Steve McNair Is Dead: Lower Your Voice an Octave

We all know the routine by now: Prominent athlete dies, ESPN anchors must lower voices, somber music plays with a photo of now deceased athlete with birth and death year dates.

TV Anchors speak in hushed tones, pretend to be grieving, and then trot out all the "he said, she saids" as reported by some other "news" source and, therefore, we can quote it legally as long as we mention it was FIRST brought up by that media, NOT, in any way, shape or form, by us.

"Us" are too way too cool for that: we just reach for our "someone got killed today so we have to use our "hush" voices and find some somber music and his stats."

Until, of course, 12 or 18 hours pass, we get the salacious and exceedingly juicy details from local newspapers or national celebrity gossip sites, and then we can get on with our gleeful reporting of all the crap. Except, we will certainly lower our voices an octave and speak in soft voices as we go to the photo and, once again, birth and death dates of the beloved athlete right before the commercial break.

Print journalists are about the same. Mike Lupica, New York Daily News reporter, uses McNair's death as some manifesto against gun violence.

And yet Lupica admits when he tried, in January 2000, when McNair made it to the Super bowl, to find out where McNair came from. Lupica called the town hall of Mount Olive, Miss.

Mount Olive was McNair's hometown. Lupica obviously thought calling up the Mount Olive town hall would give substantial insight to McNair's youth.

"When I called the town hall that year, I asked the woman who answered the phone how long downtown was in Mount Olive," Lupica wrote.

"Eight blocks," she said. "Ten if you stretch it."

This somehow constitutes understanding where an athlete grew up, according to many sports journalists. You don't actually have to visit the town. Just call up the town hall and get an opinion from someone who answers the phone.

There are places in the U.S. where, if you own a tiny dog like Paris Hilton does, and it takes a very tiny crap in a very tiny yard you don't own, you could be facing a beating or worse.

Journalists love Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan because, so far. Knock on wood and be hushed, and could you get it to that low of an octave would your voice have to be—Woods and Jordan haven't gotten into a major scrape.

Journalists love the stories about the homeless kid or the gang kid turned great athlete. Then, when guns or drugs or domestic violence enter the story, the journalists are surprised or pretend to be surprised, or use the opportunity to practice low-octave voices or protest against gun/domestic/drug violence.

Stop the phony TV and newspaper stuff.

When an athlete gives the old "One day at a time" or "I gave 110 percent", sports journalists get all upset because they heard it all before. But, given a popular athlete's death, it's the same old, same old at the networks and newspapers: "Oh, how did this young athlete die?!!!" "Oh, how could someone who seemingly had everything to look forward to do this?"

The real reason most sports journalists don't ask the hard questions is because the extraordinarily wealthy owners of most sports franchises won't countenance those questions.

The owners want fans to buy into the continued concept that sports are just games. And they are: The reason people love sports is because, in the end, the score of any sporting event is meaningless. You can love sports, and sports scores, and sports events because, in the end—all such things basically have no real impact on the world.

Except, of course, if you are a sports franchise owner, then you get cities and states to enact taxes, build infrastructures, and do favors for you.

For his next hundred columns, Lupica could be exploring and explaining the financing of the new Yankees stadium instead of calling some town hall to, wink, wink, illustrate what a podunk town some athlete came from.

Easy to say an athlete's death is due to a gun culture. Harder to explore the culture of rich men building stadiums on the backs of working people.

It's time for sports journalists to explore the rarefied air rather than concentrate on the mean streets. In the end, only men can stop other men from being enslaved.