League of Denial Read online

  Steinberg, at least at the time, did not have that problem. He controlled 21 quarterbacks in the NFL and had written hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts. On the one hand, taking on the concussion issue was self-evidently bad for business. Neither the owners nor the players wanted to hear it; one client, Warren Moon, said to him: “You’re probably right, but I wish you’d shut up.” On the other hand, his activism could prolong careers, generate more contracts, and, at the very least, soothe his conscience.

  He knew the first order of business was to gather more information. Steinberg had been setting up more and more of his players with neurologists, and he asked the doctors pointed questions to try to get to the heart of the matter: How many concussions are too many? What is the point at which an athlete risks long-term brain damage? Are there any methods to prevent those problems and, once they’ve occurred, treat them? “There were no answers,” Steinberg said. Steinberg, whose battle with alcoholism later derailed his career, thought the whole era reminded him of how people once viewed public drunkenness as slapstick comedy and “there were people like Red Skelton and Foster Brooks and Dean Martin, a whole series of people who laughed and laughed about drunk driving. No one talked about the fatalities or the effects of alcoholism.”

  His solution was to set up informational seminars on the effects of concussions. He would bring in his high-profile clients and a panel of concussion experts to educate the players and the public and put pressure on the league to address the issue. Steinberg invited Tagliabue, or at least a representative of his new Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, to attend the first meeting in 1995. The response from the NFL was silence. Steinberg spoke privately to league owners and appealed to their pocketbooks, if not their humanity: If a brain-damaged player of Aikman’s caliber could no longer take the field, he reasoned, not only would the team lose the player, but his salary would be counted against the newly instituted salary cap. But there wasn’t much interest. Steinberg felt that the culture of denial was so embedded in the NFL that it was as if he had “asserted that the world was round instead of flat” and he was “one of the heretics.”

  Of course it wasn’t just the league: Many of his own players refused to take the issue seriously. Steinberg held the first seminar at the Newport Beach Marriott, not far from his famous office, a memorabilia-stuffed museum to pro football that made a cameo appearance, along with Steinberg and Aikman, in Jerry Maguire. In addition to his superstar quarterbacks—Aikman, Warren Moon, Steve Young—he invited some of the less heralded athletes in his stable. One was a 49ers linebacker, Gary Plummer, who like Steinberg had gone to Cal, the main reason the superagent agreed to represent him.

  Plummer’s view of the seriousness of the concussion issue was best expressed by his response when a trainer once asked him how many fingers he was holding up. “One,” replied Plummer, extending his middle finger.

  To Plummer, just raising the issue contradicted pretty much everything he had been taught and believed about pro football. It was not that he wasn’t aware of concussions; he had both experienced and inflicted them. But he viewed them as minor nuisances. When Toon and Hoge retired, his reaction was neither concern nor pity. Plummer thought simply: “They’re pussies.”

  “I had been playing football since I was eight years old, and there is nothing more revered in football than being a tough guy,” he said. “I prided myself on being a tough guy. I encouraged others to be tough guys. I did some horrendously stupid things in my career—like having surgery on Tuesday and playing on Sunday twice. I would never give you specific names, but there are hundreds of guys who had more talent in one hand than I had in my entire body, but because they weren’t tough, they couldn’t play in the NFL. The coaches have euphemisms. They’ll say: ‘You know, that guy has to learn the difference between pain and injury.’ Or: ‘He has to learn the difference between college and professional football.’ What he’s saying is the guy’s a pussy and he needs to get tough or he’s not going to be on the team. It’s a very, very clear message and literally hundreds of guys that I played with were just pussies.”

  Plummer’s solution to pain was not rest or retirement but Toradol, a painkiller that had come on the market in 1989 and soon swept through the NFL like a miracle drug. In a 2002 academic paper first mentioned in the Washington Post, 28 team doctors reported injecting Toradol every Sunday, some to as many as 35 players. Plummer, like many, injected the drug preemptively, “literally right before the game,” to mask his injuries. “It’s like an overall body analgesic, and it dulls the pain,” he said. Plummer and another ex-49er, the center Ben Lynch, said that as the season wore on, players lined up 10 or 20 deep before games to get their injections. “I mean, it really was like a production line,” said Lynch, “a line of guys that would just pull their pants down, show their butt cheek, and the doctor would give them a shot of Toradol. It wasn’t, ‘Come in and shut the door. Hey, how ya doin?’ It was just boop, boop, boop, boop.”

  The drug lasted “almost exactly four hours,” Plummer said, after which “it feels like literally a gang of thugs had just taken a baseball bat to your body.” That included his head: “When the Toradol wore off, I’d just get this unbelievable headache for somewhere around six hours. It felt like somebody had hit you in the back of the head with a two-by-four.” The pain revealed one of the more insidious aspects of Toradol: The drug masked the actual injury to allow players to play, increasing the likelihood of making the injury worse.

  Plummer resisted attending the seminars but was finally “convinced” after two of Steinberg’s assistants enticed him with “a car service to pick me up, a hotel room, and ordering $2,000 worth of stuff out of a Nike catalogue.”

  Now, in a conference room at the Newport Beach Marriott, Plummer listened to the medical experts Steinberg had assembled describe the dangers of concussions. Mark Lovell was there from Pittsburgh, explaining his new concussion test. So was Julian Bailes, talking about the potential risks of long-term brain damage. Plummer sat in the back of the room next to Steve Wallace, a 49ers tackle who had sustained so many concussions that he had taken to wearing a kind of helmet for his helmet: a half-inch-thick Styrofoam “ProCap” that made him look so much like an alien that his teammates called him Gazoo after the big-headed character on The Flintstones.

  “They’re up there giving their spiel, and I wasn’t even paying attention because I’m like, ‘You know, this is my job: to freaking smash people. I really don’t care that these quarterbacks get hurt,’ ” Plummer said. “So all of a sudden this guy—I don’t know who he was, some doctor—he says: ‘Many of you don’t understand that there are three grades of concussions. A Grade I concussion is seeing stars, being slightly disoriented. If you had one of those, you need to get evaluated on the sideline. And if you’ve had them back-to-back, you probably need to sit out for a week or two.’

  “I had been bored stiff, but now I literally jump up out of my chair and I say: ‘I don’t know where you’re getting your data from, but you’ve obviously never played in the NFL.’ The guy’s kind of startled, and he says: ‘Excuse me? What do you mean?’ I said: ‘If I didn’t have five of your so-called Grade I concussions a game, that meant I was basically inactive. And by the way, there are some plays when you get two of those on the same play.’ ”

  Plummer was on a roll: “You try putting your forehead underneath a 330-pound offensive guard and then get off of him to take on a 220-pound running back,” he told the doctor. “Trust me, you’re going to see stars just like the cartoons with the little birdie flying around your head. I’m in my thirteenth year of professional football, and I have five of these a game. So according to your theory I’ve had over 750 concussions, and you know what? I’m pretty lucid.’

  “The guy started to get argumentative, and I told him to take his clinical studies and put them where the sun don’t shine because he’s full of crap.”

  That, of course, was not the public message that came out of Steinberg’s
seminar. The agent announced that he intended to produce a white paper on concussion assessment and treatment and present it to the NFL. It would call for the elimination of AstroTurf fields, a study of helmets, and the creation of an independent “medical referee,” preferably a neurologist whose sole job would be to determine whether a player should return to play. Some of the players in attendance, mainly the quarterbacks, seemed to take the discussion seriously. Aikman admitted that he barely remembered the details of the previous year’s Super Bowl. He noted that the NFL benefited from videos that showed particularly vicious hits and that the revenue “goes right into NFL Properties’ pockets. They’re kind of straddling a line there.”

  “I’ve had concussions, and I’ve come back too soon,” Aikman said. “People this year were asking me, ‘When is enough enough?’ The next one could maybe be my last one. I’ve said before if it comes to the point that I’m worrying about concussions, I will get out.”

  Aikman would play five more years.

  Steinberg believed he was “dancing on the edge of the apocalypse to raise these issues. No one wanted it to be true. No one wanted concussions to pose a threat to the NFL. No one wanted there to be long-term ramifications.” When word from the league eventually got back to Steinberg through a team official or someone else connected to the commissioner, the response was always the same: “Show us the studies. There are no studies.” But Steinberg felt he was making progress. He had aligned himself with the people who believed the world was round, people such as Lovell and Bailes and Barry Jordan. Those men had produced studies, and soon there would be more. Steinberg thought the force of his argument eventually would win the day, and the NFL—the commissioner, the players, everyone—would wake up to the reality that the sport needed to change drastically. At least that was what he thought.

  5

  THE MIKE WEBSTER HEALTH CARE SYSTEM

  Team Webster’s two-pronged strategy for the Hall of Fame had failed miserably. Webster’s rambling acceptance speech, even delivered on 80 mg of Ritalin, only reinforced the perception that he was to a large degree unhinged. His latest moneymaking scheme, the Steelers Hall of Famer collective, also went nowhere. Having ripped up Bradshaw’s $175,000 check in a grand gesture of pride and pique, he returned to Pittsburgh, where he was now living with his oldest son, Colin, in a two-bedroom apartment furnished with camping utensils and furniture culled from yard sales and the Dollar Store. Colin and Mike ate sparingly: “We’d have a little pasta or just sliced bread and toast,” Colin said. “Once in a while we’d get some cheap Italian sausage or hamburger and throw them in the sauce and kind of stretch it.”

  Colin sarcastically referred to those lean times as “my bachelor pad years.” He was 19, just out of high school, his life a 24/7 job of looking after, caring for, and chauffeuring around his famous father. But what else could he do? He had been living in Wisconsin with his mom and his siblings when they received a call one day that his dad was in trouble in Philadelphia. Colin and his sister Brooke immediately hopped on a train. When they arrived in Philly, they found Webster nearly catatonic and living in a suite at the historic Warwick Hotel.

  “He looked like death,” Colin said. “He was just very addled.” Webster was holding a bottle of large oval-shaped pills, which Colin understood to be muscle relaxers. “He would take some of these horse pills and lay down. Then he’d take some more 15 minutes later. I’d be like, ‘Dad, no!’ ” Colin and Brooke somehow got their 250-pound father into the shower. A moment later, they heard a crash. “I thought he was going to be dead when I went in there because the smack was so loud; he tripped over the tub line and it was just boom!” said Colin. “It was a marble floor, and the sound was just sickening. I can hear it to this day.” He found his father sprawled on the floor but otherwise okay. A couple of days later, Colin took Mike back to Pittsburgh and moved in with him.

  At that point, it was hard to say which was more alarming: Webster’s mental or physical deterioration. He was 45. His hands and feet were swollen and disfigured; his perpetually aching right heel tormented him. Webster seemed susceptible to grotesque and inexplicable afflictions; one day, without warning, dozens of red, open sores erupted across his arms and his back. As often as not, Webster would ignore those myriad ailments or treat them himself with a variety of medieval coping mechanisms that combined the creativity of alternative medicine with Ace Hardware.

  Between his sparse meals, Webster subsisted on junk food—Coke, Dots, Little Debbie Cakes, pecan swirls—and ever-present tins of snuff. Soon his teeth began to fall out. He couldn’t afford a dentist, and so “he’d Super Glue his teeth back into his head,” said Colin. Webster lost—and reset—about 10 teeth this way, according to Colin. “It was kind of awesome in a not necessarily so awesome way.” The bottoms of Webster’s feet were cracked—long fissures that made it painful to walk. This he solved by wrapping them in duct tape. Webster slept erratically; because of his constant back pain, he shunned beds and often nodded off in a chair. When that didn’t work, he walked outside and tried sleeping behind the wheel of his truck.

  When that didn’t work, Webster took more drastic measures. He had acquired a number of mail-order stun guns. “One was real long, like a police baton,” Colin said. “It had the two prongs, and you could see a clear blue spark; it’d make that crack, crack, crack sound. And then he had one that was called the Myotron, which he was really excited about because it was guaranteed to put somebody out for thirty minutes.” Sometimes, Webster put himself to sleep with the Myotron, calling it soothing. Colin, who inherited his father’s love of reading and penned science fiction novels, joked that his dad had “a primordial nervous system that allowed him to absorb energy” like a superhero.

  One day, Mike asked Sunny Jani, his booker and caretaker, to put him out. “He had really bad pain, and he just wanted to go to sleep, you know?” said Sunny. “I did it only once. I didn’t know if he wouldn’t wake up and I’d have to go to jail.” Sunny winced as he gingerly applied the Myotron to Webster’s thigh. Mike was jolted unconscious. “I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck, what the hell just happened here?’ ” Sunny said. “I’m like, ‘Holy heck, wake up, man! Wake up!’ ”

  Mike came to about a half hour later. Sunny, standing over him with a glass of water, felt his heart pounding.

  “Man, that was the greatest nap I’ve ever had,” said Webster.

  “Please, Mike, don’t ever ask me to do that again,” Sunny told him.

  Sunny came to refer to Webster’s various methods of self-treatment as the Mike Webster Health Care System.

  Team Webster clearly needed a doctor. Shortly after the Hall of Fame induction and Webster’s scattered acceptance speech, James Vodvarka, an internist in Wintersville, Ohio, was talking with one of his hunting buddies, former Steelers lineman Steve Courson.

  Courson was concerned about Webster. “You know, there’s something wrong with him,” he told Vodvarka.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he’s living out of his truck, and he’s not able to function. He can’t hold a job. He’s just not able to function in society.”

  Like Sunny, Vodvarka had grown up in McKees Rocks. He was a die-hard Steelers fan who worshiped Iron Mike as a leader on those fabled teams. He could still see him sprinting out of the huddle, his bulging biceps exposed in the subfreezing weather, or delivering measured, articulate analysis after the game. When Courson asked if he’d be willing to examine his friend, Vodvarka said he would be delighted.

  Almost from the moment Webster came through the door, Vodvarka could tell something wasn’t right. Although he was an internist, Vodvarka knew a lot about brain dysfunction. His father had had a stroke years earlier, and more recently his son had been born with a slightly deformed skull and a brain bleed.

  Vodvarka noticed that Webster had a “Parkinsonian stare.” “You know, when you watch somebody, it’s like at times there’s no expression?” he said. “There’s no emotion, and it’s like somebod
y’s looking right through you when they talk to you.” Tracing his hands over Webster’s skull, Vodvarka discovered a cluster of knots on his forehead: scar tissue that he thought was indicative of trauma. Vodvarka had seen this in car-crash victims, but typically there was one lump where the head had hit the steering wheel or the dashboard. In Webster’s case, there were lumps everywhere.

  Vodvarka thought immediately there could be only one source of Webster’s problems. “Here’s a guy that’s pretty discombobulated, beat up physically, and played the position of center in football,” he said. “I mean, it didn’t take much thinking to think that football was the main cause.”

  Vodvarka told Webster he wanted him to return for regular follow-up appointments. Webster did, although it was never clear if he would show up on the right day, much less the right time. In many ways it was an ideal arrangement: Webster had neither money nor health insurance (besides the Mike Webster Plan); Vodvarka was only too happy to treat him for free. In that regard, Vodvarka was like many people hanging around Webster, basking in his former greatness. When they went out to eat, Vodvarka invariably picked up the tab. “He’d be stopping people on the way out of the restaurant going, ‘Hey, do you know who this is? This is Mike Webster,’ ” said Colin. “It was just really awkward.”

  But Vodvarka also was indispensable, the perfect doctor for Team Webster—on call at all times and a trusted and reliable source when Mike ran out of his meds. Webster called him Jimbo and soon was making regular one-hour drives between Pittsburgh and Wintersville, often to pick up prescriptions for Ritalin or Ultran, a pain pill.

  It was clear to Vodvarka that Mike was disabled; no way could he hold down a job. But Webster had never filed for disability benefits with the NFL. The league had a program, the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan, that granted benefits to retired players and their families. The plan was administered jointly by the players and the owners; three reps from each side ruled on disability claims. But many former players viewed the plan with contempt. It was the place where their pleas for help went to die or at least remain in perpetual limbo. They complained of a byzantine application process, of being sent to doctor after doctor, of their claims being stretched out interminably. A decade later, when the NFL and the players union were called before Congress to answer questions about the league’s commitment to retired players, officials would acknowledge that only 317 out of more than 10,000 eligible players were receiving benefits.