Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
By GARY SHELTON
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 30, 2000
ATLANTA -- His arm. Thank goodness, we're talking about his arm.
Steve McNair can throw the ball 70 yards in the air, but he is in an offense where, sometimes, that is his total for a game. There are few places on a field he cannot reach, but many where his team will not let him try to throw it.
And so the discussion continues. Is McNair handicapped by the Titans offense, or is it the other way around? This is what people should be talking about when it comes to McNair, the Titans' unorthodox quarterback. For a man with a rifle, he is playing in an offense that stresses arms limitations. The loneliest job in football, it is said, is being a wide receiver for McNair, who makes his living chipping and dipping to tight ends and running backs.
His legs. Hallelujah, we're talking about his legs.
McNair can motor. Even McNair tells stories of how he will run through a linebacker, throwing a meat cleaver of a forearm, and twist free on his way to the end zone. "They tell me, "You aren't a quarterback. You're a running back,' " McNair says, and he laughs.
If you had to bet, the odds are that McNair's running totals in today's Super Bowl will be roughly the same as his passing totals. That's the way it has gone for the Titans most of the season. McNair's idea of a bomb is to roam around the pocket, look deep, then take off and run for 51 yards, the way he did last week to set up the clinching touchdown against Jacksonville.
His guts. Yes, we're talking about his guts.
His toe is jammed and aching from the bone spurs, and the Super Bowl is on natural turf, and when you ask him about it, he shrugs. For McNair, it is one more example of playinghurt. He came back this season five games after back surgery, then was booed for ineffective play. For goodness' sake, the fans were yelling for Neil O'Donnell. Neil O'Donnell.
Offensive coordinator Les Steckel, in fact, says McNair is "the toughest football player I've ever been around. He played last year with a bursa sac on his elbow, he had a hip pointer -- you'd rather have two broken legs than a hip pointer, you can't talk, laugh, cough -- he had a broken sternum and people were saying, "When's he going to take a day off?' The guy is unbelievable."
Pick a topic. Steve McNair is a fine collection of parts, and most should be open to debate. Can he run free through the Rams the way he has the rest of the league? Can he lead the Titans to yet another ugly victory? Can he pass enough to keep St. Louis honest?
Thankfully, very little of the talk is about McNair's skin, and the color it happens to be.
Oh, you cannot ignore that McNair is African-American. There is still too much historical significance, especially in the town of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Rocker. Only one other black quarterback has played in a Super Bowl, so it would be kind of shallow not to notice. Thankfully, however, Super Bowl week has not turned into the ordeal Washington's Doug Williams went through a dozen seasons ago. McNair's race is part of his story; it is not the only part.
"This isn't about black and white," McNair says. "This is about playing quarterback. Kurt Warner and I are two quarterbacks, and one of us is going to win the Super Bowl. You look at the background of this city, and it's significant. It's special as a black individual. But it's about playing the game."
Twelve years ago, Williams said much the same thing, and no one listened. Now, it is different. When Williams telephoned McNair last week, he talked about handling the game, not the hype.
"We just talked about what he has to do," said Williams, now the coach at Grambling. "I let him know I was pulling for him. I told him not to get caught up in passing yards, like everyone else. A lot of people who threw for a lot of yards aren't there."
The situations are different. With Williams, race seemed to be the only issue. With McNair, it hasn't been.
"I think he got three times the questions I've gotten," McNair said.
"Twelve years later, all those questions have been answered," Williams said. "I've always said the key isn't whether you can play in the league, the key is whether you get the opportunity."
For McNair, opportunity is what brought him from tiny Mount Olive, Miss. (where he lived with his mother and four siblings in a trailer) to tiny Alcorn State to start with. He could have played his college football anywhere, as long as he was willing to do it as a cornerback. McNair balked. He loved being a quarterback. So he went to Alcorn, where Air McNair was born. He threw the ball all day long, for ridiculous amounts of yardage.
"If I would have been at Grambling then, we'd have had him," Williams said. "I saw his first game, and he was the same then as now. He came off the bench and won the game by making plays. That's who he is. Some quarterbacks need playmakers, Steve is a playmaker."
The truth is, McNair and Williams really don't have that much in common as far as the way they quarterbacked. Williams was a drop-back quarterback. McNair is all free form, and his style is much more like, say, Doug Flutie.
"If you know football, you know playing quarterback is not just about passing the ball," McNair said. "It's about doing the little things to win a game. My mentality is that I'll do anything I can to get this offense going, to put this team in position to win the game. Whether it's running or whether it's passing. People get caught up in so many numbers, and it doesn't make any sense. As long as a quarterback is doing what he has to do to win, that's all that should matter."
Still, it is hard not to look at Warner's staggering passing yardage, and McNair's paltry total, and not be swayed. One writer last week called McNair the worst quarterback in a Super Bowl since David Woodley (although it's hard to reason why O'Donnell got a pass).
"He's a football player," Titans coach Jeff Fisher said. "If he needs to throw for 350 or 400 yards, he can do it. He finds ways to win."
It is true the Titans haven't exactly allowed McNair to throw the ball 82 times in a game, as he once did in college. Tennessee plays offense cautiously, dinking and dunking and hoping that Eddie George or McNair will break a long run.
McNair, however, says the Titans can throw deep if they have to.
"We've done it," he said. "We haven't done it a lot, but we've done it. I think we have the ability to make plays in a game."
For the Titans, that's the important thing, for McNair to put enough stress on the Rams with his arms, his legs, to enable them to win. That's the time McNair wants to be compared with Williams.
"He won the Super Bowl, and he was MVP," McNair says. "I'd like to do the same things he did."
And if he does?
His heart. If there is any perspective remaining, we will be talking about his heart.