League of Denial (5 page)

Asked what motivated Webster, one of his former teammates replied: “Total fear.”

By 1978, Webster was the best center in the NFL. From that year forward, he would make the Pro Bowl eight straight seasons. If off the field he was a bit awkward, on the field Webster was totally in his
element. Before the snap, the center is responsible for making the line calls, adjusting blocking assignments in response to the configuration of the defense. Webster was a master, barking out audibles, some of them decoys, assuming the role of the Steelers’ field general. He studied game films endlessly—he often took them home—and came to know the Steelers’ offense so well that he
sometimes overruled Bradshaw in the huddle. “Ultimately he became the leader to the extent that he would call the plays,” said Bleier. “Bradshaw would just say, ‘Okay.’ ”

Webster was low to the ground, and he used that to his advantage. As the center, he often drew the gnarliest blocking assignments, the biggest and baddest linemen and linebackers. In the 3–4 defense (three down linemen) he was head up on nose tackles sometimes 50 pounds heavier. In the 4–3, he was responsible for taking on the middle linebacker. Gerry Sullivan, a former Cleveland center, recalled watching film of Webster taking on Oilers nose tackle Curley Culp, a former college wrestling champion and future Hall of Famer. Sullivan was astounded: Webster wasn’t just blocking Curley Culp. He was
uprooting
him. “To me, the physics of it weren’t even possible, you know?” Sullivan said. The Browns ran the film over and over, mesmerized. “You could hear a pin drop as we watched him do it like four times in a row. I don’t know how he did what he did. He was just a force of nature.”

One of Webster’s greatest assets was his head. He used it as a battering ram, smashing it into his opponent as he exploded off the line. To stop Webster, nose tackles and linebackers tried to neutralize his head. Harry Carson, the great New York Giants linebacker, came into the NFL when Webster was in his prime. He found that his best strategy often was to bludgeon Webster as he fired off the line. “When I would explode into Mike, it was power against power,” Carson said. “I would hit him in the face. That’s what we were taught: to hit a guy right in the face so hard that they’re dazed and stunned.” Sullivan, who stayed friends with Webster for years, began to notice that a thick layer of scar tissue had formed on his forehead at the exact spot where he thrust his helmet into opposing linemen. Sullivan was jealous. It was a sign Webster was executing his block—play after play. “I was kind of disappointed that my forehead wasn’t, um, disfigured,” Sullivan said.

It wasn’t just the games that had hardened Webster’s head. Many
Steelers considered the games a break from their normal reality. “We were a collision football team,” said Kolb. Years later, through collective bargaining, NFL players were able to cut down on contact during practice significantly, but not then. During
training camp, the Steelers pounded one another for six weeks, often twice a day. During the season, Wednesdays and Thursdays were full-on contact. Friday brought goal-line drills—the teamwide equivalent of the Nutcracker. With the ball on the 2-yard line, the first-team offense cracked heads with the first-team defense over and over. It was one of Noll’s favorite drills.

Gerry “Moon” Mullins, who played alongside Webster for six years, thought that the players had been programmed to ignore the pain caused by the continuous violence. “They’d drag you back to the huddle: ‘Shake it off, man. We need your ass out here,’ ” he said. “Nobody knew any different. That’s just sort of the way you were, sort of like the GIs when they bring in young kids and they program them: ‘Rush that pillbox, that machine gun that’s blazing out there!’ Nobody in their right mind would do that.”

Pam Webster said her husband often came home with searing headaches that he attributed to his job. When the headaches occurred, Webster would retreat to the bedroom and lie alone in the dark for hours.

If the Steelers’ medical staff was aware of this condition,
it was not recorded: Hundreds of pages of medical files accumulated over Webster’s 15 years with the Steelers contain exactly two references to head injuries. One, dated December 19, 1982, Webster’s eighth year in the NFL, indicated that he passed out after a game in Cleveland after experiencing weakness and dizziness. “He gives no history of head trauma,” says the report, which attributes the blackout to low blood sugar. Webster, after his career ended, would tell one of his doctors that he absorbed several hard hits to the head in that game.

The only other reference to a head injury was on November 3, 1988: “Hit in the head during practice—complains of intermittent dizziness. No other symptoms or complaints. No nausea or headache.”

The nearly blank record is not surprising.
Webster rarely acknowledged his injuries, much less reported them.

There was a certain perverseness about it: The inner strength and mortal fear that drove Webster, lifting him to success beyond his wildest
dreams, was pushing him to play even in the most extreme circumstances. The more he achieved, the more he pushed. Stage, the Steelers’ pilot, dropped by practice one Saturday to see Webster and was told he had been
admitted to the hospital. The week before, Webster had lowered his head to make a block on a screen pass and had injured his neck badly. After the game, he took an injection for the pain and had an allergic reaction, according to Stage. Webster was admitted to Pittsburgh’s Passavant Hospital and told he would be unable to play that Sunday.

When Stage went to visit him, he found Webster in traction with a high fever and a lump the size of a baseball on his neck. Webster confirmed that he would not be playing the next day and asked if Stage would mind swinging by with a couple of cans of snuff.

Stage showed up as promised, but Webster was gone. He had checked himself out and taken a cab to Three Rivers, where he played the entire game. No one attempted to dissuade him. On the contrary, when Webster walked through the door, Ron Blackledge, the offensive line coach, “about started crying,” Ilkin recalled.

During one six-year stretch,
Webster never missed a snap—a streak of 5,871 consecutive offensive plays. That did not include long snaps on punts, field goals, and extra points or the snaps he made in preseason and postseason games.
When the streak finally ended in 1986 because of a “very badly dislocated elbow,” Webster estimated that dating back to his sophomore year of high school, he had played in 300 out of 300 of his teams’ games. He figured he had participated in 890 out of some 900 practices in the NFL.

As Webster was reaching the end of his career, the Steelers drafted a young running back.
His name was Merril Hoge, and he had grown up in Pocatello, Idaho. Hoge was drafted in the tenth round, the 261st overall pick. His exposure to the Steelers and the NFL had come almost entirely through television. To Hoge, like most fans, the Pittsburgh Steelers were giants who roamed the earth. When he walked into the huddle for the first time, it was like walking onto a movie set.

And then, suddenly, Hoge found himself face-to-face with Mike Webster.

Hoge loved to hunt, and he thought that seeing Webster in his natural habitat was like being startled by some fantastic animal out in the wild. He was majestic. He had an aura.
That guy’s been around
, Hoge thought.
That guy knows
. He looked at Webster’s helmet. The rubber was partially scraped off the face mask, exposing the metal underneath. There were cracks and deep divots in the plastic shell, “like a bear had attacked it.” Webster certainly could have obtained a new helmet. He didn’t want one.

Hoge was Webster’s roommate that season. It was like “rooming with your dad,” he said, only more intimidating: “I mean, I was scared to death.” He came to understand the many ways Iron Mike was driven to succeed and survive, his toughness and the underlying vulnerability. Webster lived by one central tenet: Never come off the field. During one game, the Steelers were getting blown out in Phoenix, 31–7 in the fourth quarter. Noll pulled all his starters, but Webster refused to leave.

As the offense huddled up, Webster turned to Hoge and said, “We’re gonna take the ball and we’re gonna shove it down their throats. You got me?”

“You talk about inspired, I mean, I had a rocket in my ass,” Hoge said.

The drive ended with Hoge catching a 12-yard pass in the end zone.

In Webster, Hoge came to see the totality of a football life.

He’s the epitome of the NFL
, Hoge thought.
Nobody was as tough as that dude. Nobody
.

The Steelers effectively cut Webster after the 1988 season, allowing him to become a free agent.
He was devastated, having believed the team would keep him on as a player-coach. He announced his retirement and then
took a job in Kansas City as a coach, but soon he was playing for the Chiefs. He lasted another two seasons. The end finally came in 1990. The Chiefs had a center of the future, Tim Grunhard, but he was struggling that year. Grunhard’s father had died of cancer, and Tim was playing with a cast on his hand because of a dislocated thumb. One Sunday against the Broncos, head coach Marty Schottenheimer replaced him with Webster.

Grunhard was humiliated; he feared his career was over before it
started. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked up to see Webster stripping off his gear.

“What are you doing?” Schottenheimer said.

“You gotta put this guy in,” Webster told him. “I’m not playing anymore.”

Grunhard never forgot the gesture. He played 11 years in the NFL.

“It was the turning point of my career,” he said.

As for Webster, he was done. He was 38 years old. That year, he had played with three broken ribs, a fractured right heel that never properly mended, and bulging discs in his back that his kids could see when they splashed around in the pool.

On a medical form that Webster filled out during his last season, he was asked whether he had neck pain, such as frequent stiffness, motion limitation, and so on.

“No,” he replied.

Then, in the comments section, he added, “JUST ON MONDAYS.”

Some years later, Noll would mention to one of Webster’s doctors that there were times in the locker room when he would look over and see his powerful center, his offensive captain, the epitome of the NFL, with his head buried in his hands, seemingly in a daze.

Webster had built
a 3,000-square-foot home in Kansas City for his retirement, a monument to everything he had achieved: a successful career, a stable family life, escape from the turmoil of the Northwoods. The house had its own phone booth so Brooke could carry on her teenage conversations in private. There was a pool down the street. “It was like he wanted to make our dreams come true,” said Pam.

At first, that was exactly what it looked like: a beautiful dream. Pam loved Kansas City. So did the kids. But they began to notice changes in Mike, almost imperceptible at first but growing more noticeable during his final years in Pittsburgh and Kansas City and now impossible to ignore. Before, Mike rarely raised his voice; now his temper was short. He became easily distracted and forgetful. He was often lethargic and indecisive. Where Webster once had approached his work with unrelenting focus, now “he couldn’t decide what to have for breakfast,” Pam said.

Webster soon became obsessed with the failings of the monument he had created. “He was
angry
at that house,” said Pam. “It got built, and then he found fault with everything.” Minor leaks or a problem with the tile sent him into a rage. He thought the contractor was out to screw him. Without warning, seemingly, the Websters had financial problems. Mike had led Pam to believe they were set for life, but now they were having trouble making the house payments. She couldn’t understand why.

Pam was at a loss for why it was happening or what to do. She worried it might have something to do with her or the kids. As Mike’s behavior grew more erratic, Pam began to think that her husband was rapidly being replaced with another person who occupied the same body.

Chuck
Noll had a question for the Pittsburgh Steelers’ brain specialist. His name was Joe Maroon, and at the time he was the only one of his kind in the NFL. Maroon had been a pint-sized running back at Indiana University back in the late 1950s. Now, in 1991, he was one of the top neurosurgeons in the country, the chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. To reach that position, Maroon had survived nearly two decades of rigorous medical study, including residencies at Georgetown, Oxford, and Indiana. He had edited or contributed to hundreds of books and papers on everything from orbital tumors to the management of cervical spine injuries. He had served as general program chairman of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, an international education society with thousands of members.

And now a football coach wanted to know: On what basis are you telling me that my quarterback can’t play?

Steelers quarterback Bubby Brister had sustained a concussion the previous Sunday. Maroon, who moonlighted, unpaid, as the team’s neurological consultant, had examined Brister and determined that he should sit out the next week against the Buffalo Bills.

Noll had gotten the Steelers job in 1969 after Joe Paterno turned it down. He was known around Pittsburgh as
a Renaissance man who played guitar and dabbled in subjects as varied as photography, oceanography, and haute cuisine.

Brister looked fine, Noll told Maroon. He was throwing well. He knew the plays. Maroon, though, insisted that Brister had to rest for a week.

“Those are the recommended guidelines for this type of concussion,” Maroon explained.

“Well, who wrote the guidelines?” Noll said.

Maroon informed the coach that, in fact,
he
had, along with other top neurosurgeons experienced in sports medicine. The guidelines were based on previous experiments that had examined the effects of mild traumatic brain injury, the medical term for a concussion.
In one series of early experiments, professors at Wayne State University dropped dogs, pigs, pregnant baboons, and human cadavers down an elevator shaft to study the effects of concussions. In another experiment, a researcher put metal helmets on monkeys and applied pneumatic arms, which were propelled back and forth rapidly, violently shaking the monkeys’ heads. The monkeys were then euthanized and their brains cut out to examine the effect.