Concussions and the Complicated Legacy of Mike Webster

The Steelers’ annals are overflowing with tough guys who handled themselves on the field and played through all kinds of injuries. Mike Webster has one thing on all of them: nobody played more games for the Steelers than Webster, and he was literally at the center of the collisions precipitated by every snap of the ball.

The brawny Webster played 220 games in 15 seasons for the Steelers. He redefined excellence at his position while winning four Super Bowls.

A conversation of the greatest centers in NFL history has to start with Webster. Sadly, a conversation on the potential price of glory in the NFL might also start with Webster. That is because “Iron Mike” died in 2002 at the age of 50 both a broke and broken man.

His mental health rapidly deteriorated after Webster retired from the NFL following the 1990 season and he spent stretches of the final years of his life homeless or living with his teenage son, Garrett. A study of Webster’s brain following his death eventually led Dr. Bennet Omalu to establish a link between repeated head hits in football and dementia and other mental illnesses later in life.

Webster is the first former NFL player that Omalu diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The need for more research on brain trauma has only grown since then due to the premature deaths of more than a score of former NFL players, including Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau, who committed suicide in 2012 at the age of 43.

The NFL has been portrayed as both dismissive and reactionary to the issue of concussions. Accusations and litigation have been leveled at the billion-dollar league, leaving people like Garrett Webster with mixed feelings about the NFL.

Webster, who was forced to take care of his dad when it should have been the other way around, is the only one of his four siblings who still lives in the Pittsburgh area. He manages an airport parking service in Robinson Township and works as an administrator for the National Brain Institute.

The group, led by Omalu and Dr. Julian Bailes, is among the institutions that study brains to gain more clarity between repeated head hits and mental illnesses later in life.

“I think the biggest misconception is that groups like us are out to end football or stop people from playing football. Really what we’re trying to do is make it safer,” said Garrett Webster, who is in his early thirties. “There’s no reason not to make the game safer and the NFL continuously tries to push the problem over here or push it over there.”

The Webster family is upset that the NFL and the Steelers did not do more to take care of Mike Webster after his health collapsed and a series of bad investments wiped him out financially. The NFL fought a lawsuit by Webster’s estate seeking disability payments and Garrett Webster said the family has only been invited to a pair of Steelers functions since his father’s death.

When asked if his family has hard feelings toward the Steelers, Garrett Webster said, “Me and my mom will say this: we root for the players, we root for the jerseys. The suits or whatever you want to call them, those are the people we don’t root for because all of this stuff didn’t need to be this way. As a family we’ve been through so much since Dad retired it’s continuously baffling to us why they don’t want to make any kind of amends and not even amends, just some kind of acknowledgment. It seems like ‘[Bleep] the Websters’ every time something comes up and that’s disappointing. If they would have just embraced us and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do what we can’ and make us feel welcome and come in for alumni games one time a year or one time every two years that would have felt good at least. But instead it’s, ‘Nope, we’re just going to ignore you guys,’ and that just hurts.”

That feeling of isolation characterized the final years of Mike Webster.

“My dad never complained that he played football,” Garrett Webster said. “He was upset that he did all of this stuff and was part of the league and part of a team but once you can’t do anything for them anymore you’re a pariah. We’re not mad at football. My dad won four Super Bowls, he made lifelong friends. [But] a lot of people should know, ‘Hey, as of right now, if this stuff happens to you guess what? You’re screwed.’ That’s what our argument has been with the NFL, is that this stuff happened and when you guys knew about it instead of doing the right thing, saying, ‘Hey Mike, let’s get you in. Let’s study this while you’re alive,’ they just ignore him and pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Webster is not the only former Steelers offensive lineman whose erratic behavior and premature death was linked to head trauma as a result of football.

Former Steelers guard Terry Long committed suicide in 2005 at the age of 45. Former Steelers tackle Justin Strzelczyk died instantly a year earlier after the pickup truck he was driving rammed into a tanker during a high-speed police chase.

Omalu diagnosed Strzelczyk, who played nine seasons for the Steelers and left behind a wife and two young children, with CTE following an extensive study of his brain.

Strzelczyk’s behavior after he retired from the NFL had led his wife, Keana McMahon, to divorce him because she didn’t understand it and feared what he might do. More than a decade after Strzelcyk’s death she refuses to watch an NFL game even though she still lives in the Pittsburgh area.

“NFL Sunday doesn’t exist for me anymore,” McMahon told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in December of 2015. “They don’t care. The players are cattle to them. They’re in and they’re out and I won’t watch it.”

The link between football and brain injuries, however, is as complicated an issue as it is a contentious one.

Brains cannot be studied for CTE until after a person’s death. And right now it is impossible to know which players are more prone to the degenerative brain disease until it is too late since only a fraction of people who played in the NFL have been diagnosed with CTE.

There is anything but a consensus in the medical field when it comes to brain injuries and even Omalu and Bailes disagree on a key point.

Omalu, in an opinion piece for the New York Times in late 2015, wrote that children should not be allowed to play football. Bailes said he would merely advise parents to wait until their child is older before permitting them to play organized football.

Coverage of the differing opinions at least showed that awareness on potential long-term repercussions from repeated hits to the head has spread. That, Garrett Webster said, is as much a priority for the National Brain Institute as research on the body’s most mysterious organ.

Alan Faneca is among former and current NFL players who take the issue seriously.

Faneca said he retired after 13 NFL seasons even though the Arizona Cardinals wanted him to return in 2011 because he wanted to play it safe with his long-term health.

Faneca, who has three young children, said he thinks about the potential fallout from all of the collisions he endured in football and has been proactive in dealing with it. Faneca runs regularly and takes supplements. He also engages in brain LaMantia, which is a series of exercises that work out the brain.

“Just keeping it active and doing things,” Faneca said. “Not just sitting around doing nothing. Use it or lose it.”

This approach coupled with medical breakthroughs could help generations of former NFL players navigate life after football. Greater awareness could also prompt former players to seek assistance when dealing with CTE.

Webster’s youngest son acknowledges that pride often kept his father from accepting help from the Steelers and former teammates because he didn’t want to take what he saw as charity.

Former Steelers running back Frenchy Fuqua saw a glimpse of Webster’s plight near the end of Webster’s life. The two were among a handful of Steelers players who attended an autograph show in Chantilly, Virginia, in 2002.

They were catching up on old times at the hotel bar and Fuqua noticed that Webster took a long time to speak before answering a question and seemed forgetful. What really struck Fuqua is when Webster told him he was sleeping in his car that night so he could pocket the money the former players had been given to stay in the hotel.

Fuqua said he tried to talk Webster into staying in his room—and accepting more than the $50 Fuqua insisted he take—but Webster refused.

“He was very proud and I can understand the pride that’s involved to be in that situation but I had no idea it was that bad,” said Fuqua, who held Webster in the highest regard as a person and a player. “He spent the night in his car and the next thing I know they were rushing him back to a hospital in Pittsburgh.”

Webster died at the age of 50 and the cause of death has never been released by his family. What is particularly heart-wrenching about Webster’s story is that even after his life unraveled he still felt a connection to the Steelers—as ambivalent as it was.

“Even in the end when my dad would say he couldn’t stand the Steelers and Dan Rooney and stuff like that, we’d sit there and the Steelers would be on TV because it’s Pittsburgh,” Garrett Webster said. “Dad would still kind of pay attention to the game and you could tell he was still into it and wanted to root for the Steelers but it was like he felt guilty. We as a family were like that too. We always secretly wanted them to win.”

EXTRA POINTS

Big Ben Advances Concussion Transparency

A breakthrough on concussions might have occurred when Ben Roethlisberger told doctors he was experiencing difficulty with his peripheral vision after taking a shot to the head in a November 29, 2015 game at Seattle.

The symptoms prompted the Steelers to pull Roethlisberger from the game and he was lauded for reporting them rather than trying to playing through a concussion in a close game.

Roethlisberger admitted that he might not have reported his symptoms early in his career without the benefit of foresight—and stature.

“You don’t want to think about after football with your head, but you have to,” Roethlisberger told reporters three days after the Seattle game. “You have to think about the type of man, husband, and father you want to be when you are done playing, because this is such a short part of our lives.”