Sportsfrog.com

It seems clear from the news dripping out of Nashville and being broken on tmz.com (the new starndard for hard news, apparently) that Steve McNair and Sahel Kazemi were in some sort of relationship. Given that Kahel was 20 and McNair married, that was a rather troublesome detail. The NY Daily News fills in another piece of the puzzle this morning, reporting that friends close to Mechelle McNair – Steve McNair’s wife – say that she had no idea about the affair and the first she found out was in the hours following the news that her husband was dead.

So, that’s awful.

The easy guess, of course, is that McNair was trying to break it off with Kazemi and it went awry. The Nashville Police will have the final say on that, but the word locally (I am still in Nashville this morning) is that their investigation is centered on piecing together as many details as is possible about the relationship between McNair and Kazemi. That simply fuels the assumptions. We all should know shortly.

Sad. And puzzled.

The 4th weekend’s travels have taken me up to Cincinnati for a few Reds games and now down to Nashville to the in-laws for a few days. And it was on the drive down to Nashville that the news of Steve McNair’s death broke. Obviously shocking. But you surely don’t need me for that observation.

What I can tell you is that this news has hit Nashville like a ton of bricks. I lived here before law school when the Titans were moving to the city and in the intervening 13 years, Nashville has gone from a college town to a pro town. The Titans matter here, a lot. And McNair was the face of the team as they became beloved. So, yeah. This one hurts.

The details are not good. It appears to be a murder/suicide, with the woman being the trigger-person. Not usual. And nothing certain as of yet. The Tennessean is reporting the deceased women, Sahel Kazemi, as having dated McNair for several months. Which is odd, given that he is married. The apartment where the bodies were found is on 2nd Street in Nashville, a touristy street in downtown within view of where McNair played for the Titans for a decade. It is not a bad part of town. At all. But it was also an apartment leased in McNair’s name where Kazemi was apparently living, and just two days ago, she was arrested for DUI with McNair in the car as a passenger in a Cadillac Escalade registered in the names of McNair and Kazemi at the address of his restaurant. Weird details. Even weirder? The arresting officer two days ago was the same one who arrested McNair on DUI back in 2003. I guess he never got a promotion.

None of it really matters in the end, of course. It’s a tragedy, it is beyond indescribably awful for McNair’s family, and all the rest. David Climer in the Tennessean puts some words to the loss from Nashville’s perspective.