McNair Murder Stirs Mixed Emotions: Former Titan QB a Hero or Tragic Fallen Star?

It was a warm summer Saturday afternoon. Tiger Woods was leading the golf tournament. With the exception that it was the Fourth of July holiday, complete with the requisite outdoor cooking and fireworks, it seemed everything was as it should be in Nashville.

Then the local news broke into the golf tournament. I thought, "Must be a tornado warning somewhere nearby."

But it wasn't the weather this time. Local football hero Steve McNair was dead, murdered. His bullet-ridden body had been discovered at a downtown condo with the lifeless body of a young woman on the floor nearby.

Nashville's civic psyche goes up and down with the fortunes of the Tennessee Titans each football season. New to the city, we experienced our first taste of Titan fever during the 2008-09 season, when for weeks on end the team owned the best record in the NFL. Blue Titan flags flew from car windows. School children were encouraged to wear Titan jerseys to school on Fridays.

True, McNair retired a few years ago, and before leaving the NFL he had left Nashville for Baltimore. But the city refused to forget that it was McNair under center when the Titans earned their way to the Super Bowl in 2000.

The newscasters adopted a tone I hadn't heard since I was sitting in my sixth grade classroom listening to the coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy being broadcast over my school's intercom system. Well, no, that's not true. TV news anchors had that same shocked-solemn tone just a few days earlier when Michael Jackson died.

Channel Five sports director Hope Hines was soon in the studio, recalling McNair's career, especially the QB's reputation for playing through injuries.

My wife and I sat quietly as the broadcasters filled time before they had any real substantive facts to share. Eventually they reported the location of the condo: on Lea Street near Second Avenue.

Nashville is a small town. Just an hour earlier we had cut across Lea on our way home from the Music City Hot Chicken Festival. We had probably passed within a block or two of the scene of the tragedy.

Gradually the city learned more about the situation. The dead woman-20-year-old Sahel Kazemi-was a waitress at Dave & Buster's restaurant at Opry Mills. We had walked by there just the day before on our way to see a movie.

Emotions that started out as inexplicable shock gradually mixed with something more like despair when the picture of a young woman tragically smitten with a larger-than-life sports hero began to emerge.

The first fact reported was a DUI incident involving both Kazemi and McNair that had happened earlier in the week. Police kept McNair's name out of the news at the time. We learned that Kazemi believed McNair was divorcing his wife and that she and the QB would soon marry.

Press reports began to stress how McNair was shot several times, including once to the head, and that Kazemi suffered only one gun shot. Also, the gun was found near her body and police weren't looking for any suspects. Although no official word came from the police, everyone concluded it was a murder-suicide.

At the same time, a memorial was growing at a restaurant McNair had recently opened. People wrote tributes on the windows. They left flowers on the sidewalk. The press reviewed all the charity work McNair did around town.

As the picture continues to be painted, how should the community mourn? Does it just hold onto the athlete who played past pain and took time to teach youngsters to drop back in the pocket? Will McNair be remembered for his on-the-field heroics, or as a tragic figure who ultimately could not cope with being out of the limelight and sought excitement with a fragile young woman?