League of Denial (10 page)

Webster fidgeted through the ceremony, adjusting his gold Hall of Fame blazer and tie, which he wore over a dark blue golf shirt, its collar half up and half down. The inductees sat in a row behind the podium. At one point, in the middle of Mara’s speech, Webster got up and left, returning after a few minutes. When Bradshaw finally took the podium to a loud ovation, his introduction was more of a sermon than a speech.
Bradshaw rarely had set foot in Pittsburgh after his career ended, apparently because of his resentment over the abuse he endured early in his career. But for 10 minutes—longer than even the inductees were supposed to speak—Bradshaw talked largely about himself, a homespun tale of his dream to play football and how God had not only granted him that dream but allowed him to share it with some of the greatest players ever—Swann, Stallworth, Harris, Bleier, Greene, Lambert, Ham, Kolb, Holmes.

Finally, Bradshaw reached the powerful climax:

“But what good is a machine if you ain’t got a center? And oh, did I get a center! I didn’t just get any ol’ center, no sirree. I got the best that’s ever played the game, the best that ever put his hand down on a football. I loved him from the first time I ever put my hands under his butt.”

As Bradshaw continued, Webster, aware that he was about to speak, removed his tie.

“There has never been or there never will be another man as committed, totally dedicated to making him the very best that he could possibly be,” Bradshaw continued. “There’s never been a man who was so loved. He was the background on which we were built around. He was our spine. There never has been, never will be, another Mike Webster!”

At Bradshaw’s own induction in 1989, he had yelled, “What I wouldn’t give right now to put my hands under Mike Webster’s butt just one more time!” And so as he completed his introduction, Bradshaw reached into a paper bag, pulled out a football, and shouted, “One more time!” Webster rose, with the Steeler faithful delirious, took off his blazer, and limped over to Bradshaw. He grabbed the ball, somehow
managed to hunch down as low as he ever did when he was playing, and snapped a bullet to Bradshaw.

The two men hugged, Webster approached the podium—and Team Webster held its breath.

By this point in Webster’s life,
Ritalin was one of his best friends, a drug he came to depend on to get him through the day. He used it to focus and take the edge off his spiraling depression. A psychostimulant, Ritalin had grown popular for treating children with attention deficit disorder. Though it sparked the release of dopamine in the brain—the chemical most associated with pleasure and reward—the drug had the effect of honing an ADD patient’s concentration. Some doctors saw its potential with Parkinson’s patients and with adults who had experienced brain trauma. It was clear to Webster that Ritalin worked for him. Before taking the podium in Canton he gulped down 80 mg.

Even then, his rambling speech lasted 21 minutes—13 more than his allotted time. Speaking without notes, Webster was conversational, occasionally inspiring, and funny. But he was also all over the place. He opened with a slightly awkward joke: “Giving Bradshaw a forum and a microphone is like giving Visine to a Peeping Tom.” He added another later: “His dad says he was so ugly, his mom carried him around for two weeks upside down, thought he only had one eye.” Webster left the stage briefly to hug Pam, the kids, and other family members. He bounced in and out of messages about failure and success, briefly quoted Longfellow, and lost his train of thought several times.

Sometimes it appeared as if he were giving a talk to a group of middle-school students:

“Don’t give up, don’t be afraid to fail. No one is keeping score. All we have to do is finish the game, and we’ll all be winners.”

Other times he sounded like a man trying to save his country, though it was unclear what he was trying to save it from:

“I’m talking about things that are going on today that have been ignored for a long period of time. And yeah, we’re addressing them now because we have a history of only addressing them only when they jump up and bite us in the ass. And not until we do that. But we can change that. We can change, but we’re in this, we gotta care about one another, we gotta care about our kids, we gotta care about a lot of things. And
we do care about a lot of things, but we gotta have enough people caring and working together. And we can get that done, it’s not impossible. Hell, nothing else is working. You know, maybe it’s idealistic, but nothing else is working, folks. And I’m just appreciative that I had the opportunity to play with these men both in Pittsburgh and Kansas City, and against the jerks on the other teams.”

As he watched Webster struggle,
Bob Stage cringed. The Steelers’ pilot had enjoyed Webster’s company for years and considered him one of the most decent men he had ever known. The man he was now watching was being honored for his greatness on the football field, which was fitting, but it was no longer Mike Webster.

“It made no sense,” Stage said. “It broke my heart.”

Perhaps most notable in Webster’s speech was who he didn’t thank—and who didn’t attend. There was no mention of Steelers owner Dan Rooney or Joe Gordon or anyone else from the team’s front office except for the beloved and deceased Steelers patriarch, Art Rooney Sr. No one from the organization attended. Dan Rooney said he was in Dublin preparing for the team’s American Bowl preseason game the next day against the Bears.
“I expected more,” Pam told the
Post-Gazette
. “It’s a shame. They could have sent someone or sent a telegram. It would have been the classy thing to do.”

By this time,
Webster’s festering enmity toward his former team was obvious to those closest to him, though its origins were never clear. Part of it was Webster’s belief that the Steelers had never offered him a coaching job at the end of his career, although Dan Rooney later said they had. Part of it certainly was his growing paranoia and, with that, his lasting belief that Rooney had somehow betrayed him. Why he came to hate Joe Gordon, no one really could say. Just a year earlier, Gordon and Rooney had rescued Webster from the Pittsburgh Greyhound station. But hate was what it was, and as Webster got sicker, that hate consumed him.

There was, however, one moment of astonishing lucidity in Mike Webster’s Hall of Fame speech, a moment that seemed to capture the essence of the sport that had broken him. “You know, it’s painful to play football, obviously,” he told the crowd. “It’s not fun out there being in two-a-day drills in the heat of the summer and banging heads. It’s not a natural thing.”

Seated behind Webster was the NFL commissioner, Paul Tagliabue. This remark, as truthful as any that Webster would utter that day, seemed to provoke in Tagliabue neither awareness nor reflection as he sat next to Bradshaw watching an NFL legend unravel. Instead, the commissioner and Bradshaw seemed to be laughing at something.

In March 1996, about a year and a half after Merril Hoge announced his retirement, some of the nation’s leading experts in sports medicine gathered during a spring snowstorm at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. By the standards of some medical conferences, it wasn’t a huge gathering: about 200 brain specialists, team doctors, and trainers, mostly from across the Northeast.
The conference was billed as “the first cross-disciplinary attempt to confront the many difficult issues regarding evaluation and treatment of sports-related concussion.” Maroon, who cohosted, used his Steelers connections to put together an “experts roundtable” of doctors and retired players, including Hoge, New York Giants linebacker Harry Carson, Steelers quarterback Mike Tomczak, and Buffalo Bills safety Mark Kelso. The moderator was former Steelers great Lynn Swann, whom Maroon introduced as “a master chef, poet, and good friend.”

What followed was an eye-opening dialogue about the realities facing the NFL when it came to brain injuries. The players told the audience of doctors that they had spent their entire careers essentially ignoring them, playing through pain and injury out of fear of letting down their teammates and losing their jobs. During one exchange, Swann asked Carson, a future Hall of Famer and one of the best linebackers of his generation, a leading question: Do players feel their “livelihood” is threatened when they come off the field?

“Very much so,” said Carson. “Football players are very insecure people. Players are interchangeable parts. Someone played your position before you, and when you leave, someone else is going to be in your place. You are only there for a short time, so you want to make as much as you can in the time given you. You do not want to give anyone else a shot at your job. Football players understand that if they give someone the opportunity to do the job better, their days are numbered.”

Perhaps the most startling admission came from Tony Yates, the Steelers’ team doctor, who said he was essentially powerless to bench a highly motivated player. He cited as an example Greg Lloyd, a Steelers linebacker who once said, “I know I haven’t played a good game unless my hand has been stepped on or if
somebody somewhere isn’t bleeding.” Yates told his fellow doctors, each of whom had taken the Hippocratic oath (“Do no harm”), that the ultimate authority for getting Greg Lloyd off the field was not him, the doctor, but the head coach. “Many times it is just physically impossible,” Yates said. “Only a head coach can pull a player off. When we finally reach the head coach and impress upon him the seriousness of an injury, the players come off.”

Sitting in the audience, mesmerized, was a Michigan State graduate student named Michael (Micky) Collins. He had made the five-hour drive down from East Lansing with his faculty adviser, mostly out of curiosity. Collins felt like he was at a personal crossroads. A former pitcher and outfielder at the University of Southern Maine, he was in his second year studying for a master’s degree in clinical psychology. But Collins had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He missed sports and had thought about coaching or perhaps a career as an athletic trainer. He had traveled to Pittsburgh at the suggestion of his adviser, who thought the combination of sports and brain research might stir Collins’s interest.

Collins was attentive to what the players had to say, but for him the real stars were the doctors and the scientists. He watched as Joe Maroon and Mark Lovell presented their latest findings on concussions. “These are the coolest guys in the world,” Collins thought. During the drive back to East Lansing, he told his adviser: “This is what I want to do with my life.”

At this point in the looming concussion crisis, Merril Hoge was no
longer a professional football player; he was a case study and a cautionary tale. During the conference, Lovell had presented slides showing how Hoge’s brain function had fallen off a cliff after the hit in Chicago. Lovell’s concussion test already was becoming known in neuropsych circles as the Pittsburgh Steelers Test Battery, although the Steelers didn’t own it and the test was not yet the marketing juggernaut it would come to be. Collins was fascinated. After watching Lovell’s presentation, he approached him and asked if he could use the Steelers Battery as the basis for his own research into football-related concussions. Lovell readily agreed. Thus began the steep upward trajectory that within five years would turn Collins into one of the leading concussion experts in the country and a member of a partnership with Maroon and Lovell that would shape the NFL concussion saga in huge and controversial ways.

Collins was nothing if not enterprising. He first used the Steelers Battery on the Michigan State football team, having secured permission through a trainer. Collins baselined a Spartan a day for months, all the while thinking to himself, No way this is gonna work. Then one day a lineman named Chris Smith came off the field with a concussion. Collins tested him the next day. “He looked normal, he talked normal, he acted normal, and he went right back to play,” said Collins. There was one problem: The test indicated that Smith was a walking zombie; he shouldn’t have been playing at all. “I was thinking to myself, ‘Wow. This really works,’ ” said Collins. At that point, he was in no position to influence whether Chris Smith played or sat out, but he was emboldened. He secured a small grant to study other colleges. He traveled to the universities of Utah and Pitt and then got an internship to study the University of Florida football team.

When he was done, Collins wrote up his findings. He submitted the paper not to some minor publication for young researchers but to the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, or
JAMA
, the most widely circulated medical journal in the world. “ ‘What the hell, it’s a sexy topic, isn’t it?’ ” he thought. Collins titled his
sexy paper “Relationship between Concussion and Neuropsychological Performance in College Football Players.” He cold-called a
JAMA
editor, who agreed to take a look. The fact that the paper was accepted, he later acknowledged,
was a tribute less to its quality (“It’s probably the worst paper I’ve ever published”) than to the sudden appetite for a subject that researchers had ignored for years but that now seemed critically important, an issue whose time had come, like the dangers of nicotine or cholesterol. The paper’s major findings, published in 1999, were that neuropsychological testing was an effective tool to assess concussions in athletes and that those with a history of multiple concussions or learning disabilities were far more likely to fail those tests.

“Quite honestly, and not to sit here and blow, but this paper was seminal,” said Collins. He seemed dismissive of the earlier work of researchers such as Jeff Barth, who had reached similar conclusions but had published his research as a chapter in a book called
Mild Head Injury
. Years later, that book was still available on Amazon, delivered to your doorstep within days, but Collins would say: “The other article published on this stuff was published in some obscure journal, and there was very little. You had to dig deep to find it.” Collins’s own article, in contrast, was big-time: “This was
JAMA
!”