Maryland coach Mike Locksley finds bond with father of Jordan McNair over death of sons
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – A day after Jordan McNair’s death last summer, Mike Locksley picked up the phone. His message to Marty McNair, one father to another, was simple:
“Hey, there’s not many people that can tell you, ‘I know how you feel,’” Locksley recalls saying. “‘A lot of people don’t. They can have sympathy for you’ – but I knew how he felt.”
Locksley knew because his son Meiko had been shot to death less than a year earlier. He was 25. Jordan McNair, a redshirt freshman offensive lineman at Maryland, died in June 2018 from complications from heatstroke after an offseason workout. He was 19.
“The circle of life isn’t built for parents to bury their children,” says Locksley, who was Alabama’s offensive coordinator at the time. “It’s usually the other way around, and it disrupts how things naturally work. When I heard about Jordan’s passing, the first thing that came to mind was my own pain and just remembering how I felt when I first even had to absorb the words, ‘Meiko is dead.’”
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The relationship between Locksley and Marty McNair had begun years earlier when Locksley was a Maryland assistant recruiting Jordan. His daughter Kory went to the same high school near Baltimore.
“All those things were just unique that were already built in,” Locksley says, “so for me when I heard about it, I immediately went, ‘Man, I need to call Marty and touch base with him.’”
The bond deepened during more phone conversations after Jordan’s death. As one example, here was Locksley’s insight offered to McNair the night before Jordan’s funeral:
“It’s not gonna hit you,” he says he told McNair, “because you’re gonna be the rock and stand tall for your family and honor him with the people that come. But there’s gonna come a time when you go home and lay your head down and it will happen.”
When Locksley was named Maryland’s head coach last December, the fathers’ relationship only grew. McNair attended the introductory news conference. They’ve shared meals and smoked cigars and just hung out together. For Locksley, it has nothing to do with Maryland football. It’s an unfortunately “organic connection,” a shared experience they wish they didn’t share.
“For me, it’s because of my tragedy,” Locksley says. “… When I hear of kids dying, whether it’s that my son was murdered or Jordan died from medical complications, it’s the pain, and inner pain when you see a parent has lost a child. … I felt that pain, and that’s why I reached out to Marty.”