AMERICA AT LARGE:A murdered quarterback and an unlucky astronaut had several things in common

I HADN’T THOUGHT much about it at all when I’d pulled the shirt out of the drawer Tuesday morning. It wasn’t until we were joined in the lift of a midtown office building by two ladies headed off on their lunch hour that anybody mentioned it.

“Steve McNair. I’ve been reading about it. What a tragedy,” said one of the women.

“Yes,” I nodded. “It certainly was.”

“No, I meant your T-shirt,” she pointed to the front, which bore the slogan McNAIR SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM.

“That is for Steve McNair, isn’t it?” she asked.

“No,” I admitted. “Ron McNair, actually. He was an astronaut.”

Although he had not previously commented, Mike Woods, the boxing writer and editor, at that point confessed that he had also assumed my shirt referred to the recently-deceased former NFL quarterback.

Lou DiBella, the promoter, asked, “But you wore it today because of Steve McNair, right?”

Not even subconsciously. The truth is we were driving to Boston for a funeral, but on a steamy July day anything I wore in the morning would be soaked before we hit Connecticut, so I grabbed a shirt from my T-shirt drawer and resolved to change later.

And until that moment in the elevator I’d never had occasion to mention Ron McNair and Steve McNair in the same breath. But as I thought about it, it occurred to me that, though unrelated, they were products of traditionally all-black colleges in the south (Ron’s undergraduate degree was for North Carolina AT, Steve’s from Alcorn State), both were in their mid-30s when they met untimely ends, and that when I thought about either one of them, the first memory synapse to fire involved a Super Bowl.

In Steve McNair’s case that would have been Super Bowl XXXIV in Atlanta. Trailing by a touchdown with six seconds left, McNair completed a pass to Kevin Dyson, whose outstretched arm came down a yard shy of the line, preserving a 23-16 St Louis win over McNair’s Tennessee Titans.

Fourteen years earlier, in New Orleans, I’d been in a hotel lift adjacent to the Superdome the morning after Super Bowl XX when I learned that the space shuttle Challenger had blown up, killing Ron McNair and six other astronauts.

Although he was a scientist by trade, Ron McNair was also an accomplished athlete. He was a fifth-degree black belt as well as a recreational runner. He had also boxed and played football, in addition to being a jazz musician. His saxophone, in fact, was included on the Challenger’s manifest. The plan had been, once orbit had been achieved, that Ron was going to perform the first concert from space.

Steve was a four-sport star at his Mississippi high school, and was drafted by the Seattle Mariners – as a pitcher – even before he was drafted by the NFL. He was the first-round choice of the Houston Oilers in 1995.

In 2000, five years out of college, Steve performed his Super Bowl heroics. Five years after graduation, Ron McNair was awarded a PhD from MIT.

At 29, Dr McNair became a fully-qualified astronaut. Steve McNair was 30 when he was named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player.

Following the Challenger disaster, the US department of education established the Ronald E McNair scholarship programme, which funds post-graduate study for low-income, mostly minority students. My friend Dr Robert Rodriguez directs the program at the University of Kansas, and had given me the shirt that had worked its way to the top of the rotation Tuesday morning.

Steve McNair’s 13-year NFL career was punctuated by a series of injuries, many of them so severe they might have ended the careers of lesser men, and is as much a tribute to his toughness, the burden of leadership and resilience in the face of considerable pain as to his considerable gifts.

Steve’s off-field contributions were considerable. He had established a foundation for boys and girls clubs in Tennessee and Mississippi, and hosted off-season football camps for youngsters in both states. After Hurricane Katrina he not only donated funds to the relief effort but rolled up his sleeves and distributed food and clothing to refugees.

“This young man was special,” said Jeff Fisher, his head coach for the 11 seasons he spent with the Oilers/Titans. “And he was going to be special.”

Ron McNair’s legacy is already well-established. How Steve’s will be affected by the events of the last week remains to be seen.

Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning McNair was shot and killed in what appears to have been the front end of a murder-suicide. Although he was no more the instrument of his death than Ron McNair was of his, the circumstances once again have served to call into question the judgment of athletes with respect to a couple of issues – female companionship and guns – that crop up in these stories with astonishing regularity.

To the outside world Steve McNair was a happily married father of four. As it turns out, he led a double-life of sorts, maintaining a relationship with a woman named Sahel Kazemi, who, at 20, was three years older than Steve’s eldest son.

This hardly made him the first celebrity to be keeping a bit on the side, and he does not appear to have gone to great pains to conceal the relationship. Although he had rented the Nashville apartment that served as their love nest with the male friend who discovered the bodies, photos of a recent McNair-Kazemi vacation in some tropical paradise quickly surfaced online. It also came to light that when Kazemi was arrested and charged with driving under the influence a week ago, the papers for the Cadillac SUV she was driving listed her and McNair as joint owners.

Ms Kazemi had told friends that McNair planned to get a divorce and marry her. This came as a surprise to Mechelle McNair, the quarterback’s wife, and to other friends of the ex-player.

What we know is this: on the night of the arrest, Kazemi spent the night in the pokey, but was released the next morning when McNair posted bail. Within hours she had gone off on a shopping expedition. To buy a pistol.

In Tennessee, that’s as easy as running down to the corner store for a quart of milk.

At the apartment a night later she fired it four times at McNair. One shot hit him in the torso, two in the head. His body was still on the sofa where he died when police arrived Saturday afternoon. Kazemi was also dead, of a single gunshot wound to the head. Forensic evidence seems to have established that she pulled the trigger in each instance.

The Titans opened up their Nashville stadium yesterday and will again this morning for a public memorial. While it didn’t quite rival a similar affair held for Michael Jackson a day earlier at the Staples Center in LA, tens of thousands of fans filed into LP Field to sign the condolence book while a loop of McNair highlights played on the Jumbotron.

It all does kind of leave you wondering. When somebody spots a fellow passenger wearing a “McNair Scholarship” T-shirt on an elevator 20 years from now, are they going to ask “Steve?” or “Ron?”