League of Denial Read online

  Brain injuries were viewed as the hardest sell. It was as if the NFL’s disability board was channeling the views that Tagliabue had articulated to Halberstam at the 92nd Street Y. Some players and lawyers came to believe that the board simply did not award benefits for any neurocognitive impairment—ever. Brent Boyd, a Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman who had been diagnosed by several doctors with football-related brain damage that prevented him from working, told Congress that the board was using “tactics of delay [and] deny” in the “hope that I put a bullet through my head to end their problem.”

  But Vodvarka believed that if anyone deserved disability benefits—to help him solve at least a few of his myriad problems—it was Webster. Vodvarka knew it would be an immense challenge. Webster certainly couldn’t handle it himself. He decided Webster needed a lawyer who was smart and tough enough to stand up to the NFL. Vodvarka called a judge he knew in West Virginia.

  “What if you had an NFL player that’s hit rock bottom, but there’s a reason for it and nobody will listen?” Vodvarka asked the judge without naming Webster. “Who would be an attorney that I could get that would be able to go against one of the biggest entities in our country and not be intimidated?”

  The judge replied without hesitation: “Bob Fitzsimmons—he’s the best.”

  Mike Webster and Bob Fitzsimmons had one major thing in common: Neither of them slept. On most nights, up until midnight and often beyond, Fitzsimmons could be found in his office, a converted firehouse on Warwood Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in Wheeling, West Virginia. As a grace note, Fitzsimmons had kept the fireman’s pole, which ran between the first and second floors next to a mahogany staircase. When Mike and Sunny first went to meet him, Fitzsimmons penciled them in for 10. “Mike, what kind of lawyer works at 10 at night?” Jani asked.

  In fact, Fitzsimmons was the kind of lawyer who with a single glance conveyed the impression, “You do not want to fuck with me.” That happened to be an accurate impression, because Fitzsimmons had carved out a considerable reputation in the Ohio River Valley as the man to turn to on the biggest cases involving medical malpractice, coalmining accidents, toxic exposure, and so on. The region, the heart of the nation’s rust belt, produced enough litigative fodder for generations of personal injury attorneys, and Fitzsimmons was now bringing his sons into the business. Fitzsimmons’s father had been a plumber, and Fitzsimmons had worked his way through high school, college, and law school as a member of Local 83 of the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters. He was neither tall nor particularly imposing, but he projected a coiled intensity that seemed to lie just below the surface. One thing was crystal clear: If Bob Fitzsimmons joined Team Webster, he would be nobody’s sycophant.

  Fitzsimmons didn’t normally take disability cases, and so he wasn’t initially certain how he could help. But as Webster began to talk, Fitzsimmons realized that (1) something was very wrong with the legendary player and (2) Webster’s case was not totally dissimilar to other personal injury cases he had handled. Fitzsimmons had already read and heard some of the stories about Webster, that he was “some nut case running around out there.” Instead, he found him intelligent and well read, instantly likable, but with no apparent ability to focus. Every two or three minutes, Webster would change the subject. Fitzsimmons tried to obtain his medical history—Have you seen a doctor? What have you been treated for? Who did you see?—but Webster was no help there. There were long pauses as Mike hunted for words. “He was a total blank,” said Fitzsimmons. “It was like he had amnesia.”

  Fitzsimmons thought it was obvious: Webster had some sort of closed-head injury. This was Personal Injury Law 101: Client gets in car crash, lawyer brings in psychologist to do workup, damages are awarded. “It’s been a common thing,” Fitzsimmons said. “It’s been common now for years and years and years.”

  This case would prove slightly more complicated than that. If Fitzsimmons didn’t fully grasp the complexity of the journey he was about to embark on, he soon would. It would involve not only the all-consuming and unpredictable care and feeding of Mike Webster, a client who would end up all but living with Fitzsimmons, but the most powerful entity the lawyer had ever confronted: the National Football League.

  But that was later. For now, Fitzsimmons spent much of 1998 setting up a series of psychological exams for Webster. He sent him first to see Fred Krieg, a Wheeling psychologist and professor at nearby Marshall University. Just getting Mike to the doctor could be a slapstick adventure. He canceled several appointments, and then, on the day he did show up, he was two and a half hours late because he got lost getting to an office that was less than three miles from Fitzsimmons’s office. Webster was off his Ritalin when he saw Krieg, and so an evaluation that should have taken only a few hours ended up lasting two days. Without Ritalin, Webster admitted to the doctor, “I can’t think straight.”

  Krieg took Webster’s personal history and performed a battery of tests. He was moved that even though it was to Webster’s advantage to do poorly—the better to make his case to the NFL—he tried hard to impress the doctor. He sugarcoated his problems and focused on his physical ailments rather than his mental and emotional ones. “He is obviously a very proud man who is somewhat embarrassed by his present situation,” Krieg observed.

  Krieg concurred with Vodvarka: Football had given Webster irreparable brain damage. He wrote: “I believe that Mr. Webster’s condition is caused by many years in the NFL and the repeated blows to the head he received as a center.” Krieg compared Webster’s condition to that of a punch-drunk boxer. “It takes very little time to realize that he has fallen from the position of hero to one of pity,” he wrote.

  Fitzsimmons also sent Webster to see Charles Kelly, a local family practitioner and social worker who also dealt with mental health cases. Among other things, Kelly worked as a ringside physician at West Virginia boxing matches. To Kelly, like Vodvarka and Krieg before him, the situation was obvious: Football had given Webster chronic brain disease. “It is my opinion that Mr. Webster suffers from encephalopathy caused by head trauma,” he wrote.

  Fitzsimmons turned finally to a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center named Jonathan Himmelhoch. Himmelhoch would examine Webster six times over three months, more extensively than any other doctor except perhaps Vodvarka. He then wrote a devastating six-page summation of how football had destroyed Webster mentally and physically.

  Himmelhoch described Webster as a confirmed “encephalopath”—a person with chronic brain injury—whose “totally disabling” condition was the primary reason he was now living like a “vagabond, often using his old pickup truck as a home.” In Himmelhoch’s opinion, part of Webster’s desperate condition derived from the fact that his medical treatment had been compromised from the start of his career. His care, he wrote, “has been delivered by doctors working for two masters—1st the Pittsburgh Steelers and second, Michael L. Webster.” Those doctors repeatedly allowed or encouraged Webster to play hurt, essentially refusing to save him from himself to advance the interests of the team. “Full recovery of subtle head injury is a necessity before resuming any job,” Himmelhoch wrote. “If there is no recovery period, subtle, then manifest cortical injury is insured. One can conclude, therefore, to reasonable medical certainty that Mr. Webster’s progressive deteriorating encephalopathy began while he was still playing NFL football.”

  Webster, Himmelhoch concluded, “suffers from a traumatic or punch-drunk encephalopathy, caused by multiple blows while playing center in the NFL.”

  The disability case became Webster’s obsession. It was a forum to show the world how football could destroy a man’s mind. At the same time, the case fed Webster’s growing hatred of the Steelers’ brass and the NFL.

  Webster came to believe it was his destiny to restore the dignity of thousands of battered players and avenge the league’s sins of abusing and discarding them. As Fitzsimmons gathered evidence, Webster raged against those he
perceived as trying to stop him, including Steelers owner Dan Rooney, PR man Joe Gordon, the Steelers’ organization, and the retirement committee itself. He became convinced that the Steelers had burned his medical records and paid off doctors to torpedo his case. In fact, the opposite was true. Fitzsimmons would later say that Rooney called him personally to ask how he could help and notify him that he had lobbied the league on Webster’s behalf. Even in the worst of times—and they would soon get very bad—Fitzsimmons had nothing but good things to say about Dan Rooney and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

  Here was the essential, sad truth about Mike Webster. His cause was just. He was leading a fight that eventually would lift the secrecy and shame that shrouded an untold number of former players sustaining the devastating effects of head trauma and other football-related injuries. His struggle would significantly advance the science of concussion and the search for the truth about the connection between football and neurodegenerative disease (Fitzsimmons called him the “father of the whole thing”). Yet the disease now ravaging Webster’s brain was plunging him into a world of delusion, incoherence, self-loathing, and rage. It was an increasingly dark world.

  Webster through the years had collected an array of firearms: a .357 Magnum revolver, a Sig Sauer P226 semiautomatic pistol, an M1911 semiautomatic pistol, riot shotguns, stump shotguns, hunting rifles. He kept them under his bed and in his truck. Now, when he launched into a particularly intense rant, he told his son Colin that what he would really like to do was kill Dan Rooney or Joe Gordon or the many people connected to the Bert Bell retirement plan.

  “He wanted to go shoot these guys in the head,” said Colin. “They don’t know how close I guarantee you it came to happening on many occasions. Dad literally wanted to go and shoot these guys, some of them that were messing with him.”

  Colin, while living with Webster, had absorbed his father’s rage and in many ways came to share it. He said he understood the desire for revenge. The only thing that held his father back, Colin believed, was his fear that such an act of violence would reflect badly on his family.

  Webster thus poured his emotions into legal pads and notebooks, which he toted everywhere in a heavy satchel. Webster’s fingers were so mangled, his knuckles so swollen, that he couldn’t hold a pen for very long. To write, he used the same duct tape that held his feet together and wrapped it around his fingers. He holed up for hours at Kinko’s or Barnes & Noble, at rest stops during his wanderings along the highway. He sent the letters to almost everyone he came in contact with: his doctors, his friends, his children. Fitzsimmons received letters almost daily, some hand delivered, some faxed from wherever Webster happened to be writing. Fitzsimmons cleared out a storage room in the basement and let Mike use it as an office where he wrote and sometimes slept. Webster bathed himself with paper towels, leaving water all over the floor of the basement’s tiny bathroom. Fitzsimmons would leave late at night, only to find yet another letter stuck to the windshield of his car. Some were 20 or 30 pages long. By the end, the lawyer had collected hundreds. Some went unread; there were simply too many to keep up. Others were incomprehensible, depending on Webster’s mental state.

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

  Dear Bob,

  Thank you for Taking the time to See me Today. I know you are Busy and I Expected that the Burt [sic] Bell People under the Direction of Dan Rooney and His Associates will Drag this out and Deny me a Thing so that I Never make it out of my own Personal Hell!

  Often they were jumbled and despairing:

  No Money Poverty Worse Every day. No money many weekends almost everyone sit can not do anything or Go anywhere. No source of Help and Where to Turn So I do not know when last time any Fun & Enjoyment and Cost of Medical and other Costs has been staggering.

  My goddamn writing and mind are going to shit. Wow.

  Occasionally they were hopeful:

  Restoration of my Past my name and the lives and future of my kids, my mind, body, honor and to have a chance to live out my life in a little peace and harmony, then I can go to work for you, Robert, investigating and cracking the case, underground secret investigation and super snooper, sergeant Columbo. That’s me!

  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:

  It would Be the same as Having you come in my House Bend my wife over the Couch Fuck Her in The Butt and, Beat up abuse my Kids etc while I tell them It’s O.K. Family These Guys Gave Me The privilege of working For Them and Getting the shit Beat out of myself and Despite Helping Them and The Coaches have High Percentage of winning Records and multiple championship that sell out every Game excess profits etc and can always get Jobs, They Want Just a Little Free Liability To Keep Taking from Us!

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

  Then Behold a Pale Horse

  The Man Who Rode Him Was Death

  And Hell Followed With Him

  “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 foo
tball. 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.