STEVE MCNAIR SACKED BY BULLETS

July 5 2009

Nashville, TN – Football is a sport built on violence. The sporting equivalent of war, Football is celebrated and criticized for its extreme levels of orchestrated violence. With every position on the field prone to a punishing hit through the game the
quarterback is the one player on the field for which everyone is gunning. The leader of the team and the one player most able to inflict scoring damage on the opponent, the quarterback position has always been the focal point of successful game plan.

Steve McNair was a quarterback well accustomed to the violence of the football field. For twelve years McNair threw touchdowns and evaded sacks in the NFL. Playing with the Tennessee Titans and Baltimore Ravens, taking the latter team to, literally, within inches of Super Bowl victory, McNair carved out a position for himself as one of the premiere quarterbacks in the league. Since retiring in 2008 McNair had left the violence of the football field behind but it seems in the interim lost a bit of the foot speed that made him so successful. With his death on Saturday from a gunshot wound to the head many are in mourning and even more are lamenting the degradation of the foot and passing skills that brought his teams so many victories but left him unable to evade a flying bullet.

“When police officers arrived in response to that call, they found two individuals who had been shot to death inside the residence: one female, one male,” said Don Aaron of the Nashville Police. “We now know that the male deceased is Steve McNair. The female deceased has been tentatively identified. We're working to confirm that and then notify her next of kin.”

The woman found with McNair was 20-year old Sahel Kazemi who is believed to be McNair’s girlfriend. Police have not yet commented on whether or not the deaths are a result of a murder-suicide or a double homicide, something which is of only marginal interest to football fans and players alike.

“The players I have spoken with are obviously shocked and saddened by the death but like any kind of shocking end inevitably people’s thoughts begin to turn to
themselves and how they would have dealt with the situation. Naturally for professional football players their thoughts turn to things like foot speed and reaction time, something that is bred in the bone a part of their existence, part of their very nature. Seeing someone fall as far as McNair obviously had in skill level causes a lot of concern for their own skill set,” said Scrape TV Sports analyst Mark Marvins. “This is especially true for the older players who are starting to face up to the reality of that their bodies just aren’t what they once were. Their cuts aren’t the same, their hands aren’t nearly as quick and that is scary for a lot of players. True a bullet moves
a lot faster than a lineman or a blitzing safety but the bullet got him in the head, something a younger man would have hopefully been able to anticipate an avoid.”

Early speculation indicates that McNair’s reaction time may have been dulled by the presence of Kazemi, lending credence to long accepted practice of avoiding sex before game time.

“In the end there were probably a number of factors that led to the degradation of skills that McNair obviously had. Age though was likely the primary contributor to his inability to avoid that particular sack no matter what aging NFL’ers
would like to believe. Blaming other factors helps them fantasize that they could avoid the same fate but that is simply avoiding the inevitably that time and age will ravage their skills and make them similarly unable to avoid flying bullets,” continued Marvins. “There are some that will point to the fact that he lived a life of violence and therefore came to a fitting end but that would be unfair. Bullets and gunplay are so rarely a part of Football that combing the two in death is really not fair. The NFL has a strict policy regarding gunplay on the field and the connection between the two is tenuous at best. Really we should just see this as a guy who got old and shot in the head.”

Traditional NFL playbooks have never addressed the need to avoid gunfire but reportedly a few teams are considering implementing such training in the wake of the McNair case.

Alexi Orton, Sports Correspondent

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