff writer's
lead: "This city has always kept its secrets well hidden, tucking
imprudence away from the lights of music marquees, sequestering
it behind closed doors." If so, how ever did we find out that
McNair's passing was occasioned by two bullets to the head and
two more to the chest, administered by a 20-year-old woman who
then put a fatal bullet in her own head? Another troubling
detail; the woman's name was Sahel Kazemi, not Mrs. Mechelle
McNair. And, according to police, she had complained to friends,
just before she bought the gun, that she suspected McNair of
seeing another girl, and not only her, in the brick townhouse
they shared.
The "accentuate the positive" goes on to explain that she was
"too young and naive to understand the subtleties of his
lifestyle, mistaking vacations and the gift of a Cadillac
Escalade for a declaration of love." Now, how dumb can a girl
get? There survives a Mrs. McNair, and four boys, two of whom
said to have been fathered by McNair with wife Mechelle. The
story quotes friends as saying McNair was never going to leave
his wife. He was just going to do -- what so many overpaid sports
stars do. And, as one fan wrote on the window of Steve NcNair's
Gridiron 9 restaurant, "Steve, we forgive you."
For the record, McNair was an NFL quarterback who never won a
championship but led the Titans to the 1999 Super Bowl, and had
been traded some years later to the Baltimore Ravens. But he did
good in Nashville, ran free football camps, positioned his
restaurant just across from the Tennessee State U. campus, in the
black community. For two days his old team, the Titans, threw
open the main gate of their stadium and supplied eight giant
notebook binders filled with papers for mourners to record their
grief. Heard often was the sub-Mason-Dixon phrase: "He was good
people." He was 36.
True, there had been a couple of DUI charges along the way, which
were dropped. As a longtime teammate said of the manner of death
and Nashville's reaction, "They know it doesn't look great, but
they're intelligent enough to look past that and see what he's
about."
topics:
Sports, Professional Football
