R.I.P.: Steve McNair and Sahel Kazemi

"Never go to bed with a woman who has more problems than you do."
(Nelson Algren, American novelist)

"You play around, you lose your wife,
You play too long, you lose your life."
(From the country song, "Good Time Charley's Got the Blues")


The recent murder-suicide deaths of former NFL quarterback Steve McNair and his twenty-year old girlfriend, Sahel Kazemi, have put me in a pretty depressed mood the past week. I had followed McNair's career from the early '90's, when he was compiling sensational passing records at tiny Alcorn State University, to his retirement a couple of years ago from the Tennessee Titans. Like most football fans, I admired not only his skills but also his toughness. McNair would "play hurt", as they say, unlike so many players of today who will nurse an injury forever rather than jeopardize their future earning capacity. And, from what I had heard, he always gave back to the community in ways large and small.

McNair was also known as a great family man. He married his college sweetheart, Mechelle, who became a nurse and was by all accounts a wonderful wife to McNair and wonderful mother to their four kids. Even though injuries finally forced McNair to retire from football a bit prematurely at age 34, the family was financially set for life. As a player, McNair hadn't squandered his money on Ferraris or thirty-room mansions; he and Mechelle lived an upscale, but not flamboyant, lifestyle, and their kids' needs always seemed to come first.

Or so it seemed.

It turns out that, apparently unbeknownst to Mechelle, Steve McNair was living a double life. At some point, he and a buddy of his purchased a condo in Nashville to entertain women. One of those women was Sahel Kazemi. Ms. Kazemi's friends and family members say she was outgoing and fun in public, but subject to severe mood swings. Her mother was murdered when Kazemi was nine years old, after which she lived with a variety of relatives before setting out on her own in her late teens. At the time she met McNair, she was struggling to support herself as a waitress, and she was reportedly overwhelmed by the attention, the gifts, and the romance that soon followed.

For several months, McNair and Kazemi were seeing each other three or four times a week in Nashville, and sometimes flying off together for beach vacations. He bought her a Cadillac Escalade, although, inexplicably, he put the title in both of their names. According to her close friends, he told her he was going to get divorced and marry her. She wanted to believe him---she did believe him---until the night she arrived early at McNair's condo and saw another young woman hastily leaving.

We'll never know what, if anything, she and McNair said to each other after that, but within a day or so Kazemi had managed to buy a 9 mm. pistol for $100 from a guy in a parking lot, the same pistol she used to pump four bullets into McNair before she put one into her own brain.

So, is this yet another story of a guy with money who thinks he can play around and never get caught? Maybe. And is it yet another story of an emotionally-fragile young woman who will believe what she wants to believe, and then totally freak out when she learns the truth? Maybe. But it's also a story of a loving wife who, perhaps, trusted too much. And it's a story of four little kids who once had a father and now just have some memories.

It's all so sad, and so unnecessary.