I hate Jason Whitlock’s writing, and I generally try to avoid it, which isn’t too hard.  The beauty of this here internet thing is that I can simply avoid anything from Fox Sports that doesn’t contain the words “Jay Glazer reports that…” and I’m not subjected to Whitlock’s self righteous, race card playing, enormous ass.  No harm, no foul.

But yesterday, Whitlock took some time off from the 2009 Jeff George is Available Tour to write a column on the recently deceased Steve McNair that is, simply put, inappropriate and wrong.  I’m a McNair fan, so it may seem like simply a knee jerk reaction for me to stick up for him, but please believe me when I say I wouldn’t want this type of column written about my least favorite player, especially so soon after his passing.

So, with a gigantic tip of the cap to Fire Joe Morgan and Big Daddy Drew, I’m going to take you through some of the finer points of Whitlock’s character assassination of Steve McNair.  It’s a little longer that what you’re used to here at BWB, but I hope you’ll take the time to read the whole thing.  The italics are Whitlock’s article, the normal font is my commentary.

We can quit calling Steve McNair a great leader now. Leadership starts at home.

Oh, is that so?  We’re not allowed to refer to any athlete as a great leader unless they have a pristine home life?  Tom Brady?  Son out of wedlock.  Not a great leader.  Brett Favre?  Previous addiction to painkillers.  Not a great leader.  Kobe Bryant?  Cheated.  Not a great leader.  Dwyane Wade?  Allegedly doesn’t see his children.  Not a great leader.

I guess it’s irrelevant that all of those guys have, you know, LED their team to championships.  You see, Mr. Whitlock, when we, as sports fans, refer to an athlete as a great leader, we mean they are a great leader of a team in the world of sports.  We don’t all have greater society in mind every time we make a statement.  Sports are simply sports.  They are a game, not some bizarre representation of life in general.  So, if a player shows great leadership capabilities on the field, and leads his team to great heights, that player is considered to be a great leader in the world of sports.

One negative personal issue does not disqualify a man from the discussion of great leaders when it is measured up against a lifetime of positive public contributions on and off the field.

And I’m no longer all that interested in hearing about the community service work McNair did in Tennessee and Mississippi. Service to community begins at home, too.

No, it doesn’t.  Community service, as one might deduce from the name given to such service, begins in the community.  You see, by doing my expected duties at home, I am not servicing the community, because the community does not live in my home.  In order to serve the community, I have to go beyond my own home, and out into the community.  That’s why when someone has to complete community service hours for school/court/personal reasons, they do not include “cleaned room” or “did not cheat on wife”, or “raised kids”  If those things were considered services to the community, the whole notion of community service as we know it now would be quite ridiculous, wouldn’t it?  Your home is part of the community, but not a large enough part that actions benefitting only your home can be considered community service.

We’re two lines in and I hate you already, sir.

If you read this column regularly, you know I’m not the morality police, you know I’m far from bothered by McNair’s May-December romance and you probably should’ve surmised I get my “Becky on” from time to time.

Not the morality police, not bothered by McNair’s romance, got it.  So, you won’t be making moral judgments, and you won’t be criticizing McNair for his relationship?  Then what the hell were those first two lines all about if they had no moral implication?  McNair’s ability to lead home improvement projects at his house?

I’ll leave the “getting my Becky on” line alone.

Stop reading now if your preference is sugar-coated, politically-correct, phony-ass pontificating.

Remove the words “sugar-coated”, “politically”, and “phony ass”, and you would have yourself the only useful sentence in this entire piece.  In fact, that sentence should be the opening line to every Whitlock column.  Just to let the readers know what they’re getting into, you know?

But regardless, Whitlock’s point here is that this is about to be some real serious shit.  He used the word “ass” in a mainstream media piece, so you know he’s not playing around!  In reality though, these types of disclaimers generally mean “I’m about to write something entirely for shock value.  Please read on.”

Until the police wrap up their investigation, I’m only willing to acknowledge four victims — McNair’s four sons.

Uh…well, that’s stupid.  Although the entire investigation hasn’t been wrapped up yet, McNair being a victim was fairly obvious from day one.  Something about being dead, and having taken four bullets, I believe.

Only an idiot wouldn’t know to classify McNair, and his wife for that matter, as a victim.

I don’t know how to classify the adults in this saga — McNair, his wife Mechelle or his 20-year-old girlfriend, Sahel “Jenny” Kazemi.

Ah, so I see.

Let me help you out here.  McNair – victim (shot four times, dead)  Mechelle McNair – victim (cheated on, husband shot and killed)  Those two are open and shut cases.  Sahel “Jenny” Kazemi is up in the air, I suppose.  You could speculate on her not being a victim for a number of reasons, but I can understand an unwillingness to deal with speculation.

The kids, they’re victims of two horrific crimes: 1. the murder of their father; 2. their father’s apparent abandonment so that he had time to wine, dine, vacation and shack up with his jump-off.

We’re lumping these together, are we?  They both fall under the realm of “horrific”?  No qualifier there to suggest that perhaps the murder is more horrific than the “abandonment”?

And classifying McNair’s relationship with his children as “abandonment” strikes me as a little over the top.  Was his handling of his family situation a classy move?  Of course not.  But has there been any indication that he actually abandoned them?  Not to my knowledge.  But hey, “abandonment” sounds more “horrific” than “cheated on their mother”, so let’s go with that!

Let me repeat, I’m not some sanctimonious moralizer.

Personally, I prefer June-December romances, but a blossoming May flower certainly could be fertilized into a special, 28-year-old bouquet by a patient and attentive gardener.

Uh…what?

As for the life-experience, station-in-life disparity between a retired millionaire quarterback and a Dave & Buster’s waitress, well, let he who has never Captained cast the first hoe.

Every man I know has a little Captain in him. We see a pretty young thang working her way through nursing or cosmetology school and it’s just in our nature to pay a cellphone bill, a car note or get her nails done.

It’s what we do. And if you’ve earned a chunk of change in professional sports or in corporate America, you might buy a big black Escalade in her name, fly her to Vegas or go parasailing over the ocean.

It’s not a black or white thing. It’s not an athlete thing. It’s a man thing we haven’t been able to shake since Eve gave us an apple.

The look of pure, unadulterated joy on McNair’s face captured as he and Jenny parasailed is one every real man recognizes as the uncontrollable feeling of elation that gushes through the male, middle-aged body when he finds the Tenderoni Bobby Brown sang about.

Why, this reads almost as though you’re condoning McNair’s extramarital affair!

Do not read this as me condoning McNair’s extramarital affair. I’m not.

Oh, my apologies then.

But we don’t know the nature of Steve and Mechelle McNair’s relationship. We don’t know what made them happy, what agreement they reached or what was transpiring in their marriage.

So, Whitlock doesn’t know the nature of the McNair’s relationship, but that doesn’t stop him from saying that McNair “abandoned” his children?  He admits to not knowing anything about the McNair’s home life, yet he’s comfortable dismissing McNair’s leadership abilities and community work due to that same home life?  Interesting logic.

What we do know is that McNair had four sons. And based on the observations and comments of Kazemi’s neighbors and neighbors at the condominium McNair rented, McNair spent so much time with Kazemi over the past few months that people assumed they lived together.

There’s the money paragraph.  Apparently, Whitlock’s claims of “abandonment” center on the comments made by Kazemi’s neighbors.  There are a few things fundamentally wrong with this. 

First, no one knows who these neighbors are or how seriously their claims should be taken.  So, remember earlier when I mentioned respecting the fact that Whitlock doesn’t indulge in speculation?  Yeah, forget about that.  He’s centered a story on the claims of completely anonymous individuals.  That’s speculation at its finest.

Second, and more importantly, how often do you actually see your neighbors?  You see them whenever you and them are leaving or arriving at the house/apartment at the same time.  Given that McNair was a retired NFL player and his girlfriend was a Dave & Busters waitress (ie worked shifts), we can assume that they wouldn’t typically be coming and going at the same time every day.  This means that the most logical explanation for neighbors seeing each other daily, which would be going to/coming from work at the same time, is out of the question in this case.  So, we’re talking about neighbors that saw the couple only on the random occasions that they were both coming/going at the same time.  How often is that?  Weekly, maybe?  Probably not even.  So Whitlock is basing his statement that McNair abandoned his sons on the fact that Kazemi’s neighbors claim to have believed the two were living together, even though there is no indication as to how many times any of those neighbors actually saw the two together at the apartment.  Not exactly rock solid.

You see, this is my problem with McNair, with American men as a whole.

Ah, here we go.  For a Whitlock column, this has gone on a little long without pointing out how this represents society’s ills.  For, you see, Jason Whitlock is so brilliant that he feels comfortable telling society that it’s simply not getting the job done.  Society, you continue to disappoint Jason Whitlock, and that disappointment continues to manifest itself in the actions of professional athletes.  This is why Whitlock passes himself off as a sports columnist; so he can appear brilliant by drawing tenuous connections between major sports stories and the greater issues that they “represent”.  That, and the fact that Fox wouldn’t give him the title of “Supreme Societal Advisor” at the top of his columns.

At this point, I’m leaving out a few paragraphs where Whitlock talks about McNair and the rest of America being shitty fathers.  He’s probably right, but I’ll address that later.

Many have tried, but you can’t maintain two homes, two families. If HBO has shown us anything, it’s that kids are the losers when it comes to Big Love.

That is, except for those people who do, in fact, maintain two families.  Like, you know how if you get divorced and then you get remarried, you are still the father to your kids from a previous marriage, but you also have a new wife and potentially new step kids?  Well, in that case, your biological kids would be family #1, and the new wife and step kids would be family #2.  They would likely be living in separate homes, (unless your life is a bad sitcom) meaning that you would be maintaining two families and two homes.

And if HBO has shown us anything, it’s tits.  Plenty of tits.  I don’t look for life lessons sandwiched between those tits.  I get my life lessons from NBC.

You can’t live with a waitress in a condo/apartment, take her parasailing, clubbing, to Vegas and raise a brood of boys living in a home on the other side of town.

Right.  Between sleeping, two vacations, occasional trips to the club, and the time it takes to drive across town, there’s barely a spare minute left in the year!

Kids are game-changers. Kids require sacrifice. Kids are a daily and sometimes hourly responsibility. You don’t properly raise them in your spare time with money, fame, gifts and glowing newspaper and magazine stories about your courage to play on Sundays despite injury and pain.

Yes, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that McNair was under the impression that all he needed to do was give his kids a scrapbook of articles about himself and they’d be good to go.

As for being a daily and sometimes hourly responsibility, what is Whitlock suggesting here?  That athletes not have kids?  Because there is no way in hell any athlete can cater to his kids on a daily basis, let alone an hourly one.

Steve McNair sounds like a warrior who fought the wrong war. He won a public-relations battle.

Oh, so he’s a warrior now is he?  You’re sending mixed signals here Whitlock!

And which war should he have fought?  The War at Home?  Both Emilio Estevez and Michael Rapaport will have you know that that war is damn near impossible to win.

He was so popular in Nashville that when his under-drinking-age “Becky” got popped driving her mistress ransom while drunk and/or high the police called a cab to give McNair, the Escalade passenger, a ride home.

He was so popular that when he didn’t really break any laws, the police didn’t arrest him!  Can you believe that?  It’s as though you’re just allowed to ride shotgun these days!  Unbelievable!

This is the privilege of fame and inclusion in the boys club. We’re so mentally diseased that we instinctively feel empathy and envy when we see a married father of four liquored up with his near-teenage girlfriend.

It’s interesting that he would mention that she was near-teenaged, when a few paragraphs earlier he claimed to “pass no judgment on McNair kicking it with a woman 16 years his junior.”

Furthermore, we don’t feel empathy and envy.  We feel that you’re allowed to be liquored up, and you’re allowed to have a near-teenage girlfriend, so whether we agree with it or not, we don’t paint men that do it as villains.  Or, at least, most of us don’t.

You know what the cop was thinking:

But for the grace of God, two-tenths of a second on my 40 time and the high school coach who made me play tight end rather than receiver, there go I.

Or he could be thinking “I’m going to arrest the drunk driver and let the person who isn’t really doing anything wrong go.”  Sorry I didn’t word it as elegantly, but for some reason most cops don’t strike me as “But for the grace of God…there go I” type of speakers.

Steve McNair was flawed in the same way as most American men.

Too many men think financial success is their primary and most important contribution to a relationship with their kids, wives and/or girlfriends. A grown woman has the right to settle for that. Children shouldn’t have to settle for anything less than their father’s very best effort.

That’s the end of the column, and now I’ll quickly get into the point of it, which is that American men are bad fathers.

It’s true, but it’s hardly groundbreaking work by Whitlock.  Some parents are bad parents, and it sucks for the kids.  Ed O.G. was rapping about it in ’91, and it’s still a problem to this day.  I agree with him on that.  Shit, I think everyone would agree that your family should be the most important thing in your life.

Now, I don’t know if Jason Whitlock has kids.  If he does, then he’s free to say whatever he wants about parenting, provided he practices what he preaches.  If he doesn’t, (and, after a very quick googling, I’ve found no indication that he has kids) then is he really the one than should be telling American fathers to smarten up?  Is someone who has never experienced the difficulties of balancing work life, social life, and family life qualified to tell someone else how to do so?  I would think not.  The expression “easier said than done” comes to mind.

Furthermore, is a “sports” column that uses a well liked, recently deceased individual as its center point really the place to make this argument?  And is now really the time?  Are you really using this tragic event as an excuse to get up on your moral high horse and damn society for a problem that has existed for years and will continue to exist for many, many more?  You don’t consider that disrespectful at all?

Did any entertainment writers use Michael Jackson’s death as a platform to speak out against child abuse?  No, because it’s a fucking obvious problem, everyone is aware of it, and nobody needs to see a recently deceased individual’s legacy dragged through the mud in order to understand that point.  This is no different.

But Whitlock, as he tends to do, saw a way that he could inject a bunch of shock value into a piece (being the only one openly critical of McNair since he died) and still try to pass it off as some sort of effort for the greater good (addressing America’s parenting problem.)  The whole idea is bullshit, and the ridiculous reasoning and arguments that I’ve criticized above only further my distaste for the column as a whole.  

There are plenty of living athletes who are well known bad fathers, Mr. Whitlock (how can you write a sports column about bad parenting and not mention Travis Henry or Shawn Kemp?), and the issue you attempted to address has been around for years and years.  Even if you do feel strongly about bad parenting, why wait until now to address it, and why feel the need to ruin the name of a well-liked public figure who just got murdered?

As Whitlock said, “Steve McNair was flawed in the same way as most American men.”  My question to you, Mr. Whitlock, is why couldn’t you afford him the same courtesy you afford most American men, and not tarnish his legacy and his good name within days of him dying?

Steve McNair may have cheated on his wife, but for his whole career he was far too classy to rip somebody in the media, or to to publicly attempt to humiliate somebebody, living or dead.  That was part of the reason so many people respected him.  I suppose you, Mr. Whitlock, would rather have people talk about you than respect you.

That’s one of many things that sets you apart from Steve McNair, regardless of how strong your family values may be.