League of Denial (16 page)

“I mean, he was very pleasant, very charming, but didn’t have the drive and direction and decision-making ability,” Westbrook said later. “And this is what gets destroyed in this process of repetitive brain injury. He was pretty much at sea in an open boat unless somebody directed him.”

Westbrook thought it was an “easy case to decide.” He wrote to the disability board: “With the history of multiple head injuries that all football players have and the history that the patient has predominately problems with what appears to be frontal lobe function, I think we can be pretty comfortable that this is related to injury.”

“I don’t think it’s rocket science to say that there’s chronic injury from head injury in football,” Westbrook said. “I mean, we’ve all talked about it.”

It would be years before it was known publicly what Edward Westbrook had concluded about Mike Webster, a period in which the concussion issue would sweep over the NFL like a giant wave and the question of what the league knew about the connection between football and brain damage—and when it knew it—would potentially be worth millions, if not billions, of dollars.

On October 28, 1999, on Westbrook’s recommendation,
the retirement board granted Webster “Total and Permanent” disability benefits on the basis of his injuries. A few months later, Fitzsimmons received a letter from Sarah E. Gaunt, the plan’s director, explaining the decision: “The Retirement Board determined that Mr. Webster’s disability arose while he was an Active Player.” The medical reports, including one from the NFL’s handpicked neurologist, “indicate that his disability is the result of head injuries suffered as a football player with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs.” The league’s own disability
committee—chaired by a representative of the NFL commissioner and managed in part by the NFL owners, who elected that commissioner—had determined that professional football had caused Mike Webster’s brain damage.

A decade later, as
thousands of former players were suing the NFL for fraud, Fitzsimmons, who by then had nothing to do with the lawsuit, would describe that 1999 letter as “the
proverbial smoking gun.”

The decision was
a hollow victory for Webster. The league didn’t dispute that pro football had caused his brain damage, but the retirement board disagreed on when he became so disabled that he couldn’t hold a job. All five doctors—Westbrook included—concluded that that happened immediately after Webster’s career ended. The board determined that it was several years later, even though Webster’s only full-time employment was his truncated season with the Chiefs in which he lived in a storage closet. Financially, the retirement board had made a hairsplitting—but life-changing—distinction. It was the difference between $42,000 a year and hundreds of thousands.

Webster, of course, was apoplectic, and so was Fitzsimmons. The attorney whipped off letter after letter to the board in “an attempt to correct an obvious mistake.” He recruited more doctors. He filed more forms. But no change was forthcoming. “Needless to say, I am disappointed and also frustrated,” Fitzsimmons wrote. “I have now written to you … on 38 separate occasions. I have submitted the reports of at least ten independent doctors. Mike has filed three affidavits and we have obtained all of the available records you have requested.”

Vodvarka, who continued to bear witness to Webster’s decline as his personal physician, sat down and wrote Fitzsimmons a letter to try to make sense of it all. For much of his life, Vodvarka had worshiped Mike Webster, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and the National Football League.
He couldn’t get over the injustice, how the NFL had honored Webster by putting him in the Hall of Fame, how Webster was frequently named to the all-time teams that experts put together. Yet the league had abandoned him. “I am and could only be appalled,” Vodvarka wrote Fitzsimmons. “We are dealing with a unique situation where a human being has lost his well-deserved dignity, respected reputation and most importantly
his family. The Pittsburgh Steelers and the National Football League have turned their backs, and have done nothing but try to destroy one of their most prolific players. I can only imagine what misery some of the National Football League’s lesser players must suffer. Are they [the NFL] afraid to set a precedent? Do they expect the common people/taxpayers to fund their casualties while paying to watch them occur?”

Fitzsimmons concluded he had
no alternative except to sue the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan. Thus began an entirely new battle, one that Webster would not live to see concluded.

His life was now in free fall. As soon as the disability checks started rolling in, the
IRS garnished most of the payments; after taxes and the levy, he was getting $641.67 a month. His ability to remember people and places was fading rapidly.

One night he and Colin took a drive to the local convenience store, just down the block from their apartment. They had made the trip dozens of times. Suddenly Webster made a wrong turn.

“What are you doing, Dad?” Colin asked. “The convenience store is that way.”

“What are you talking about?” said Webster.

Colin tried again, but Webster started arguing. For 10 minutes they went back and forth, with Colin trying to convince his father that he was mistaken.

“I think you’re crazy; I don’t know what you’re telling me, but all right, let’s look,” Webster said.

When Webster came upon the store, he was shaken.

“That was the scariest look I’ve ever seen on his face,” Colin said. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, I just lost how to brush my teeth or tie my shoes.’ The confusion and horror that was in his eyes, it was like, ‘Oh, man!’ I think that was really the worst for him, that he knew he was losing it.”

One night Colin went to get a snack in the kitchen only to discover his father standing in front of the oven, the door open, his pants down,
pissing into it.

“What are you doing, Dad?” Colin asked.

“Oh, Jesus, I thought I was going in a urinal,” Webster said.

Eventually, two years out of high school, with no money and no career prospects, Colin decided to join the Marines. When he left, his
younger brother, Garrett, not yet 16, came down from Wisconsin to assume the role of son/caretaker/roommate. In Garrett’s case, it was more roommate and caretaker than son. If Colin and his father had been like bachelor pals, Garrett and Webster were more
like high school buddies. Garrett was huge, nearly 6-8, bigger than his dad. He played football even though his heart wasn’t in it, saddled by the burden of being the son of a Hall of Fame center.

But Garrett, like Colin, loved hanging out with his dad. They browsed around Kmart at two in the morning, went to WWE wrestling matches, watched many of the same movies over and over:
The Princess Bride
,
Tombstone
,
Goodfellas
,
Happy Gilmore
, and, of course, any John Wayne flick. He and Garrett were
Star Wars
nerds, so they made sure they were there when
Episode II—Attack of the Clones
opened in spring 2002. Near the end of the movie, when Yoda strikes a pose with his light saber, ready to fight for the first time, Webster leaped out of his seat, screaming, “Yeah, yeah!”

But where once Team Webster could expect maybe 15 or 20 good days every month, he was down to perhaps 3 to 5. Sunny said Mike often sniffed ammonia late at night to stave off sleep, fearing he wouldn’t wake up. “I don’t want to fall asleep, little buddy,” Webster would say.

Webster’s demise was reflected in
his incoherent letters.

One read:

From a Kinko’s in Madison on March 15, 2002, Webster faxed a nine-page letter to the Brain Injury Association of America. It was written in the third person in Webster’s hand. One passage read:

One night, Bob Stage, the former Steelers pilot, ran into Webster at a convenience store in Moon Township.
The two men had once been close. Stage had attended Pro Bowls in Honolulu with Webster. The two men had gotten their families together, had prayed together and shared their faith. But now Webster had cut himself off—from old teammates, old friends, nearly everyone.

Stage walked up to say hello. Webster was gaunt and frail; he looked like he was 70.

“Mike, it’s
Robert!
” said Stage, using the faux French pronunciation the way Webster used to.

“You could see a little flicker of recognition,” said Stage, “and then it was like a light going out in his eyes.”

Stage was destroyed. He went home and wept.

Three months later, around 11:30
P.M.
, Garrett called Sunny from the Walmart parking lot at Robinson Township. He said his father was having
chest pains and trouble breathing. Sunny joined them and called Charles Kelly, the Wheeling doctor who had become Mike’s good friend. By then, Webster’s lips were turning blue. Kelly told Sunny to give Mike aspirin “in case he’s having a heart attack” and drive him to the emergency room. Garrett went into the store and came back with Tylenol. His dad cussed him out. “Are you trying to kill me?” Webster said. “That’s not the right stuff.”

Garrett went back to the store and fetched some aspirin, which Mike gulped down. His condition wasn’t improving. Sunny drove him to the emergency room at Heritage Valley Sewickley Hospital.

“I got Hall of Famer Mike Webster in my car; he’s not feeling well,” Sunny told the nurse. “Can you please help him?”

Webster was talkative and upbeat. He asked Sunny to take Garrett to school in the morning. As a nurse went to insert a catheter, he joked: “This is the first time a woman has touched me like that in ten years.” The nurse injected him with morphine, and Sunny and Garrett could hear him saying behind the curtain: “Oh, yeah, baby, that’s the good stuff.”

They thought everything would be fine. And then suddenly it wasn’t.
Tests revealed two fully blocked arteries and two that were partially blocked. Webster’s heart was failing. He was transferred to Allegheny General in an ambulance. Webster was still optimistic and reassuring. When he saw Sunny, he reminded him of their plan to buy a pair of motorcycles someday.

“Don’t worry,” Webster told him. “When I get better, we’re going to get those Harleys. We’ll go out and make some money on some signings and do some different things.”

But not long after the surgery, Garrett and Sunny were told they should call the rest of the family. There was too much blockage. Webster’s body was shutting down.

Garrett and Sunny were stunned. Like everyone who had known him or watched him, they believed to the end that Iron Mike was indestructible. But he wasn’t. In the early morning hours of September 24, 2002, Mike Webster was pronounced dead. He was 50. Sunny, the memorabilia collector, recalled being struck by the time of death: 12:52
A.M.

Bradshaw wore 12, Webster 52.

The Steelers paid for the funeral: $5,000. Two hundred people attended, including a
Who’s Who of Steelers greats: Bradshaw, Swann, Harris, Blount, Noll. And the owner, Dan Rooney. Sunny had called Joe Gordon to ask the team for help; he had never really understood Webster’s hatred of the Steelers. Colin was at Camp Lejeune, about to be deployed to Iraq, when he got the terrible news that his father was dying. At the funeral,
he watched with disgust as Garrett greeted Rooney and the other Steelers. At one point, two of Rooney’s assistants approached Colin to ask if he would come over to see the owner and receive his condolences. “Fuck you!” Colin shouted at Rooney. “My dad loathed you till the day he died. You have no business here.”

Pam found herself looking around at all of Webster’s ex-teammates and their wives. She wondered: Why aren’t you all having to deal with this?
Why just Mike? What did we all do to deserve this? Why are your husbands all fine?

Noll’s wife, Marianne, came up to offer her sympathies.

“I didn’t know Mike was sick; he didn’t appear sick,” she told Pam.

“Mike didn’t appear sick because his injuries were inside his helmet,” Pam said.

A few days later, the
phone rang at Bob Fitzsimmons’s office. The caller introduced himself as a pathologist with the Allegheny County coroner. Fitzsimmons could hardly understand him. The caller had a thick accent, and Fitzsimmons was tired and grief-stricken. He had lost a client who had become his friend. Fitzsimmons had grown to love Webster, and Mike’s death had only made him more committed to confronting the NFL, to trying to recover what Mike was owed on behalf of his family.

Fitzsimmons wasn’t totally sure he understood what the doctor wanted. He asked him to repeat himself, and the pathologist explained that he had read about Webster’s problems before his death.

Then he repeated his odd request: Could he please study Mike Webster’s brain?

Leigh Steinberg’s Marriott brain seminars were causing a cultural shift in the NFL. Steinberg knew that the tradition of players laughing about their head injuries or hiding them from trainers and doctors would never be fully eradicated; expecting otherwise was “somewhat akin to asking a drunk driver whether they’re drunk,” he thought. But the culture was definitely changing. Exhibit A was Steinberg’s biggest client.

“
The flippancy went away in that time period,” said Steve Young.

Steve Young was not like most football players, and it went well beyond his use of words like
flippancy
. He was
the great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, patriarch of the Mormon Church and founder of the university where Young played college football. Young was born in Salt Lake City but raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, after his father, a corporate lawyer and former BYU fullback, got a job in New York City. He was a National Merit Scholar and a great high school quarterback with a suspect throwing arm. Young decided to attend BYU, at the time a quarterback factory, even though he had no guarantee he’d get to play quarterback there.