Nine high school students got a sweet surprise Monday night when Tennessee Titans linebacker Keith Bulluck presented them with $1,000 scholarships in the name of the late teammate Steve McNairBulluck presented the scholarships at the 44th annual National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame award dinner. Bulluck chose to award nine students as a symbolic representation of McNair’s jersey number – nine. The winners were chosen from among the 54 recipients of a scholar-athlete award for Middle Tennessee high schoolers. The $1,000 will be awarded on top of the original scholarship. Scholarship winner Juwan Turner told the Tennessean that, “this was a nice surprise because I don’t think any of us knew about it. [Bulluck] is a role model.”
Bulluck took the process of selecting his winners seriously, according to the Tennessean. ”They all filled out applications and it really was a lot of work picking nine,” Bulluck said. “I read through all of them, looked at their GPA’s, look at their extracurricular activities, looked at their coaches’ comments, saw how much they were involved in things and how many years they lettered on teams.”
Bulluck’s sweet gesture is a particularly upstanding move given that he’s now an unrestricted free agent coming off an ACL injury and insiders say that Tennessee is likely to part ways with the ten year veteran.
Steve McNair was shot dead on July 4th, 2009 by his distraught mistress Sahel Kazemi, a 20 year old waitress who had recently come to suspect that McNair had a second mistress and was not likely to divorce his wife, as she had thought he would. The former quarterback and his wife, Michelle, had four sons. He is beloved in Tennessee for leading the Titans to their only Super Bowl.
