League of Denial Page 6

  And so one week after Hoge thought he heard the ocean in Kansas City, he rejoined the Bears in preparation for the regular-season opener against Tampa Bay. Hoge knew he wasn’t right. He still had blinding headaches and sometimes forgot the snap count. “I mean, most people now when I tell them, it’s like, ‘How stupid are you?’ ” Hoge said. “Listen, I didn’t go to school to be a neurological doctor.”

  Hoge played in the season opener and three more games after that. Then, on October 2, the Bears took on the Buffalo Bills at Soldier Field. Early in the game, Hoge bent low to make a block. What happened next is a blur. When Hoge reached the sideline, his chin was sliced open and his face mask caved in. A Bears assistant had to pry it off to treat him. Hoge was unresponsive, staring into space, and so the Bears sent him to the locker room.

  He was sitting on the training table when he heard someone say, “Man, are you all right?”

  His eyelids fluttered, and he fell to the floor. Hoge had stopped breathing; doctors later told him that 20 seconds passed before he was revived.

  He was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in an ambulance. The Bears initially didn’t disclose the extent of his injury, announcing only that he had sustained his second concussion in six weeks and a lacerated chin that required stitches. Hoge held out hope for another quick return. He was released from the hospital the next day and went straight to Halas Hall, the Bears’ practice facility, wearing the same clothes he’d worn to Sunday’s game. He told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune that he hoped to play the next week.

  In reality, Hoge was in a fog. There were many things he could no longer remember, including his two-year-old daughter’s name. A few days later, he went for a doctor’s appointment and was found wandering aimlessly in a hospital corridor. The doctor, sensing his confusion, asked him: “Who’s the President of the United States?” Hoge didn’t know that, either. By the end of the first week, the Bears were saying that Hoge was out indefinitely. The team sent him to specialists and put him through a battery of tests and scans.

  When Hoge realized he wasn’t getting any better, he decided to return to Pittsburgh to see Joe Maroon and Mark Lovell.

  The concussion test that Lovell and Maroon had created was designed to assess exactly this type of injury: How badly hurt was Merril Hoge’s brain? Lovell pulled out Hoge’s baseline scores from the original Group of 27 and administered the exam to Hoge again.

  When he saw the results, Lovell did a double take; he had never seen a football player so impaired. It had been almost two weeks since Hoge had sustained his second concussion, but his scores were half of what they’d been a year earlier.

  One of the tests, the Wechsler Memory Scale, measured short-term memory in a variety of ways. One involved repeating a random sequence of numbers forward and backward. A year earlier, Hoge had tested in the sixty-first percentile on the backward test and the twentieth percentile on the forward test. This time, he tested in the eleventh percentile backward and the second percentile forward.

  Lovell then administered the Controlled Oral Word Association Test, in which the subject is asked to list as many words as possible from a specific category—words starting with the letter B, for example. Profanity was allowed. Some players called it the “Fuck Ass Shit Test.”

  Before his concussion, Hoge listed 43 words in 60 seconds. After: 21.

  Hoge then took the Trail Making Test, a measure of mental flexibility in which he was asked to connect a set of 25 dots as quickly as possible. He couldn’t complete it.

  Lovell showed the results to Maroon. The neurosurgeon was shaken. It was as if Hoge had run his car into a wall at high speed. Maroon’s first thought was: “I don’t want anybody to die following a football game on my watch.”

  He summoned Hoge to Allegheny General. Maroon’s office was packed with Steelers memorabilia, plastic brains, neurological textbooks, and dozens of papers Maroon had written on brain science.

  He laid it out bluntly: “You do this to your brain again, I can’t help you. Whatever happens, it’s done, it’s final, it’s finished. If you drool or you can’t speak or you can’t function, I can’t do anything about that. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I allowed you to play again.”

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Maroon asked.

  Hoge did. More than anyone, he was painfully aware of how hurt he was. The inside of his head was broken. He was incapable of living his life, much less playing professional football. For nearly a decade, Hoge had ignored pain and injury to keep himself on the field. It was part of what had made him so successful. Even in that final game, Hoge had been playing with a broken hand. After the concussion, doctors had fitted him with a cast, reasoning that he wouldn’t be playing again for a while. But there was no cast for what he was dealing with now.

  “You’re just gonna take this?” Hoge thought to himself. “You’re not gonna put up a fight or question him? You’re just gonna go: ‘Okay’?”

  But that was exactly what he did. Hoge flew back to Chicago, notified his teammates, and officially announced his retirement from the NFL. He was 29.

  Over the next several months, as Hoge’s memory slowly returned, Maroon would get phone calls in the middle of the night. He knew who it was before he answered. “Hey, you know, Doc, I feel great!” Hoge would say. “There’s nothing wrong with me!”

  Maroon would patiently walk Hoge through it all over again. There was no telling what might happen if he got hit again. He could lose his memory permanently, even his life. And there was always the chance that he would accelerate the process that led to a series of devastating diseases: Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia.

  Hoge would let it pass until the next time he ached to get back on the field. Then he’d call Maroon again.

  One night, Hoge went to make a personal appearance in Pittsburgh. It was a wine tasting, of all things. Hoge didn’t drink wine, but he had committed to going, and so he showed up and pretended he cared or knew anything about wine. He commented on how one wine was bold and one was dry and one was wet.

  “Here, try this one,” someone said.

  “So I did the little swirling thing; I was gonna be a smart-ass and take a little sip,” Hoge said. He pressed it to his lips. And then the world went black.

  “Everything shut off,” he said. “I mean, there was nothing. I scratched my eyes. I blinked my eyes, and I couldn’t see a thing.”

  For ten seconds Hoge couldn’t see. When his sight came back, he called Maroon in a panic. The Steelers were in New York playing the Jets, and Hoge reached Maroon at the team hotel. Maroon told him it was an indication that part of his brain was still traumatized.

  “This is what I’m trying to tell you, Merril,” Maroon said. “You’re not healed. Are you willing to risk your vision to play?”

  Hoge understood.

  “I won’t be calling you anymore,” he said.

  3

  “DAD IS IN OHIO”

  The dream house had turned into a nightmare. Besides the leaks and the minor flaws, real and imagined, that Mike Webster constantly complained about, the reality was that he couldn’t afford it. Pam didn’t know where the money had gone. Mike had earned more than $1 million over the last three years of his career. The Websters needed to move on, but Mike was paralyzed—mentally paralyzed. For two decades he had been the forceful leader of his household, his every decision creating comfort and stability for his wife and his children, but now he changed plans every hour. Pam woke up wondering: Am I staying in Kansas City? Am I going back to Pittsburgh? Am I going home to Wisconsin?

  For most professional athletes, retirement is like falling off a cliff. Webster was 40. He had played 17 years in the NFL, 245 regular-season games. It had provided him with a militaristic structure for his life: train, practice, play; his work schedule was so rigid that it was printed up in the newspaper every fall. Now all of that had been ripped away. It was a struggle all professional football players went through: After so much
violence, the transition was a form of post-traumatic stress. Most had trouble coping on some level, but this was different. People who came in contact with Webster found him delusional about both his career prospects and how and where he and his family would survive.

  Bob Stage, the Steelers’ pilot and his close friend, flew out to Kansas City to spend a weekend with Webster. In some ways, he was the same old Webby; Mike still called him Robert, using the faux French pronunciation, and was generous to a fault. Stage knew that some of the financial problems could be traced to people who had treated Mike like an ATM: “They took his generous heart and took advantage of him.”

  “You’re the only friend who’s never asked me for money,” Mike once told Stage. But in Kansas City, Stage found Webster totally unrealistic about his future. One warm evening, Webster decided he wanted to throw a baseball around. “Mike had so much nervous energy, he about wore my arm out,” said Stage. “The sad part is, he wouldn’t listen to anybody. That night when we were playing catch he told me: ‘I’m gonna become an agent.’ I said, ‘Mike, you didn’t even get your degree at Wisconsin. How are you going to do that?’ He would come up with these ideas, but the dots didn’t connect.”

  “I think I’m gonna sell RVs,” Mike said to Pam one morning. The next day he announced: “I think I’m gonna go to chiropractor school.”

  Pam ended the indecision by persuading Mike to sell the dream house at a steep loss. The Websters put their belongings—furniture, sports equipment, almost everything they owned—in a storage unit and moved back to Wisconsin to start over. They eventually bought a four-bedroom house in Lodi, Pam’s hometown, not far from her parents. When they were living in Pittsburgh, Mike and Pam had imagined a simple life after football, with trees and open space, maybe even a log cabin. But the new Mike spent indiscriminately. He bought a speedboat and a pair of Harley Softail Fat Boy motorcycles, toys for his retirement. Where the money came from—and where it went—remained a mystery. Pam later learned that Mike had opened some two dozen checking accounts, stopped paying taxes, and drained three annuities that had been set up for their retirement and the kids’ college fund.

  Instead of settling on a career, Mike became nomadic, not a traveling salesman but a man on the road in search of a deal—a dreamer and a schemer. He disappeared from the Lodi house for weeks at a time. Unpaid bills began to show up in the mail. Many seemed related to business endeavors that Pam had never known about and that had gone nowhere. Then one day the phone rang.

  “Is this Pam Webster?” a woman asked. “I have some of your stuff.”

  “What do you mean you have some of our stuff?” said Pam.

  “Well, we were at an auction, and we bought one of your buffets. It had some of your personal items in it. I’d like to send them to you.”

  Mike had stopped paying the rent on the storage unit in Kansas City. The company had auctioned off the contents—almost all of the Websters’ possessions.

  On the occasions when he returned home, Pam and the kids were never certain which Mike would show up. There was Good Mike—gentle with the kids, a loving husband, relatively normal—and Bad Mike—irrational, even destructive. Usually his anger was directed at Pam. She figured out a way to gauge his moods: If her picture was upright on Mike’s desk, everything was fine. If it was turned over, she knew to stay out of his way. His eruptions were almost always followed by profuse apologies and profound sorrow over his lack of control.

  Each week seemed to bring another low point in Webster’s accelerating transformation. One day, Pam returned from a trip to the store to find all the photographs and portraits of Mike as a player dumped on the floor. The pictures were slashed, the frames broken to pieces. As bad as it was, Pam thought it was worse because she was unable to shield the kids from what was happening to their superhero dad, who now seemed to be lashing out at everything he had been. “It was horrible for the kids to see their dad destroying pictures of himself,” she said.

  One afternoon, Webster took his seven-year-old son Garrett into Madison to pick up some medication. In addition to his deteriorating mental state, Webster was in constant pain: ice pick headaches, throbbing knees, gnarled hands, an aching back. To relieve the pain, he took whatever he could get his hands on: Vicodin, Ultram, Darvocet, Lorcet. When they pulled up at the drugstore, Webster told Garrett to run in and get the medication. He told the boy that in no circumstances was he to let anyone know he was outside. But of course, when Garrett looked up from the counter and asked for his father’s painkillers, the pharmacist explained that he couldn’t give pills to a little boy.

  “Is your dad here?” he asked.

  “Yes, he’s out in the car. I’ll go get him,” Garrett said.

  When Garrett told his father what had happened, Webster frantically drove off.

  “He just started yelling for probably 35 minutes straight,” Garrett said. “I’m seven years old at the time, he just started yelling, hitting the dashboard of the car, stuff like that, talking about how now everybody’s gonna know he was there. That’s where we really noticed he was becoming paranoid. It was always, ‘Somebody’s following me, or somebody’s going through my garbage or listening on the phone line.’ ” Within ten minutes of the outburst, Webster had apologized and bought Garrett a toy.

  And then, like a passing storm, Webster would be gone again, his whereabouts unknown. The Websters soon developed a dark inside joke to explain his long absences: “Dad is in Ohio.” It was an all-encompassing catchphrase to be used at missed family functions, school events, important meals. Dad is in Ohio. Sometimes the phone would break the silence, like a radar blip revealing a lost ship or plane. It would be Mike, calling from the road about some new scheme. Or it might be the police in Columbus, Wisconsin, a little town east of Lodi, calling to say that Mike had been sleeping in the train station for two days. Would someone please come get him?

  Mike sent just about every dime of whatever money he earned back to Pam and the kids, but it came in a trickle. Ultimately, the Lodi house went into foreclosure, and Pam scrambled to get a job and a modest apartment.

  Finally, in 1994, Webster returned to Kansas City. Carl Peterson, the team’s president and general manager, had tossed him a life preserver. Webby would be the Chiefs’ strength and conditioning coach. In normal circumstances, it would have been the perfect assignment. But later, few people recalled him playing much of a role. Marty Schottenheimer, the head coach, would say he didn’t even remember that Webster had been around.

  For much of the season, Webster lived in a storage closet above the weight room at Arrowhead Stadium. “It was pretty spartan,” said Bob Moore, then the team’s public relations director and now the Chiefs’ historian. “It consisted of a cot and broken weight machines. It was sad, but he was never down about it. He wasn’t complaining about it.”

  Moore had the impression that Webster was either estranged from Pam or divorced; it was obvious that Peterson was trying to help him through a tough time. Webster sometimes appeared at practices, snapping the ball during drills, and also worked with players in the weight room. But he was as much a hanger-on as he was a coach. No one was entirely sure what to make of his presence, this living legend just four years removed from playing in the NFL but seemingly dropped in from another galaxy.

  Tim Grunhard was now the Chiefs’ starting center. Webster had mentored him during his rookie year, and the two men were close. During his rookie season, Grunhard had noticed some fits of irrationality, but he thought Webster was just quirky. Now, four years later, he saw that Webster was a changed man. “I can’t put my finger on what it was, but he wasn’t the same guy,” said Grunhard.

  Webster spent a good chunk of that season with the Chiefs. One day, Moore noticed that he hadn’t been around for a while.

  “Where’s Mike?” he asked.

  He’s got some other opportunities in some other places, came the response.

  What those opportunities were, nobody seemed to know.


  When Sunny Jani first heard that Mike Webster was sleeping at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Pittsburgh, he couldn’t believe his good fortune. The wheels started spinning immediately. Jani wasn’t really that curious about Webster’s fall from grace. Rather, he was plotting how he could befriend the former Steeler and make some money off him.

  Sunny Jani was his given name. Born outside Bombay, he’d moved to Pittsburgh with his family when he was 12. His parents settled in McKees Rocks, a hardscrabble former steel enclave on the other side of the Ohio River. Sunny’s father opened the Blue Eagle Market on Broadway, and when Sunny wasn’t at school, he could be found hanging out at the family convenience store, stealing packs of trading cards from his dad. Like most Indian boys, Sunny grew up around cricket and soccer; he found American football difficult to comprehend—Wow, they’re killing each other for a little frickin’ ball, he thought—though it wasn’t hard to pick up on the religious fanaticism that surrounded the Steelers. Jani stole so many packs of trading cards—his father looking the other way—that he eventually accumulated enough to open his own card shop next door to the market.

  Sunny knew that Webster had played “a million years” in the NFL, possessed four Super Bowl rings, and was one of the most beloved Steelers of all time. For an enterprising young memorabilia dealer, it was a rare trifecta. After hearing about Webster’s plight, he drove to the Greyhound station, and sure enough, there he was, disheveled but unmistakably himself. Webster was sitting alone on a bench, his long, unkempt hair spilling out of a dirty cowboy hat. He was surrounded by a half dozen duffel bags filled with clothes and books. No one appeared to notice the legend in their midst.

  Sunny introduced himself and made his pitch.

  “Mr. Webster, would you like to come sign autographs? I would pay you for it.”