‘The story just had to be told’
Widow of murdered Capital Gazette journalist finds a respite from grief in finishing his book
“It takes more courage and strength to be kind and gentle than it does to appear courageous and strong. He was willing to give the shirt off his back for anybody. He put himself out there.” Andrea Chamblee
John McNamara was the second of seven children, reared in chaos and thus craving just a slice of solitude in adulthood. So, when he and wife Andrea Chamblee were settling into their Maryland home, the sportswriter had just one request.
The den, McNamara decided, would be his sanctum.
Chamblee understood and honored his request, and when McNamara launched his passion project – the definitive book about basketball in our nation’s capital – the den became a de facto library, filled with copies of microfiche and carefully indexed interviews. Chamblee knocked on the door merely to deliver his dinner – “Like a 1950s housewife,” she notes – and would return half an hour later to retrieve the empty plate.
This routine played out for the better part of 11 years until an afternoon in June 2018 when a man armed with a shotgun stepped into the Annapolis, Maryland, newsroom of the Capital Gazette and began shooting. Five Gazette employees, including McNamara, were murdered and two wounded, sending ripples of grief that accompany every mass shooting in a country where they happen with greatest frequency.
Chamblee calls the aftermath of a shooting “a huge circle of hurt and stress and trauma.”
She says the weight felt heaviest as she approached the den’s door.
For several weeks, she shuddered as she walked by and learned to keep a box of tissues outside it.
Only when she clutched her husband’s urn and determined it belonged there did she summon the will to enter. Once she did, Chamblee found the strength to finish McNamara’s life work – and find a path toward her own.
As Chamblee inhabited her husband’s workspace, she found copiously detailed chapter outlines. A list of sources expecting return phone calls. And reams of paper with passages carefully noted in McNamara’s preferred orange highlighter.
All provided a road map for Chamblee to finish what McNamara started, as emotionally wrenching as it was. She made the phone calls and filled in the blanks, all the while learning even more about her life partner than she could have imagined.
And now, a little more than a year later, she has a tangible product of their shared work. “The Capital of Basketball: A History of D.C Area High School Hoops” is a 250-page repository of knowledge on a place that, at its core, is a basketball town.
“I’m holding it in my hand and part of me wants to just keep it,” she says. “The other part of me wants everybody to know about it. Because he worked so hard on this book.
“The stories are so good and the people are so remarkable. The story just had to be told.”
An assist from Gary Williams
The book hits all the bold-faced names that define hoops in Washington, D.C., at every level – from Red Auerbach to Dave Bing, Elgin Baylor to Len Bias, John Thompson to Morgan Wootten to Kevin Durant – but its passion is reserved for the hidden figures. The world beyond the District may not know that circus impresario Maurice Joyce persuaded James Naismith to cut the
The Baltimore Orioles created a memorial for John McNamara at a seat in the press box at Camden Yards. players on each side from nine to five in 1892, the better to provide a conditioning challenge for physical education. Or how basketball played a crucial role integrating D.C. thanks to E.B. Henderson, a trailblazing player and coach who wasn’t allowed to coach white students at the turn of the century, yet whose activism ultimately proved instrumental in the founding of the NAACP.
While McNamara was knowledgeable about other sports, the book distills the passion of a true hoops head, a man who would stalk his area drugstore for days at a time every October until the Street & Smith’s college basketball annual dropped. McNamara could turn a simple trip to his hair salon into a night of basketball, once telling Chamblee they were bound for Northwest High that evening because the stylist wanted him to see her son play.
McNamara’s intellectual curiosity for hoops and his even-handed coverage earned him the trust of coaches from the game’s grassroots to its area royalty. On an off day during the 2010 NCAA tournament, McNamara and Maryland coach Gary Williams’ paths intersected on a morning walk.
So for two hours, they talked hoops but not shop, a rare window into the irascible coach who was equally pleased to clear his mind without expectations. Nearly a decade later, Williams would write the foreword for “The Capital of Basketball.”
In talking with Williams and Wootten and McNamara’s former colleagues, Chamblee realized what her husband meant to his profession.
It has been heartening, she says, but also “kind of bittersweet.” McNamara’s final days with the Capital Gazette were spent not as a hoops scribe but a jack of all trades; a staff downsizing forced him to work news, sports and even page layout, since, at 56, he possessed all the requisite skills.
“All these people tell me how much they liked his writing, how personable he was, and how he could make them see things in the sport – not just basketball – that they couldn’t see,” Chamblee says. “So I was like, why didn’t you tell your bosses at The Washington Post?
“He would have liked to have some outside recognition. And now he’s getting it. People are showing up to say how much he helped them get a leg up.”
The duty to protect people
The news media had been under siege from economic and political factors largely in a figurative sense until June 28, 2018, when Jarrod Ramos blasted through the doors of the Capital Gazette with a shotgun.
“People ask me if I’m mad at the shooter,” Chamblee says. “From time to time I am, but the people I’m really mad at are the people who ask for the job to protect us – the politicians who say they want the job to make the laws that will keep society civil and protected.
“And they turn away for a pittance of money. The amount of money it took for my husband’s memorial service – one guy, you can buy their soul for that amount of money. They can change it. They can make these preventable killings stop.”
Chamblee, herself a former sportswriter and now an adjunct professor at George Washington’s School of Medicine and Public Health, says finishing the book has provided distraction, but she expects “I’ll find myself unmoored again” once it begins gathering dust.
She has learned that grief can envelop her anywhere. Once, she was waiting out a delayed connecting flight in Chicago when a phone conversation next to her was too loud to ignore. A man was cavalierly discussing the demise of his third marriage but expressed hope the fourth time around would be the charm.
Chamblee burst into tears. “Here’s this guy going through wives like one a decade,” she recalls, “and he asked me why I was crying. And I said, ‘Because my husband just died in a mass shooting, and I don’t know when I’m going to get used to it.’
“And he said, ‘You’ll have to get used to never getting used to it.’ ”
The man was a Vietnam veteran who lost several friends in the conflict.
“And I thought, ‘That’s a war zone, though,’ ” she says. “But so is this. It’s a war zone.”
Mass shootings – loosely defined as the murder of at least four people – occur with enough rapidity that one tends to erase the next. The elementary school, the newsroom, the church, the country music festival – all are subject to the vagaries of the news cycle and the public’s ease in looking away.
Yet the shootings’ totality creates a community of survivors who don’t have that privilege.
“I’ve learned there’s this huge, unspoken river of people who this happened to, and I’ve been pulled into the tide with them, and we’re all trying to keep our own heads above water,” Chamblee says. “And there’s hundreds and hundreds of us.”
Living life as he did
So Chamblee expects to put herself out there even more, wherever she feels inspired to fight on her husband’s behalf. She politely accepts kind words that frame her as courageous but stresses that she and other survivors are merely reacting.
Living as her husband did – that’s the more noble endeavor.
“It takes more courage and strength to be kind and gentle than it does to appear courageous and strong,” she says. “He was willing to give the shirt off his back for anybody. He put himself out there. He was just kind all the time.
“Whenever I can’t find something, John would be the observant sportswriter and tell me where it was. And now, every time I can’t find something, I get so upset because he’s not there to say something nice and make me feel less scatterbrained.
“And that’s when I really miss him.”