I didn’t comment on Michael Jackson’s passing, mostly because I’m but 28 years old and his life didn’t really affect me all that much. (Ditto for Farrah Fawcett, and certainly not Billy Mays.) Former Titans QB Steve McNair, however, is a different story.

Growing up, my dad never watched football. Ours was a college basketball house; I got a kick out of rooting for Louisville while Pop cheered for Kentucky. I played a couple years of varsity soccer in high school — starting often, in fact, thanks to the unfortunate fact that our team wasn’t very good — and liked to watch the diving competitions in the Olympics… other than that, I was really never into sports.

That changed once I got to college, and only because I was an hour away from Nashville and my aunt had season tickets to Tennessee Titans games. I went to a game and started to figure out the rules; that led to my watching Titans games on TV while doing my laundry and otherwise procrastinating from coursework. In 2000, the Titans made it through the playoffs and into the Super Bowl — called by many the greatest Super Bowl ever, in which the Titans came up just one yard short of tying the game in the last seconds and forcing overtime.

Steve McNair was the quarterback, then, that cemented my love of football. He didn’t just pass, but could take off running in a split second. And unline most quarterbacks, he didn’t just slide safely to the ground seconds before being tackled; no, he was a massive man and would give defenders as hard a time as any running back.

So I’m sad to hear of his death, and even sadder about the strange circumstances… though the news is still developing, it seems he’d been having an affair with a woman 16 years his junior, telling her he was planning to divorce his wife. Just a reminder that fame and wealth come with a price — and that “immortality,” whether through sports achievements or whatever else, is quite the false hope.