League of Denial (9 page)

Thus was born the Mike Webster–Sunny Jani partnership. Mike followed Sunny out of the bus station—a homeless former Steeler and his spindly twentysomething Indian guide. Jani got Webster a haircut, took him to Kmart to buy new clothes, and rented him a room for a month at the Red Roof Inn—at a discounted rate, since Sunny immediately was able to trade on Webster’s name to get a good deal.

Sunny was using Webster, but he seemed to drain some of the sleaziness out of the transaction by being so outrageously transparent about his motives. Every day, people try to turn a celebrity or a sports star into their meal ticket, but seldom do they announce it to the world. Sunny didn’t take a percentage from the first deals he made for Webster. That was part of his strategy. “I wanted him to trust me and build up a relationship with him,” Sunny said. “My hidden agenda was I wanted to get famous. I said, ‘You know, this is my meal ticket, but I have to take care of him.’ ”

Webster, perhaps the most guileless man in the world, especially in his addled state, wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted that Sunny get his fair share. Jani suggested a 10 percent cut. Webster countered with a 50–50 split, and there wouldn’t be any negotiating. Sunny knew it was ridiculous, unfair even. He used much of his proceeds to buy groceries for Webster or pay off some of the bills Webster was ignoring.

Sunny secured appearance fees for Webster all over Pittsburgh: $150 to sign autographs at a bowling alley here or a flea market there,
$5,000 to give a speech at Sears. Sunny once arranged an appearance in a friend’s garage, where Webster signed autographs for $10 a head. He cut deals for Webster at restaurants, persuading the managers to let the Steelers great eat for free or at a discount. He exchanged Webster’s autograph for rent, for cars, for medical expenses, for whatever he could conceive.

“You know, now I feel bad, but I kind of whored him out,” Jani said years later.

One client, a meter reader named Dennis, became a cash cow for Sunny and Mike. Dennis was massively overweight, and Webster was entertained by watching him inhale a meal. “He made love to food,” Sunny explained. They would go to all-you-can eat buffets at Ponderosa or a Chinese restaurant, with Dennis, of course, paying the freight.

On occasion, Dennis would pay $300 to have Webster come to his apartment and watch a game. Sunny set up this unusual business transaction perhaps a half dozen times until Webster began to feel guilty. Because Dennis liked to hang around, Sunny recruited him into the motley collection of people he employed to keep Webster’s life from completely falling apart. Jani dubbed it Team Webster.

Sunny had become the center of Mike Webster’s universe. Their relationship, born of exploitation, had shifted until they were now more like a patient and his deeply loyal caretaker. Webster often needed help just getting through the day, his body and mind deteriorating rapidly in opposite directions: Physically, he was an old man. Mentally, he was becoming a child.

As much as Jani tried to keep Mike’s life stable, Webster remained perpetually on the move, as if he couldn’t sit still. He spent hours driving all over the Midwest, sometimes sleeping in the homes of old friends, or in his cluttered Suburban, or in bus or train stations. By 1996, Webster would estimate he had spent about a year and a half of the last five
sleeping in his car.

Webster made the drive from Pittsburgh to Wisconsin and back dozens of times without incident. But suddenly it became an adventure. He was practically
living out of his truck, hauling around all his belongings, mainly clothes and books. To the very end, Webster loved to read and write, and the truck was filled with piles of books: Louis L’Amour novels,
historical tomes on JFK, Winston Churchill’s works, Patton’s greatest quotes, which he used to prop up his flagging moods. “He knew his story wasn’t gonna end well,” Webster’s youngest son, Garrett, would say.

Sometimes on those drives, Webster would call Jani in the middle of the night, lost and out of gas, with no money.

The conversations all went something like this:

It became such a regular occurrence that Jani started hiding money—$20 here, $50 there—inside different books. He always put the money on page 52, Webster’s number with the Steelers.

“Mike, I put $50 on page 52 of
Remembering JFK
,” Jani would tell him.

Not long after he met Webster, Jani got married; he and his wife had a baby girl. But Webster came to consume so much of Jani’s life that Jani was perpetually on call. He finally gave Webster the garage code to his home so that Webster could let himself in and sleep in the basement. Other times, Webster could be found sleeping in the back office at the Blue Eagle.

“You love Mike more than you love me,” complained Jani’s wife, Marsha. Whenever Mike called, Sunny jumped.

Soon Jani was divorced.

“We built up a great relationship of trust and love,” Jani said.

He was talking not about his wife but about Webster.

So much of
Mike’s life was coming apart in 1996. In May, Pam, with little choice, filed for divorce; Webster was so out of it, he didn’t realize until years later that his marriage had been dissolved. The IRS slapped him with a $250,000 tax lien.
His health continued to get worse. In the six years since his retirement, Webster had experienced fainting spells. He was hospitalized with heart problems and colitis. During one inexplicable stretch, he lost 20 pounds in three days. Doctors informed him he had lymphoma—until it turned out to be an infection; no one
was able to explain why it occurred or went away. Even a minor cut on his leg wasn’t simple. Where a Band-Aid would suffice for anyone else, blood spurted out of Webster’s leg to the point that he began applying
Super Glue to stanch the bleeding.

When Webster showed up at the
offices of Dr. Stanley Marks on September 5, 1996, Marks, who had treated him for years, reported that his patient’s life had “really deteriorated.” Marks continued: “He has had major problems with depression and obsessive compulsive behavior and is currently being treated with Ritalin and Paxil.… He also has frequent stress headaches.”

One morning that summer, a manager
at the Amtrak station in downtown Pittsburgh called the Steelers’ offices: Webster had been there all night. Joe Gordon, the team’s longtime public relations director, said he would be right over. The Rooneys had hired Gordon in 1969, the same year they had hired Chuck Noll, in an effort to upgrade the previously dismal franchise.
Gordon was a Pittsburgh native who had played varsity baseball at Pitt and whose hard-knuckle attitude fit perfectly with the brawling team. In the days preceding the 1976 AFC Championship Game against the hated Raiders,
Gordon decked an Oakland TV reporter. Asked the next day if his team was ready, Noll said, “I don’t know, but Joe Gordon is.”

Gordon had developed great respect for Webster during his 15 seasons with the Steelers. Like everyone, he was wowed by the center’s work ethic and was well aware of the brutal childhood that drove him. As the PR director,
Gordon also was impressed by Webster’s generosity.

“He was always very accommodating, never ever turned down an interview request or to visit a sick kid or go to Children’s Hospital,” Gordon said. “Mike was always there.”

When Webster earned $500 for doing a print ad that Gordon helped set up, Webster tried to give him half the money.

“If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have had this opportunity,” Webster said.

“Mike, that’s part of my job,” Gordon replied.

Before Gordon left for
the train station, he stopped by owner Dan Rooney’s office to tell his boss about Webster. Gordon said he planned to take $200 out of petty cash to help Iron Mike. Rooney agreed that
was a good plan. Gordon found Webster sitting at a counter, hovering over a pile of photographs of great athletes such as Muhammad Ali and Mickey Mantle. Webster looked messy, his clothes wrinkled, but Gordon didn’t think he appeared all that different from the way he often did. When Webster saw Gordon, he seemed unsurprised that the two old friends were meeting in the train station or that one of them seemed to be sleeping there.

“It was just like I’d seen him two or three days ago,” Gordon said. “It was a normal meeting with him.”

Webster explained that he had acquired the rights to distribute the high-quality photos of sports greats. He told Gordon he was going to make a fortune. Gordon quickly deduced that the business, or at least its prospects, was a figment of Mike’s imagination.

“Well, come on, you’ve got to get out of here,” Gordon said. “Where are you staying?”

“I’ve got a place to stay,” Webster said, mentioning the Red Roof Inn.

Before home games, the Steelers stayed at the Hilton, and Gordon suggested that the team could put him up there for the weekend. Webster agreed. He stayed on through the weekend and well beyond that, with no one pressing him to leave. Occasionally, Gordon would stop by, and it appeared as if Webster never left the room. Clothes, towels, candy wrappers, the remains of two-day-old room service were strewn everywhere. Webster assured Gordon he would let the maids clean up. Finally, three days having turned into three months, Rooney had to put his foot down: Webster couldn’t live on the Steelers’ dime indefinitely. The bill had reached more than $8,000. Gordon was dispatched to tell Webster he had to move on.

Then, with Webster’s condition rapidly deteriorating, it was announced he had been elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The announcement, of course, was not unexpected; Webster was one of the greatest linemen in NFL history. But it presented an uncomfortable dilemma. Webster’s struggles had become an open secret in Pittsburgh and parts of Wisconsin. As preparations for the induction ceremony unfolded, those closest to Webster wondered how he would get through it.

In early July 1997, weeks before the ceremony,
ESPN aired a story that laid bare Webster’s postretirement life. The story noted the loss of his home, his car, and “most of his worldly possessions.” Pam was quoted saying, “As good as times got, they got bad. We’ve gone through times when we didn’t have toilet paper, where we did not have heat in the house.”

Webster said doctors believed he might have Parkinson’s disease or a form of post-concussion syndrome. During a subsequent interview in which he suggested that the ESPN story had overstated his problems, Webster described visiting a doctor in Philadelphia who ran tests that revealed head and chest problems.

“Have you been in a car accident?” the doctor asked Webster. “Have you been hit lately? And how often?”

“Oh, probably about 25,000 times or so,” Webster responded.

By the time Team Webster arrived in Canton for the Hall of Fame induction ceremony, the tragic tale of
the fallen hero had been published across the country:

Still other papers picked up a story from the Associated Press titled “From Super Bowls to Sleeping in Bus Stations”—a story in which Webster insisted, “I’m not as bad off as people say.”

Of course, he was worse. But as humbling as it had been to see the demise play out so publicly, Sunny and Team Webster viewed the Hall of Fame induction more than anything as
a business opportunity. At signings, Sunny could now eliminate the word
Future
from
Hall of
Famer
; that had to be worth more money. Webster was in no mood to celebrate, not that he ever was. He had come to view the Hall as a sick ward inhabited by former players discarded by the league, their bodies and minds left to wither and rot, just as his were. He approached the event with two main objectives: dispel the rumors that his life was a train wreck and persuade several other Steelers Hall of Famers to join him in a new business venture. They would market themselves collectively: merchandise, signings, personal appearances.

“This was gonna be his big weekend: ‘Hey, I’m not a loser. I’m not a homeless guy living under an overpass like everyone says and addicted to pain medicine,’ ” said his son Colin. “That and ‘Here I am. Look, I made it.’ It was gonna be his weekend and the start of a new era.”

But none of his former teammates would sign on to his business plan. Some wanted to help, but no one was going to go into business anytime soon with Webby, not in his current state.
Webster asked Bob Stage, the pilot, if he would introduce him before his acceptance speech. Stage was touched, but he thought the choice was a reflection on how sick Webster was. “Mike, I’m honored, but you need somebody who had an impact in your career, not Joe Blow,” he said. Webster asked Stage if he thought Bradshaw would do it. Of course he would, said Stage.

In fact, Bradshaw did more than that. During the weekend, the retired Steelers quarterback pulled Webster aside and handed him
a check for $175,000. Webster tore it up. “Nooooo!” Sunny cried. “Mike, we need it!” Webster’s pride in such matters was as erratic and malleable as his mental state. One minute he was living in the Pittsburgh Hilton on the Rooneys’ dime, and the next he was ripping up a $175,000 check from his quarterback of over a decade. As the years went on,
Webster repeatedly rebuffed offers from his friends and former teammates, eventually alienating many of them. He developed an irrational loathing of the Steelers, blaming the team for a variety of his ills.

The ceremony on July 26, 1997, was delayed by rain; it was sticky and humid, with temperatures reaching the eighties. Webster was the last to be inducted into a class that included Raiders defensive back Mike Haynes, New York Giants owner Wellington Mara, and Dolphins
coach Don Shula, who, tanned and youthful, looked like he had just arrived from the Bahamas, especially compared with Webster, sitting next to him, who was pale and disheveled.