League of Denial (15 page)

Almost always, the letters revolved around the disability case.
His bitterness was palpable:

Often they were jumbled and despairing:

Occasionally they were hopeful:

Often they were delusional, starting with precise lettering and dissolving into a looping, incomprehensible scrawl. In one, Webster even attacked Carl Peterson, the Chiefs’ general manager, who had given him a job a few years earlier when his life was falling apart. Webster had once considered having Peterson introduce him at the Hall of Fame induction. Now he referred to him as “another S.O.B Brownnose FemeNazi” and railed against the system that he believed had used him up:

Webster, ominously, often quoted from Revelation 6:8:

“No Revenge, No Sir,” Webster scrawled on a scrap of paper ripped from a small daily planner. “Not Revenge, But
Reckoning
!”

Webster regularly
threatened to become the first player to quit the Hall of Fame to protest the plight of the retired players, many of whom he believed also had brain damage. He thought the Hall had come to
represent the exploitation of the men who had built the league, including and especially him. Webster swore many times that he intended to sell his Hall of Fame ring and his four Super Bowl rings to raise cash and get rid of the valuable keepsakes he claimed he no longer cared about.

Sunny had turned the
Super Bowl rings into yet another money-raising scheme—not by selling them but by
renting
them to collectors; at one point he used the rings to obtain a $90,000 line of credit from an Altoona lawyer. But Webster still insisted he wanted to sell them. Once he claimed to have lined up a deal for $100,000—$25,000 for each ring.
Sunny called Fitzsimmons in a panic. By now, Fitzsimmons was Team Webster’s head coach, the one man who could tell Mike what to do. Sunny thought Mike held Fitzsimmons in the same regard in which he once held Chuck Noll. Fitzsimmons called a meeting for 11
P.M.
at his office. Sunny managed to get Webster there early.

Webster was agitated, pacing around the conference room.

“I don’t need these fucking things!” he screamed. “They aren’t any good to me, okay?”

Webster said he needed the money to send to Pam and the kids. Sunny implored him: “Mike, your legacy is more important than $100,000.”

Three men in black trench coats (“Straight out of central casting,” said Fitzsimmons) showed up to consummate the deal for the Super Bowl rings. It seemed that there was no stopping it. Then Fitzsimmons tossed a Hail Mary: “Mike, I can get you $200,000!” he said. “I know people who will buy these.” The trench coats left. Webster kept his rings for another day.

Despite all the insanity that his condition engendered, Webster was
acutely aware of what was happening to him. In addition to the mainstays on Team Webster, Mike had become good friends with Charles Kelly, one of the doctors who had evaluated him for his disability case. Kelly was kind and soft-spoken, with the same small-town upbringing as Webster. When Mike was on Ritalin, in the quiet of Kelly’s home outside Wheeling, it could be hard to tell that he was even sick. He would bring over Kentucky Fried Chicken and a collection of tomahawks he had acquired and show Kelly’s son how to fling them against
a tree. Webster and Kelly would sit around the table for hours and talk politics and history and life.

Often the conversation turned to brain trauma. Webster saw himself as an advocate for the issue, particularly as it related to football. He brought Kelly textbooks on brain damage, marking them up as if he were a medical student. One was titled
Traumatic Brain Injury: Associated Speech, Language, and Swallowing Disorders
. On page 235, Webster underlined several sentences, including: “Difficulty in establishing psycho social well-being following [traumatic brain injury] represents a pervasive impediment to the social reintegration of individuals with TBI and affects their quality of life.”

Mike told Kelly that once he won his disability case, he wanted to use the money to start a foundation to offer legal and medical support to players with cognitive issues.

“He talked to me about that a lot,” said Kelly. He would come to see that as Webster’s legacy.

On Saturday, February 20, 1999, a few days after dropping off a Ritalin prescription to be filled at an Eckerd Pharmacy in Rochester, Pennsylvania, about 25 miles north of Pittsburgh, Webster returned to pick up the drugs. Federal agents walked up to him and said: “
Mr. Webster, you’re under arrest.”

The pharmacist had called the authorities after learning that the doctor listed on the prescription no longer practiced in Pennsylvania. The Drug Enforcement Administration alleged that Webster had forged Ritalin prescriptions on dozens of occasions all over the Pittsburgh area: Rochester, Center Township, Kennedy Township, McKees Rocks.

Exactly how Webster committed his crimes was not totally clear. The fact that he had been writing his own prescriptions was not in dispute. Sunny said a sympathetic doctor/Steelers fan had issued Webster a blank pad, but that was never pursued. Sometimes Webster apparently changed the numbers on valid prescriptions so that 90 magically became 190.

Regardless, the arrest was a PR disaster and a sign that his
drug use was out of control. “If you’d let Mike pop Ritalin all day, he probably would have done it,” said Vodvarka. “If he’d had an unending
supply, he’d have taken one every hour.” In fact, Vodvarka’s files bulged with hundreds of prescriptions he himself wrote for his friend. Webster couldn’t function without Ritalin. Himmelhoch, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who evaluated Webster for his disability claim,
helped get him out of the charges with only probation by persuading the judge that Webster had forged prescriptions “for a drug that was and is appropriate treatment” for his brain damage. Ritalin “lifts the scales of [his] confusion,” Himmelhoch wrote. But it was an exceedingly sharp double-edged sword. Ritalin is a stimulant, like cocaine; among other things, it clearly was fueling Webster’s manic literary life. “He’d stay up several days and take it round the clock and write you these notes,” said Vodvarka, who received numerous letters. After the arrest, Vodvarka decided to
cut Webster off. By enabling his addiction, he worried, he could jeopardize his medical license or, worse, Mike might overdose.

Fitzsimmons scrambled together a press conference at a Holiday Inn outside Pittsburgh to make the case that Webster wasn’t responsible for his actions, that football had altered his brain. He brought in the doctors: Vodvarka, Kelly, and Krieg. Some of Webster’s former teammates, including Rocky Bleier, Mel Blount, and Randy Grossman, were recruited to show support. But behind the scenes, some players argued that
jail might be the best option for Webster, if only to get him off the streets and free him from his addiction.

Team Webster gathered in a room to prepare. Fitzsimmons had written a statement for Webster, but Vodvarka and others worried that he couldn’t deliver it in his condition. Webster sat in the middle of it all in disgrace. “Everyone’s gonna think I’m a criminal,” he told Colin. It was the lowest point of his entire soul-shattering post-career ordeal. “You could see it just clobbered him,” said Colin. Now, between Webster’s obvious depression and his erratically functioning brain, Vodvarka, Fitzsimmons, and others tried to figure out how to get him through the humiliating press conference.

Vodvarka and Fitzsimmons pulled Webster aside 30 minutes before it started.

“Listen, take your Ritalin now so it kicks in and you can organize your thoughts,” Fitzsimmons told him.

Thus it came to pass that shortly before offering a contrite apology
to the city of Pittsburgh for forging Ritalin prescriptions, Webster gulped downed 80 mg of Ritalin with a cup of water.

“I want to apologize very specifically for any embarrassment and sadness these allegations have brought,” Webster said. He choked up twice while reading the statement. “I am not seeking your pity or sympathy. I’m not seeking a pardon for my actions, and I’m not really asking for your understanding—even though grown men need understanding.”

The press conference was largely successful. Webster came off as sympathetic, a hero brought low by his overreliance on an obscure drug he needed for injuries related to the years of profound joy he had given to Pittsburgh. The focus quickly shifted from his crimes to his head. But this had an unanticipated effect: The discussion of Webster’s brain touched off
a mini-debate over whether football had actually caused his problems.

On one side were doctors such as Vodvarka, Kelly, Krieg, and Himmelhoch, who made their views known that the repeated blows Webster sustained during his illustrious Steelers career had turned him into the damaged man he was today.

“Mike has the football version of punch-drunk,” Krieg said.

But there was another side. Curiously, it was led by Joe Maroon, the Steelers’ longtime neurological consultant. Five years earlier Maroon had advised Merril Hoge to retire because of the fear that repeated concussions would leave him permanently impaired. Now Maroon told the
Post-Gazette
that such long-term injuries were rare. Of the claim that football gave Mike Webster brain damage, Maroon said: “That’s not confirmed.” Maroon, of course, was one of the doctors Himmelhoch had accused of working for two masters: first the Steelers and then Webster. He was at least indirectly responsible for the player’s medical file, which showed hardly any signs of brain injury during his 15 years in Pittsburgh.

The
Post-Gazette
story went on to tout what it called the “Pittsburgh Steelers Test Battery,” a neuropsychological exam developed by Maroon and his University of Pittsburgh colleague, Mark Lovell, as an indication of the team’s commitment to treating concussions. Maroon explained that the test was now used by every team in the National Hockey League and a dozen teams in the NFL. An affordable software version soon would be available for high school trainers, the story said.

Maroon wasn’t the only doubter. The Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan had gotten back to Fitzsimmons with a response to Webster’s disability claim.
Four doctors weren’t enough, the NFL told Webster. The board wanted a fifth doctor: an independent neurologist who would examine Webster on the league’s behalf. This tactic was familiar to many retired players, who regarded it as a sham, part of the league’s callously indifferent bureaucracy, which they believed was designed to keep them from getting what they deserved. The “independent” doctor invariably came from a list of physicians compiled by the NFL. The doctors on that list, it was thought, frequently sided with the league.

Coming on top of the Ritalin arrest, this news was greeted by Team Webster with overwhelming despair. As addled as Webster was, there was a growing feeling among Fitzsimmons, Sunny, Vodvarka, Colin, and the others that Webster was right: The NFL intended to let him rot.
Their paranoia was such that even the location of the independent doctor the NFL had recommended—Cleveland, the home of the Steelers’ archrival—was viewed as part of a magnificent setup.

Nevertheless, on June 21, 1999—four months after his arrest—Webster traveled to the offices of Edward Westbrook,
the NFL’s handpicked neurologist. Westbrook, a distinguished-looking man with silver hair and wire-rimmed glasses, had an Ivy League education and worked at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland. He had played football in high school until he broke his collarbone, after which his coach advised: “Don’t play college football. They’ll kill you.” Westbrook then had rowed at Harvard.

By the time Webster came to see him, Westbrook had examined perhaps a half dozen former NFL players on behalf of the league. Whatever was going on inside the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan,
Edward Westbrook was not in denial. He had found himself “impressed and maybe horrified” by the degree of brain damage he encountered in the players he examined. One young former player had Parkinson’s disease, which Westbrook thought was probably connected to repeated hits on the field. The rest of the players had varying degrees of severe cognitive dysfunction.

Westbrook didn’t look at the reports from Fitzsimmons’s doctors
before he examined Webster. He did go through the medical reports from the Steelers and Chiefs and was surprised to find almost no mention of head injuries. Webster complained about headaches, some of which, he said, felt like the top of his head would blow off, and also memory loss. But what really struck Westbrook was Webster’s demeanor. He was “like a five-year-old child who was amazed by the whole situation,” Westbrook said. Webster tried to be helpful, but Westbrook struggled unsuccessfully to obtain even the most cursory medical history.