Armchair Quarterback

I hope my loyal readers will forgive me for taking a brief departure this week from my usual blog to acknowledge the shock and sadness our community has experienced this week in the wake of Steve McNair’s murder.  I felt a little awkward posting one of my regular light hearted pieces after everything that’s happened.

I’m sure everyone remembers exactly where they were last Saturday when they heard about McNair’s death.  I was in Indianapolis visiting family.  Late that afternoon, someone posted a note on my facebook page applauding Rudy Kalis’ coverage of the Steve McNair murder.  I was stunned, to say the least.  All I could think was… “What?  What murder?  Steve McNair… as in… the football player… Steve McNair?  Impossible!  He was just on the show a couple of days ago touting his new restaurant.”

I scrambled to get to our website, and sure enough, there it was in big bold letters: Breaking News “Steve McNair found dead in downtown condo.” It was surreal.  Obviously the two situations are vastly different, but I got the same pit in my stomach that I did the day someone called and asked me if Dan Miller had died.  No one had told me yet, so I immediately said, “Of course not.  He’s in Augusta.”  Unfortunately, my instincts were wrong both times.   Some people are so much larger than life you never expect them to die.  I guess that’s how I saw Steve McNair.

Over the past ten years, McNair and his family have become one of us.  They didn’t hole up in their mansion like big time celebrities.  Their kids played ball along side ours.  They ate dinner in restaurants that didn’t have a VIP section, and they gave underprivileged kids a chance to spend their summers doing something productive rather than roaming the streets.  Regardless of how you feel about McNair’s double life, it’s impossible not to feel an overwhelming sense of sadness for his four children, his wife, and his legacy.  We’ll never fully be able to remember “Air McNair” the way we would have, had his death not happened the way it did.

As a news station, it’s our job to get information and share it with the public, particularly when it involves a case this big.  Our viewers would never forgive us if we didn’t.  Still… I couldn’t help but feel sick for Mechelle McNair and her children this week every time another bizarre detail came to light.  Finding out your husband was murdered by his mystery lover is hard enough to deal with when you’re a private citizen.  Imagine having the entire sports world waiting to see your public reaction to it all.  Who could blame Mechelle for hunkering down and refusing to comment?

As I wife, I’d be angry, sad, scared, confused, and overwhelmed.  I’d want to keep it together for the sake of my kids, but deep down I’d be wondering how in the world I was going to raise my boys all by myself.  In the past several days I’ve heard a lot of people say, “Well, she’s got plenty of money.  She’ll be fine.”  Sadly, they don’t make enough money to replace a father… or a mother for that matter.

At the end of the day, Steve McNair made a mistake, and he paid dearly for it.  We can play armchair quarterback and talk about what a horrible person he was, or we could do something positive like use this as a launching point for self examination.  Unless you’re perfect, there’s probably something in your life that needs tweaking.  Now might be an excellent time to do that.

This week, we’ve been slapped in the face with yet another reminder that life is short.  We do not have an unlimited amount of time to get it right.  We come into this world with a void in our lives, and if we don’t fill it with something positive, it gets filled with something negative.  I know a lot of you are disappointed in McNair’s behavior, but frankly a little bit of that is our own fault.  The world is inherently flawed.  We placed Steve McNair on a pedestal no man on this Earth truly deserves, and now we’re upset that he didn’t measure up.  Maybe we were setting ourselves up for disappointment all along.