League of Denial (14 page)

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 somebody’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.

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.