‘The Murder of Air McNair’: True crime meets NFL retrospective

By Jay Busbee, Senior Writer

Most NFL players pass through the consciousness of sports fans for only a few short years. The transition from week-in, week-out star to afterthought is startlingly quick. One minute they’re a key member of your fantasy team, the next, they’re “remember this guy?” nostalgia.

Only a few players from any era transcend their playing days, some because of stardom, others because of tragedy. Steve McNair played 13 years in the NFL, some of them very good, one of them magnificent. But he’s remembered now mostly for the final moments of his life, a tragic ending that threw a shadow over his entire career.

McNair is the subject of a new entry in Netflix’s “Untold” series of sports documentaries, entitled “The Murder of Air McNair.” Directed by Rodney Lucas and Taylor Alexander Ward, it’s a comprehensive look at the life of one of the NFL’s early 2000s stars … starting, and ending, with his shocking death. Pitched somewhere between a true-crime narrative and an NFL retrospective, it’s a clear-eyed look at a life that ended far too soon.

The documentary opens with audio from a 911 call on July 4, 2009, where one of McNair’s close friends discovered the bodies of a man and a woman, dead of gunshot wounds in a Nashville condo. There was initial confusion in the wake of the call — Who are these people? How did they die? Why are there so many high-level law enforcement officials arriving at the crime scene? — but the tragic truth quickly became clear.

McNair and his girlfriend, Jenni Kazemi, died of gunshot wounds — McNair of four to the body and head, Kazemi of one, self-inflicted, to the temple. It’s a sadly straightforward story — a love affair gone sour, a gun bought on the street, a violent ending — and so the documentary must fill out its allotted run time with stories that range far from McNair himself.

“Air McNair” is as much a story of the turn-of-the-millennium Titans as it is of Air McNair. Those Titans are worthy of a documentary of their own, from their final days in Texas as the Oilers, to their brief stopover in Memphis, to their attempt to make the state of Tennessee fall in love with them.

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