League of Denial

In the opening chapter of League of Denial, the authors provide a sweeping biography of Mike Webster, from his troubled childhood in Wisconsin to his Hall of Fame NFL career and into the first few years of his retirement, when his family began to notice the drastic changes taking place in him. As part of the Steelers’ famed 1974 NFL Draft class, which saw the franchise select three other future Hall of Famers in the first four rounds, Webster was drafted out of the University of Wisconsin in the fifth round. Although undersized and slow for a center, Webster made up for these traits with toughness, tenacity, and strength.

Webster’s commitment to weight training and determination to succeed in the NFL were likely driven by a need to escape the poverty and abuse that had surrounded him as a youth. As the authors point out with an anecdote at the beginning of the chapter, Webster’s strength and toughness became legendary almost as soon as he stepped on the practice field for the first time. The authors describe his first padded practice, in which Webster repeatedly destroyed Jack Lambert, one of the most feared linebackers in NFL history, in the notoriously vicious Oklahoma drill, often referred to as “the nutcracker” because of the helmet-to-helmet hitting required.

The persona of “Iron Mike,” as Webster became nicknamed by Steelers fans, fit the blue-collar city of Pittsburgh perfectly. Webster’s brute strength and refusal to ever miss practices or games were adored in the city where the once-powerful steel industry was collapsing. The authors argue that “no player better represented the synergy between the city and the team” (24). Webster’s strength was not all natural, however. The usage of anabolic steroids was widespread throughout the NFL until they were banned in 1983, and Webster was no exception. Years later, after Webster’s became the first known case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), his steroid use was one of several reasons cited by the NFL that football might not have caused his brain damage.

Webster’s career with the Steelers ended after the 1988 season, and he immediately took a coaching job with the Kansas City Chiefs but instead unretired and played with the Chiefs for two more seasons. The Webster family decided to build their dream house in Kansas City, but Webster’s wife, Pam, began to notice startling changes nearly as soon as his post-football life started. The once easy-going Webster was suddenly quick to lose his temper; he could not maintain focus on things and was easily distracted and forgetful, and the money that was supposed to keep them set for life seemed to disappear. 

In Chapter 2, Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru momentarily leave the story of Webster to explore the injury of concussions and the new field of scientific and medical study that has developed around it—what they refer to as “sports neuropsychology, the study of the brain under the influence of sports” (34). The chapter begins with an anecdote concerning Bubby Brister, the Steelers quarterback who was concussed in the 1991 season and told by the team’s neurological consultant that he would need to sit out the following week. That consultant was Joe Maroon, one of the top neurosurgeons in the country and, at the time, the only such specialist working for any team in the NFL. Despite Maroon’s expert opinion, Brister was allowed to play the following week, not only because legendary head coach Chuck Noll wanted him to, but also because relatively nothing was known about the injury at that time. There was no consensus of opinion about what a concussion actually was, and there were certainly no specific guidelines on how to deal with them in football. The authors argue that, although there was a long history of brain research, “the concussion was still regarded as the neurological equivalent of a stubbed toe” (32). 

The debate between doctor and coach concerning Brister led directly to a jump from the concussion being regarded as an invisible injury that could not be treated to one that required more study. Maroon teamed with Mark Lovell, the chief neuropsychologist at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, to develop a test measuring brain function after a concussion. The doctors hoped that their test would be used as a tool to determine when a player could return to the field after a concussion. Their test required baseline data taken from players that would then be measured with data taken from the same player after a concussion.

One of the first players to participate in Maroon and Lovell’s experiment in 1993 was fullback Merril Hoge, who ironically had been Webster’s roommate during his rookie season of 1987. Hoge suffered a number of concussions during his time with the Steelers, but he exemplified the common way of thinking among players: that the only way to truly make it in the League is to play through the head injury. In 1994, Hoge signed with the Chicago Bears and suffered the worst concussion of his career in a preseason game that year. A few weeks later, Hoge suffered another concussion so severe that he passed out and momentarily stopped breathing. The Bears declared Hoge out indefinitely, but within weeks he wanted to get back on the field and visited Pittsburgh for a second opinion. Maroon and Lovell applied their diagnostic test to Hoge and found his results so bad that they advised him to retire. 

Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru revisit Webster’s postretirement life, beginning with the dream house in Kansas City that had “turned into a nightmare” (47). Despite earning more than $1 million over Webster’s final three seasons, the family could not afford the house and moved back home to Wisconsin. Webster began leaving home for weeks at a time. In addition to the physical problems that came from 17 years in the NFL, his behavior became increasingly erratic as well. He stopped paying bills and taxes, moved from career plans to money-making schemes, and had regular fits of anger. In 1994, Webster was offered the position of strength and conditioning coach for the Chiefs. In normal circumstances, it would have been a great fit for Webster, but the job did not work out with his declining mental state.

While sleeping at a Greyhound bus station in Pittsburgh, Webster met Sunny Jani, a young sports memorabilia dealer. Although Jani had opportunistic intentions, knowing that Webster could be befriended, exploited, and turned into a money maker for his business, the two actually became very close. Jani not only arranged autograph signings and speaking events to bring in some money for Webster, but he also became his primary caretaker. According to the authors, “Webster often needed help getting through the day, his body and mind deteriorating rapidly in opposite directions: Physically, he was an old man. Mentally, he was becoming a child” (53).

Webster was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1997, but his condition was so bad that many of those closest to him wondered how he would get through the ceremony. Pam had filed for divorce the previous year, but he did not even realize it. He was also in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, he was reliant on Ritalin to maintain focus, and perhaps most troubling, the news of his Hall of Fame induction brought widespread news stories about the shambles that Webster’s life was now in. Webster’s rambling, sometimes incoherent speech at the induction ceremony lasted 21 minutes. 

After years of concussions being regarded as invisible and untreatable, the injuries began getting much more attention in the mid-1990s. Not only had repeated concussions ended Merril Hoge’s career, but they had also ended that of Al Toon, an All Pro receiver for the New York Jets. Future Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman suffered a concussion so severe in the 1993 playoffs that his memory of the entire postseason was erased. The 1994 NFL season became known as “the Season of the Concussion” because so many players were being knocked senseless by other players who were now much bigger, stronger, and faster than anyone could have imagined.

Media attention about how prevalent the injuries were becoming also brought new interest to the science of concussions and new concerns about players’ safety. The NFL’s most influential voice of concern, as the authors explain, “belonged not to the news media or a player or perhaps even the commissioner. It belonged to an agent” (75). The sport’s first true superagent and the basis for the titular fictional character from the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, Leigh Steinberg represented nearly every starting quarterback in the League at the time. Steinberg was so concerned that he set up high-profile informational seminars to educate players and the public. The NFL, however, did not share Steinberg’s concern.

The authors point out that concussion research was suddenly a sexy topic, noting that “after decades of neglect, concussions were taking off as a research subject that merited serious attention” (67). In addition to Maroon and Lovell—who together had created the Pittsburgh Steelers Test Battery, which would soon be adopted by many NFL teams and all teams in the National Hockey League—neurosurgeon Julian Bailes was also a rising star in the field. As more trained brain specialists turned to this new topic, the NFL’s concussion crisis grew bigger. The NFL’s then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue dismissed the concerns as “pack journalism,” and the League itself downplayed the issue, insisting that the League’s rate of concussions was one every three or four games. The numbers were so low both because players were not acknowledging when they were concussed and because the League was only counting concussions as those times when a player lost consciousness. Tagliabue did form the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) Committee to try to contain the crisis. 

Now 45 years old and having just been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Webster moved in with his oldest son, Colin, in Pittsburgh. Only 19 years old himself, Colin was thrust into the position of caring for his father. Webster was in such bad shape that his teeth began falling out, a problem that he fixed with Super Glue, and the bottoms of his feet were cracking open; he repaired them with duct tape. Webster’s back pain was so bad that he could not sleep, so he acquired a mail-order stun gun and would have Colin or Jani jolt him to sleep. The NFL had a disability program for retired players, but it was notoriously difficult to have a claim approved by the panel, which consisted of three player representatives and three owner representatives. When the NFL was called before Congress nearly a decade later concerning its commitment to retired players, it came to light that “only 317 out of 10,000 eligible players were receiving benefits” (87). Team Webster found a willing doctor in James Vodvarka, who had been a huge fan of Webster and the Steelers, and an extremely capable lawyer in Bob Fitzsimmons.

Webster became obsessed with winning his disability claim, and with that obsession, his hatred for the NFL and the franchise for which he had played for 15 years grew to a manic level. Webster had come to believe, as many others had, that the NFL simply used and discarded players once their careers were over. Despite the awful shape that he was in both physically and mentally, Webster saw himself as an advocate for other players who he knew were suffering in a similar way. In 1999, Webster was arrested for forging Ritalin prescriptions. He had come to depend on the drug to focus, and it was prescribed for him by doctors, but he was altering the number of pills he was supposed to be given. He came away with only probation as punishment, but the episode was still rock-bottom for Webster.

Later that year, the disability board ruled that Webster would receive disability benefits based on the injuries that he sustained as a player, but the payout was so small that it barely covered the levy placed against him by the IRS. On September 24, 2002, at only 50 years old, Webster died of a heart attack. 

In Chapter 6, the authors examine the changing attitudes and opinions concerning concussions in the NFL in the late 1990s. The authors describe a “cultural shift” brought about in part by the seminars put on by agent Leigh Steinberg, and also by the repeated concussions suffered by future Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young that led to his decision to retire. , Young was one of Steinberg’s primary clients, and his success in the NFL came late in his career, when he finally replaced another legendary quarterback, Joe Montana, as starter with the San Francisco 49ers. After winning two NFL MVP Awards and a Super Bowl title in his first three years as the 49ers starter, Young began to take an unusual amount of punishing hits. He suffered two concussions in 1996, one in 1997, and another in 1999 that left him lying motionless on the field. By this time, Young’s health was a major topic among media and fans, and many opined that he should retire. Despite wanting to play again, knowing he still had the ability, and feeling as though he was healthy enough, Young chose to retire before the 2000 season.

As the authors point out, “by the late 1990s, Pittsburgh had become ground zero for concussion research in the United States” (112). The test created by Maroon and Lovell, the Pittsburgh Steelers Test Battery, was now rebranded as ImPACT—Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing—and would begin to receive funding from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Additionally, Julian Bailes began teaming with Pittsburgh area researcher Kevin Guskiewicz to compile data that would represent the first linking of repeated concussions to depression and, later, football to brain damage.

Another obvious sign that the NFL was on the verge of having a major crisis to deal with was that former player Merril Hoge, whose repeated concussions had ended his career in 1994, won a $1.55 million settlement against the Chicago Bears over how the team had handled his injury. At issue with Hoge’s lawsuit against the Bears was that the team’s doctor allowed Hoge to return to play a week after a serious concussion without proper examination and that the doctor was not aware of current concussion research. With the Hoge lawsuit, say the authors, “the NFL’s mushrooming crisis now had legal implications” (121).