Authors: Mark Fainaru-Wada
The fact that the comments were published provided no solace to the reviewers. “We were like, ‘Who reads the commentaries?’ ” said Guskiewicz. “It’s a published paper. It became the gospel.”
NFL Paper Number 4 now stood as peer-reviewed science. The NFL’s research arm could hardly have staked out a more aggressive position. The league could now claim authority over the questions that soon enough would most threaten its future. It was judge and jury. The NFL was just getting warmed up.
In normal circumstances, Mike Webster’s body wouldn’t have ended up on the slab. In 2002, there were
roughly 17,500 deaths in Allegheny County. Fewer than 1,000 were handled by the coroner’s office, which intervenes only when death results from unknown or suspicious causes. Webster had died of a heart attack: Case closed. But for his fame, his very public descent into madness, and the unusual foresight of one man, his body would have been cremated after the funeral.
The man who stepped in was Joe Dominick, the chief deputy coroner. Dominick was a burly Pittsburgh native and die-hard Steelers fan. The son of a carpenter, he had been raised in the milieu of the steel town and then had become part of the new economy when Pittsburgh transitioned into health care. “I watched Mike Webster play football every Sunday, man!” he said. Dominick’s 14-year-old son, Alexander, played center on his midget team, and Dominick had raised him on the legend of Iron Mike. Like every Steelers fan, Dominick had heard the stories about Webster’s tortured post-football life. When he learned that he had died, Dominick decided to impound the body.
“The first thing I thought was this is a good way to put this issue to rest,” he said. “My concern was if Mike died as a result of a drug overdose or he died as a result of injuries sustained that we were able to link to football, it changes the dynamics here. It’s no longer a natural death.”
The body arrived on a Saturday, and this too was a fortuitous key to
the secret inside Mike Webster’s head. At the time, the coroner’s office had more than a half dozen people qualified to perform an autopsy. The one
who happened to be working that day, Dominick thought, was the perfect man for the job. For one thing, Bennet Omalu was a neuropathologist, a specialist in diseases of the central nervous system, although neuropathology was just the latest medical specialty Omalu had picked up. A pathologist by training, he seemed to collect degrees and certificates with the ease of a man picking out produce at the supermarket. Technically, Omalu was a neuropathology
student
, having completed his studies in that discipline at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center three months earlier. He hadn’t yet passed the exams, but he was brimming with curiosity and fresh ideas. “I was intellectually hard,” Omalu said. “I had just finished my training.”
At this point, it would be hard to conjure up a more
unlikely character to wander into the Webster saga than Bennet Omalu. Nigerian by birth, short and stocky, he spoke English with a mesmerizing singsong accent, the pitch of his voice often rising and falling in the same melodic sentence. When Omalu swore, which was often, he made
motherfucker
sound like poetry. His face was equally expressive, conveying a wide range of emotions. Omalu was the ultimate open book: He had no filter, and whatever he was thinking in that moment would be fully expressed, often with no apparent concern for how it might sound to the person on the receiving end. Even his priest, Carmen D’Amico, was sometimes startled by what came out of his mouth: “He’ll say things, and it’s just like, ‘Oh! Bennet, don’t say that!’ ” The more controversial material often focused on his beliefs, a fusion of Roman Catholicism and Igbo tribal mysticism that sometimes became entwined with his medical practice. Omalu believed that the body was a vessel for the soul and that even in death—
especially
in death—the soul had to be honored. He was convinced that spirits inhabited the coroner’s office and that the nights belonged to them. Once, while working alone with a dozen or so refrigerated bodies, Omalu thought he saw a figure leaning against the door, staring at him. When he looked again, the figure vanished. He then spotted another shadowy form walking away. Omalu looked at his watch; it was 7:30
P.M.
“I said to myself, ‘Bennet, you’re trespassing. There’s usually nobody here at this time; just get the fuck out of here.’
And guess what? What did I do? I quickly stopped what I was doing. I shut off the light. And I got the fuck out of there.” On another occasion, Omalu was driving around with a brain in the backseat of his car. The car got a flat tire, and that night the empty dishwasher in Omalu’s apartment started without explanation. He attributed these events to the brain’s former owner.
Omalu wore impeccably tailored suits and tooled around Pittsburgh in a silver Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedan. He ordered his custom-made shirts without pockets to avoid collecting lint. He later designed his own $6,000 cuff links, which he was planning to sell in Dubai. Omalu sometimes spoke of himself in the third person, especially when provoked to outrage or anger (“He did not even acknowledge there was anybody like Omalu!”). He could seem indiscreet to the point of obliviousness. Once, while conducting an interview for this book, Omalu pulled out his laptop on the patio of a tony restaurant called Wine & Roses and showed images of disemboweled corpses while all around him diners brunched on quiche and eggs Florentine. To people who annoyed him, Omalu would sometimes remark: “I may do your autopsy some day. Remember that.”
Omalu’s indiscretions and eccentricities sometimes got him written off as a kook. But once you stripped away the mysticism and theatrics, the strange ghost stories and confessions, what was left was an inordinately well-educated immigrant with a razor-sharp mind, soaring ambition, and a keenly honed sense of moral outrage. All this would prepare Omalu well for what was about to occur. Julian Bailes, the neurosurgeon who later would become Omalu’s biggest champion, noted that it’s often the least conventional people who shake up the world. “Most discoveries of great things are not done by shrinking violets,” Bailes said. “They’re done by people who want to be noticed or provocative, want to be recognized for discovering things.”
Never was Omalu more of an outsider than when it came to pro football. It would have been almost impossible to locate a human being within a 200-mile radius of Pittsburgh who was more ignorant about the sport. Omalu hadn’t the slightest clue how football worked. He hadn’t watched a game, much less attended one. “I didn’t know what a Super Bowl was,” he later said. He found the city’s fevered obsession
with the Steelers baffling and pointless, “part of the American stupidity. You know, in Africa, we believe, yes, the white man is smart but the white man can be foolish.” Omalu looked at the game through the lens of a Martian, if that Martian happened to practice neuropathology. Everything about it he found worrisome and dangerous. Why, for example, were the players sheathed in armor? He looked at the helmet and thought: “Why do they have to wear that big casing?”
Omalu was just 32, the junior pathologist on staff. Because of this, he often was scheduled to work weekends. “Guess who was on duty that Saturday?” said Omalu. “Omalu.” As he prepared for work, he watched the news accounts of the sad demise of a local football hero, the stories about his Ritalin arrest, the rambling Hall of Fame speech, how Webster had slept in bus and train stations—a man broken mentally and physically. Omalu felt for the poor man. He wondered idly if he might have had some kind of brain disorder. Omalu recently had conducted an autopsy on a woman in her mid-forties. She had died after being beaten into a vegetative state by her husband. Omalu ran tests on the woman’s brain and was struck when they revealed an unusual Alzheimer’s-like pathology. He didn’t do anything with his surprising finding, but the case was still fresh in his mind.
When Omalu arrived
at the coroner’s office and was told that Mike Webster was his first case, he didn’t immediately make the connection.
“Who’s Mike Webster?” he said.
“That’s the greatest center who ever played,” he was told.
“What’s a center?” Omalu asked.
Then suddenly he got it: The body on the table belonged to the same broken man they had been talking about on TV.
“Fuck, man!” Omalu recalled thinking. “Thank you, Lord!”
Omalu looked down at Webster’s battered corpse—the cracked feet, scarred knees, mangled fingers—and got to work. He always played music during autopsies; it helped calm him and break the monotony of carving up so many bodies. A hopeless romantic, he was going through a Teddy Pendergrass phase of love ballads. Omalu worked with such swiftness and precision that it could seem almost as if he were on autopilot. But with each incision, with each organ he removed, weighed, and sliced, he was looking for clues.
Omalu’s belief in spirits extended to his autopsies. He believed he could communicate with the dead and that the dead in turn could tell him how they became dead. Omalu saw himself as their champion, a person who could give them voice. As he worked his way around Webster’s body, he conducted an ongoing dialogue, trying to engage Webster’s spirit: “Mike, in my heart, I think there’s something wrong with you. I can’t do this alone, you need to help me. Let’s prove them wrong; let’s go get them.”
The autopsy lasted about an hour, building toward the moment Omalu had been waiting for: the removal of Webster’s brain. To understand definitively what had gone wrong with Webster would require months of study. But when he was able to hold the brain in his hands, Omalu felt certain he would see some obvious signs of deterioration. Perhaps it would be shrunken and atrophied like a brain with Alzheimer’s disease. But when Omalu removed Webster’s brain, he was disappointed. It showed no outward signs of injury or disease. Omalu weighed it: 3½ pounds. It was perfectly normal.
Omalu shrugged.
Sorry, Mike. I couldn’t help you after all.
But Omalu found himself thinking back to the case of the battered woman. And so, almost as an afterthought, he ordered his technician to preserve the brain for further study.
He recorded his intentions in the autopsy report: “The brain weighs 1575 grams and has been fixed in formalin for comprehensive neuropathologic examination. A report will be issued on a later date.”
Omalu cleaned up and returned to his office. He called his boss, Allegheny County Coroner
Cyril Wecht, a Pittsburgh legend. Wecht, among other things, had an uncanny ability to insinuate himself into every major crime and fatality of the day: O. J. Simpson, JonBenét Ramsey, even the Kennedy assassinations. He was an odd breed. People called Wecht a “celebrity pathologist.”
“Sir, I’ve finished the autopsy,” Omalu told Wecht. “I’ve saved the brain and, please, I’m asking for your permission to study it.”
“What are you studying the brain for?” Wecht asked.
“Well, they said he had some neuropsychiatric problems. I want to see if he has some evidence of brain damage.”
“Do whatever you want to do, Bennet,” Wecht told him. “Just make sure you make me fucking famous.”
Omalu’s full name was
Bennet Ifeakandu Onyemalukwube.
His middle name meant: “Life is the greatest gift of all.” His parents chose it for a reason: Omalu was born in the middle of a bloody civil war. Nigeria’s Igbo tribe, of which his family was part, had annexed the southeastern part of the country to form the state of Biafra. When Omalu’s mother went into labor, his father lay in a hospital bed, having nearly been killed when the Nigerian Air Force bombed their village. The two-and-a-half-year civil war ended in 1970, when Biafra was absorbed back into Nigeria.
The conflict claimed at least 1 million lives, many from starvation and disease. In the United States, the war would be remembered for its disturbing images of skeletal children. Omalu recalled almost nothing beyond his village receiving rations of dried fish from the World Health Organization.
Omalu’s last name, fully realized, meant: “If you know, come forth and speak.” This too was fitting, for the Igbo had a reputation for being the most outspoken of Nigeria’s three main tribes (the others are the Hausa and the Yoruba). “I’m an Igbo man,” said Omalu. “I think we are bold people. That thing that you tell me I can’t do is what I want to do.” The Igbo are predominantly Christian, with many practicing a mix of Roman Catholicism and native rituals. The Igbo have complicated views on death and burial. Most believe in reincarnation and the interaction between the living and the spirit world. The Igbo are also known as businessmen and traders. Omalu’s father, John, was orphaned at three and raised as a house servant by a local parish catechist. When he finished high school, according to Omalu, his “colonial master” paid his father’s way to England, where he studied mining engineering and shortened the family name to Omalu. He returned to Nigeria and spent most of his life as a civil servant, eventually retiring as director of the Federal Ministry of Mines and Power.
Omalu was the product of an arranged marriage, the sixth of seven children. He attended the finest schools in Enugu, a city of about half a million people in southeastern Nigeria, living comfortably in a gated community, protected by armed guards, going to school in chauffeur-driven
cars. Math and English tutors came by the house twice a week to teach Omalu and his siblings. Bennet was quiet and introverted as a child. He excelled in class but had few friends and was something of a mama’s boy. He was tidy and meticulous, voted the “neatest” kid in his class. By his late teens he yearned to break away, dreaming of becoming a jet-setting pilot.
“My childhood dream was to have a girlfriend in every major city of the world,” he said. “I fly into Paris. I spend the night with my Paris girlfriend. I fly to Sydney, Australia. I spend the night with my Australian girlfriend. Then I fly to New York.…”
His parents nixed that idea and instead sent him to medical school at the University of Nigeria. After getting his degree, he worked four years as an emergency room physician and then, at 26, applied to a one-year visiting scholar program at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health. After a year in Seattle, he went to New York to do his residency at Harlem Hospital.