Atlanta’s Kordell Stewart addresses ‘the rumor’ in doc about his NFL career

In November 1998, Kordell Stewart was having a rocky season as starting quarterback with the Pittsburgh Steelers when a rumor came out of nowhere.

A fabricated story spread that Stewart had been arrested in Schenley Park in Pittsburgh for lewd conduct with another man. The internet was nascent so the rumor spread via word-of-mouth.

No police record ever existed. After the rumor became rampant, Stewart told his teammates in the locker room that he wasn’t gay and that the incident never happened. But publicly, he chose to stay silent.

Nearly three decades later, Stewart collaborated with HBO Max and ESPN to create the 40-minute short film “Kordell Stewart/ Slash & Burn” about his football career and the impact the rumor had on his psyche and his career.

“It was cathartic in its own way to rehash all that stuff,” said Stewart, 54, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Stewart has lived in Atlanta since 2007. He was a sports talk host for 92.9/The Game for a couple of years and appeared for two seasons on Bravo’s popular reality show “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” as the then-husband of cast member Porsha Williams.

Even on that show, Stewart was dogged by rumors about his sexuality, though Williams said their subsequent divorce was unrelated. In 2015, a man claimed to have had a gay relationship with Stewart, then retracted the statement. Stewart sued and won a defamation suit against the man.

LZ Granderson, an openly gay Black journalist who previously worked at the AJC, is an expert voice in the documentary. He provided context on the unfriendly climate in the 1990s for gay men and women, noting anti-gay legislation that passed in state legislatures at the time and fearmongering related to the AIDS epidemic.

“If you want to hurt a man,” Granderson said, “the first thing you do is call them gay.”

And in an NFL locker room, he noted, those dynamics were even more fragile. “It’s not ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” he said. “It’s just don’t.”

Stewart agreed. Sexuality was “never talked about” in that context, he said.

After the rumor circulated, he suffered quietly and grappled with teammates who looked at him with suspicion. He admitted in the doc that the fallout impacted his play for a time.

“I had to endure and had to go through a lot to prove my worth as a player,” he said.

Stewart, a Louisiana native, entered the NFL in 1995 with a broad array of skills.

During his first two seasons with the Steelers, his speed, good hands and cannon of an arm enabled Steelers coach Bill Cowher to use him in a utility fashion. Stewart rotated as quarterback, running back, and wide receiver. A color commentator at the time called him “Slash,” a nickname that stuck.

“The Slash nickname is a real name, bro,” Stewart said. “Like, that’s some superhero type stuff, you know. I was Kordell Stewart going into my phone booth and coming out with my cape on and doing it my way.”

He could have become a regular wide receiver but he wanted to tackle the more central role of starting quarterback. Cowher gave him that job in his third season in1997.

Even there, Stewart used his running skills in a way most quarterbacks at the time did not.

“When you see quarterbacks playing today, it was everything I did way back then,” he said. “But to make people appreciate Slash being quarterback, that was tough because I was very unconventional.”

Stewart also faced challenges as a Black man in the quarterback position in the late 1990s.

“Whenever there is a Black quarterback,” Granderson noted in the doc, “we have to be cognizant of the fact there’s a large contingency of that quarterback’s fan base that wants them to fail.”

Stewart noted that the Atlanta Falcons signed a similar dual-threat quarterback in 2001 named Michael Vick, the same year Stewart landed his single Pro Bowl appearance.

After Stewart retired from the NFL, he moved to Atlanta, drawn by the nightlife, golf courses and his girlfriend Tania Richardson, who came to Atlanta in the 2000s with their son Syre.

He said he received full custody of Syre in 2011. “He played football, basketball, baseball here in Atlanta,” he said. “There was no reason for me to go anywhere else. I’ve developed friends here. I have former teammates here. I’ve established relationships and business opportunities.”

Stewart helped coach Syre in football at North Atlanta High School and is now an offensive coordinator for South Forysth High School’s football team. He hopes those students see the documentary and understand who he is as a person.

“I want to be a father figure in their lives,” Stewart said. “Show them tough love through the process of playing the game but also how to be a young man and stand on principles of sacrifice, leadership, adaptability and honor regardless of what people say about you.”