League of Denial Read online

  “Don’t worry,” Webster told him. “When I get better, we’re going to get those Harleys. We’ll go out and make some money on some signings and do some different things.”

  But not long after the surgery, Garrett and Sunny were told they should call the rest of the family. There was too much blockage. Webster’s body was shutting down.

  Garrett and Sunny were stunned. Like everyone who had known him or watched him, they believed to the end that Iron Mike was indestructible. But he wasn’t. In the early morning hours of September 24, 2002, Mike Webster was pronounced dead. He was 50. Sunny, the memorabilia collector, recalled being struck by the time of death: 12:52 A.M.

  Bradshaw wore 12, Webster 52.

  The Steelers paid for the funeral: $5,000. Two hundred people attended, including a Who’s Who of Steelers greats: Bradshaw, Swann, Harris, Blount, Noll. And the owner, Dan Rooney. Sunny had called Joe Gordon to ask the team for help; he had never really understood Webster’s hatred of the Steelers. Colin was at Camp Lejeune, about to be deployed to Iraq, when he got the terrible news that his father was dying. At the funeral, he watched with disgust as Garrett greeted Rooney and the other Steelers. At one point, two of Rooney’s assistants approached Colin to ask if he would come over to see the owner and receive his condolences. “Fuck you!” Colin shouted at Rooney. “My dad loathed you till the day he died. You have no business here.”

  Pam found herself looking around at all of Webster’s ex-teammates and their wives. She wondered: Why aren’t you all having to deal with this? Why just Mike? What did we all do to deserve this? Why are your husbands all fine?

  Noll’s wife, Marianne, came up to offer her sympathies.

  “I didn’t know Mike was sick; he didn’t appear sick,” she told Pam.

  “Mike didn’t appear sick because his injuries were inside his helmet,” Pam said.

  A few days later, the phone rang at Bob Fitzsimmons’s office. The caller introduced himself as a pathologist with the Allegheny County coroner. Fitzsimmons could hardly understand him. The caller had a thick accent, and Fitzsimmons was tired and grief-stricken. He had lost a client who had become his friend. Fitzsimmons had grown to love Webster, and Mike’s death had only made him more committed to confronting the NFL, to trying to recover what Mike was owed on behalf of his family.

  Fitzsimmons wasn’t totally sure he understood what the doctor wanted. He asked him to repeat himself, and the pathologist explained that he had read about Webster’s problems before his death.

  Then he repeated his odd request: Could he please study Mike Webster’s brain?

  6

  THE VANILLA GUY

  Leigh Steinberg’s Marriott brain seminars were causing a cultural shift in the NFL. Steinberg knew that the tradition of players laughing about their head injuries or hiding them from trainers and doctors would never be fully eradicated; expecting otherwise was “somewhat akin to asking a drunk driver whether they’re drunk,” he thought. But the culture was definitely changing. Exhibit A was Steinberg’s biggest client.

  “The flippancy went away in that time period,” said Steve Young.

  Steve Young was not like most football players, and it went well beyond his use of words like flippancy. He was the great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, patriarch of the Mormon Church and founder of the university where Young played college football. Young was born in Salt Lake City but raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, after his father, a corporate lawyer and former BYU fullback, got a job in New York City. He was a National Merit Scholar and a great high school quarterback with a suspect throwing arm. Young decided to attend BYU, at the time a quarterback factory, even though he had no guarantee he’d get to play quarterback there.

  Young took a long and circuitous path to NFL immortality. He started out eighth on the depth chart at BYU and spent much of his time there in the shadow of Jim McMahon before emerging as a star his senior season. Instead of going to the NFL, he signed a $40 million contract with the Los Angeles Express of the short-lived United States Football League, a decision he immediately regretted. Within a year, Steinberg had wrangled Young out of his contract. Young landed in 1985 with the lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where his record as a starter was 3–19. Tampa Bay then traded him to the 49ers to make room for Vinny Testaverde. In San Francisco, Young became embroiled in the mother of all quarterback controversies, a rivalry with Joe Montana that lasted six years.

  Young was almost 32 when the Niners finally traded Montana to Kansas City. Still, he remained in the legend’s shadow, respected by his teammates but viewed as a curious case: cerebral, proper (the Brett Favre part in There’s Something About Mary was originally written for Young, but he turned it down because he felt the humor was inappropriate), the kind of quarterback who picked up his law degree in the off-season and might someday run for president or Congress. That changed one afternoon when head coach George Seifert pulled Young in the third quarter with the Niners losing badly to the Philadelphia Eagles. Young went nuts—confronting the stoic coach on the sideline, unleashing a stream of un-Mormonlike expletives in front of his stunned teammates and a TV audience. To himself, Young was merely frustrated: He felt Seifert had unfairly singled him out. But his teammates were energized. Some believed that Young threw off the yoke of Montana’s legacy that day and became the true Niners QB. “When Steve Young told Seifert to fuck off, he became a leader,” said Gary Plummer, who was on the sideline that day. “It was literally at that point that guys on the team started embracing him. That tough-guy thing, that mentality that we all started learning at 8 years old, Steve really didn’t see that as a beneficial character trait of a quarterback in the NFL until he was 32 years old.”

  By the time Young was 37, he was regarded as one of the toughest quarterbacks ever to play the game. He once scrambled nine yards after his helmet was knocked off—in a preseason game. He also was one of the league’s most battered quarterbacks. As he grew older and the 49ers dynasty was fading, he was a half step slower, and defenses seemed to land shots more cleanly. Young had two concussions in 1996, then another on the fifth play of the 1997 season when Tampa Bay’s Warren Sapp kicked him in the head. Young was so averse to coming out of games that he sometimes hid behind offensive linemen to avoid his coaches. When Sapp drilled him, he managed to talk coach Steve Mariucci, Seifert’s successor, into putting him back in. But it had reached the point where San Franciscans worried about Young’s long-term health; people openly feared that the next hit would be his last. In 1999, during a win over New Orleans, Young was hit 21 times—“his impression of a pinata,” one writer called it—with the Saints swarming over him, including a helmet-to-helmet shot that briefly left him inert. His own linemen feared for his safety. “It’s basically got to stop,” said guard Derrick Deese. “We were way over in volume of hits that he was taking.”

  The next week, the Niners traveled to Arizona. Young’s fiancée, a former model named Barbara Graham, had invited her family to the game. Near the end of the first half, Cardinals cornerback Aeneas Williams blitzed from the right—Young’s blind side. Williams, untouched, blasted Young, who went down so fast and so hard that it was difficult to tell what had happened—even on film. In fact, Young had been turned into a human pinball: On his way down, the back of his head hit tackle Dave Fiore’s knee and then the hard turf. Plummer, by now a broadcaster, watched the play from the press box. “I was easily 300 feet away, and you could hear not only the helmet-to-helmet contact, you could hear his helmet hit the back of the ground. It was brutal.” Whether Young was unconscious would become “a personal debate between my wife and me,” he said. “I honestly don’t remember whether I was knocked out or whether I just laid there.” In any event, he wasn’t moving. After several tense moments, Young rose and made it to the sideline.

  At halftime Young told Mariucci: “I know you’re not going to believe me, but I feel pretty good.”

  In an earlier time, perhaps, Young would have gone back in. But not now. The moo
d of the league and his own case history were working against him. Bay Area newspapers had begun printing time lines of Young’s concussions dating all the way back to college, including one at BYU in which he was assisted off the field and then returned to lead a game-winning drive against Utah State. Now he was the quarterback who cried wolf. “We went in the locker room, which is a long walk from the old Tempe stadium, and I remember being asked, ‘How you feeling?’ ” Young said. “I felt fine. But that’s the first time I’d ever felt, ‘You don’t believe me.’ That’s where the injury for me became different than other injuries. This was the first time I felt not completely trusted.”

  Young had been planning to stay in Arizona with his fiancée and her family. That was now out of the question. Mariucci and the medical staff ordered him back to San Francisco for tests. The 49ers first indicated that Young might miss only a week. Then a week became two. By the third week, Young’s head had become part of the national sports conversation, with some commentators imploring him to retire. Greg Garber, who had done the story for ESPN after Al Toon’s and Merril Hoge’s premature retirements, wrote a piece for the Hartford Courant under the headline “Young Should Quit While He Still Can.” “The emperor is wearing no clothes, but no one will tell him he is naked,” Garber wrote. Mariucci didn’t dispel the speculation that Young might have to retire. When the 49ers’ coach spoke of his quarterback now, it was in the mournful tones reserved for someone with a terminal illness. “I keep thinking and hoping he’s going to be back eventually,” Mariucci said. “But we’re being realistic. This is lasting longer than we all thought.”

  Young was seeing a Stanford neurosurgeon named Gary Steinberg (no relation to Leigh). Young liked and admired him, but he felt the doctor was in an impossible situation, an “innate conflict” in which as an independent physician he was being asked to either bench the most beloved athlete in the Bay Area or risk, what, killing him? “I was feeling a little bit trapped,” said Young. “It was just a red-hot situation, a tender situation.” Young couldn’t go to the store without getting advice. Elderly women would clutch his face and tell him: “Please be careful.” “I promise. I will,” he’d respond. For his part, Gary Steinberg said it was still too dangerous for Young to play. “The reason he hasn’t been cleared to play up until now is that it’s my opinion and the opinion of the 49ers that it’s in the best interest of Steve Young to allow his brain to recover,” he said during the third week of the crisis.

  The 49ers were also conflicted. Mariucci was just six years older than Young, and the two men were like brothers. Young was so close with 49ers doctor Jim Klint (“a dear friend”), he later spoke at Klint’s funeral. The conversations between Young and Mariucci began to take on a Shakespearean character. Each day, Young would beg Mariucci to let him back on the field. Each day, Mariucci refused. The discussions took place anywhere Young could corner Mariucci: in the coach’s office, on team buses, as Young stood idle on the sideline. Then, of course, there was Leigh Steinberg, who had turned concussions into a national health issue. The decision about whether Young would play had moved beyond the calculus of professional football. The main decision makers—the coach, the doctor, the agent—were like extended family members mounting an intervention to save Young from himself. “They kind of became the Italian grandmother, you know what I mean?” said Young. “The Jewish grandmother. The Mormon grandma. As I melt it down and think about it, those opinions are the ones that carried the day. Not the opinions on the street or even the intense scrutiny of concussions at the time. What held me back from getting back on the field? It was trying to convince people who truly loved me.”

  “Mooch, you’ve lost all perspective,” Young told Mariucci. “You’re too close to this. You’ve got to be practical. This can’t be emotional.”

  “I’m not emotional,” said Mariucci.

  But of course he was. At times, the coach was in tears.

  As the season wore on, it became clear that at least from the 49ers’ perspective, Young was done. The team, with Jeff Garcia at quarterback, was on its way to a 4–12 season, including at one point eight straight losses. “I could have run sprints and recited War and Peace and they would have said, ‘You’re out,’ ” said Young.

  That off-season, the question of Young’s retirement hung over San Francisco like the summer fog. To Young, it became clear that of the many hurdles he faced, one was the most significant: No one in the Bay Area would let him go back on the field—not Steinberg (the neurosurgeon), not Mariucci, not Klint, not Bill Walsh, then the team’s vice president and general manager. Walsh was a big fight fan, and he publicly expressed his fears that Young could end up punch-drunk.

  Young had one prominent ally: Mike Shanahan, the head coach of the Denver Broncos. Shanahan had been Seifert’s offensive coordinator during the transition from Montana to Young. His quarterback in Denver, John Elway, had just retired, and no one was more prepared to succeed a legend than Young. Young was faced with a brutal decision: play in Denver, rejecting the advice of pretty much everyone who loved him, or retire.

  One of his more interesting advisers during this period was Plummer. Two years earlier, Plummer had retired and taken a job as a 49ers broadcaster. The transition was chastening. Shortly after he left, Plummer was walking the sidelines and found that he had a whole new perspective on pro football. “I remember seeing the violence and laughing to myself, saying, ‘I can’t flipping believe I did this.’ ” He was no longer the same Plummer who had stood in the back of a Marriott conference room heckling a neuroscientist. On the contrary, he was embarrassed. “It’s still remarkable to think how uneducated I was,” he said. “I mean, I went to Cal; I didn’t go on a scholarship, I got in because of my grades. I thought I was a pretty smart guy. I mean, now I look back at what a fucking moron I was to be mocking some of the most brilliant minds in the country on their specialty. I’d love to go back and say, ‘I’m sorry, I was a moron.’ But that was the attitude at the time.”

  Plummer, like almost everyone, urged Young to get out. “This isn’t about your teammates anymore, this is about your life,” he implored him. “This is about having kids and being able to play with them in your backyard and not wanting you to be a mush mouth.”

  On June 12, 2000, Young announced his retirement at the 49ers headquarters in Santa Clara—grudgingly and defiantly. “For the record, I know I can still play,” he said. That was undoubtedly true. He said he had been cleared. That was partially true. Walsh said: “The San Francisco 49ers, we considered the risk factor really to be too much for us to overcome.” Young was now married, and he and Barb were expecting their first child. “The fire still burns,” Young said, “but the stakes were too high.”

  Thirteen years later, Young sat behind a desk at a nondescript office complex in Palo Alto, where he runs his charitable foundation, Forever Young; manages a hedge fund; and juggles car pool assignments. It was the first time he had talked extensively about the issue that now tormented the league. Young was not entirely comfortable with his association with the NFL’s concussion crisis. “I’ve danced away from concussions because I don’t think it was that vital to the big picture for my career,” he said. “But the truth is you’re coming to me because that’s a practical reality: the perception that part of my career is concussions.”

  Young drew a distinction between himself and some of the horror stories that had come out. He said he once took a desperate call from a “prominent player” holed up in his basement, in tears and depressed, seeking guidance and empathy. The player essentially was looking to swap stories, compare their struggles, but Young was at a loss. It was true that the issue came to dominate his last couple of years in the NFL, but he felt that others had had it much worse, that he had become more of a pawn in the politics of concussions than a true casualty.

  “Concussions didn’t drive me out of the game,” Young insisted. It was a combination of factors, including the changing nature of the 49ers organization and, in the e
nd, his desire to finish his career in red and gold.

  “I’m not the one that’s going to be a real compelling story,” he said. “I’m an expert on vanilla concussions: I felt tired, I rested up, and about a week later I felt 100 percent. That’s my history. I’m the vanilla guy.”

  In reality, though, the message couldn’t have been any less vanilla to the NFL and its fans: Steve Young, a certain Hall of Famer, had been forced from the game by concussions. The league had a burgeoning crisis.

  By the late 1990s, Pittsburgh had become ground zero for concussion research in the United States. Nearly all the major players were connected to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, or the Steelers. Many of the specialists were connected to both the university and the team, whose training site was next door to the UPMC sports medicine facility. Mark Lovell continued to tinker with the concussion test he had created for the Steelers, bringing in a software developer who enabled him to administer the test on the computer. To that point, each exam had to be done with pencil and paper, a laborious process that made it time-consuming to administer and thus less attractive to the volunteer research subjects—the players—critical to making it work. The migration to computers made the exam faster, more accurate, and, not insignificantly, more marketable. What previously had been known to a small circle of neuropsychologists as the Pittsburgh Steelers Test Battery was soon rechristened as ImPACT: Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing. ImPACT later received funding from UPMC, which maintained a financial stake in the new company. Its founders were Lovell, his protégé Micky Collins, and Joe Maroon.

  Julian Bailes, the smooth Louisiana neurosurgeon who had produced the ominous survey on NFL players, broke away from Maroon and moved to Orlando to run a neurosurgery ward and continue his own research. Bailes was still in possession of the raw data from the survey: the questionnaires compiled by Frank Woschitz and the union. He decided to bring in another researcher with Steelers connnections to help sort through the data and plot future research.