League of Denial Page 4
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.
“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.
2
PSYCH 101
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.
“Were the studies double-blinded?” Noll asked. “What are the metrics? I need more information.”
Maroon fumed. Noll was undeniably sharp, but who was the doctor here? But the more Maroon thought about it, the more he had to admit that Noll was right. As common as concussions were, there was not a lot of useful information about the injury he could cite to justify his opinion that Bubby Brister shouldn’t play.
In the long history of brain research, the concussion was still regarded as the neurological equivalent of a stubbed toe. The injury was as underrated by the medical profession as it was by the NFL. There was little research money devoted to it and it had no glamour, particularly for an area of study whose mystery and vastness are often compared to the study of the universe. There was widespread confusion about what a concussion was, not only in the general population but also among doctors and researchers; dozens of definitions had been floated and discarded.
The fact that concussions were practically an afterthought was perplexing when one considered what actually occurred. The brain is essentially an oddly shaped sphere of Jell-O, crammed inside a box, covered in a shallow layer of cerebrospinal fluid. This gelatinous material contains a kind of electrical grid—hooked up to an EEG, the brain can power a toy train—that transmits information through the body via microscopic fibers called axons. When someone is hit in the head or stops suddenly, the brain is jolted against the skull’s jagged interior, distorting or even severing the axons and interrupting the function of the synapses, the connections between the fibers of the brain. The immediate effect depends on where the connections are and the extent of the damage. Some people go temporarily blind. Others lose their memory or balance or become irritable. When the blow is particularly violent, the entire system short-circuits, like a neighborhood blackout, and the person loses consciousness.
In that context, you wondered why people hadn’t taken concussions more seriously. But the focus had always been on catastrophic head injuries such as skull fractures or hemorrhages. In sports, what little research there was occurred almost by accident. One pioneer in the field was a genial, wisecracking neuropsychologist at the University of Virginia named Jeff Barth. “In the late seventies and early eighties, nobody thought mild head injury was a problem,” said Barth, who resembled Hulk Hogan and liked to splice the wrestler’s picture into his scientific presentations. “When you’d go to the doctor or the ER with a mild head injury, they’d say, ‘Just take a couple days off, take some aspirin, and you’ll be okay by Monday.’ ” As part of his work at Virginia, Barth saw emergency room patients from the Charlottesville area and other parts of Virginia. He and his colleagues began to notice that out of the hundreds of head injuries they treated each year, the majority were the so-called minor variety that involved either no loss of consciousness or blackouts lasting only a few minutes.
Because there were so many—Barth counted more than 1,200 concussions over a two-year period, often from traffic accidents—he decided to study them to see if he could improve treatment. He and his colleagues soon discovered that these mild head injuries often weren’t so minor. “We did a three-month follow-up, and lo and behold, we found that about one-third of mild head injury patients hadn’t returned to work,” said Barth. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s amazing! Why is that?’ ”
His findings struck a chord. The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article in 1982 that described concussions as “a silent epidemic.” Barth was riding high until he went to a conference and presente
d the study to some of his colleagues.
“It was one of the worst days of my life,” he said.
As he stood at the podium, the audience bombarded him with questions and doubts. Maybe Barth was testing only people who weren’t very smart. Maybe they didn’t return to work because they had an excuse from the doctor. What was his control group? “I thought to myself: ‘How can I get out of this?’ ” said Barth. “ ‘Maybe I can fake a seizure.’ ”
Barth decided he needed a more rigorous study. The important thing was to find patients who were likely to have concussions and were available for follow-up. “My initial idea was we could test all of the Psychology 101 students at the University of Virginia, follow them around campus and hit them with a two-by-four, and then test them again,” he joked. Other groups were considered, including race car drivers and boxers. Finally one of his colleagues, Bruno Giordani, said: “What about football players? They run and hit things.”
Thus was born an entirely new field: sports neuropsychology, the study of the brain under the influence of sports. “Unfortunately, some of my colleagues who like to get at me, they don’t call me the Father of Sports Neuropsychology, they call me the Grandfather of Sports Neuropsychology,” Barth said.
Barth started to perform tests on Virginia football players to measure their baseline performance—before they got conked on the head—on tasks such as word recognition and number sequencing. He and his colleagues positioned spotters at practices and games to be on the lookout for head injuries, then tested the players immediately after an injury occurred to measure differences in brain function.