League of Denial

by Mark Fainaru-Wada

  The NFL’s strategy seemed not unlike that of another powerful industry, the tobacco industry, which had responded to its own existential threat by underwriting questionable science through the creation of its own scientific research council and trying to silence anyone who contradicted it. There are many differences, as we shall see, but one is that football’s health crisis featured not millions of anonymous victims but very public figures whose grotesque demises seemed almost impossible to reconcile with their personas. One eight-year NFL veteran would kill himself by drinking antifreeze. Another prominent player would crash his Ford pickup into a tanker truck while leading police on a high-speed chase. Two players, Dave Duerson and Junior Seau, would fire handguns into their chests; Seau, one of the finest linebackers to play the game, used a .357 Magnum that his family didn’t know he owned to shoot himself in a guest room of his beach house filled with the memorabilia of a 20-year career. As the crisis grew, the brains of those famous players became valuable scientific commodities. A macabre race ensued among researchers to harvest and study them—even while the bodies were still warm. Minutes after Seau’s body was carted out of his house, his oldest son, Tyler, began getting calls seeking his father’s brain.

  The story is far from over. As this book was being written, nearly 6,000 retired players and their families were suing the league and Riddell for negligence and fraud. Their argument was that the NFL had “propagated its own industry-funded and falsified research” to conceal the link between football and brain damage. One week before the start of the 2013 season, the NFL settled the case — agreeing to pay the players $765 million, plus an expected $200 million in legal fees. The NFL did not admit wrongdoing, but the settlement hardly resolved the question at the core of the league’s concussion crisis: How dangerous is football to one’s brain? Unlike smoking, there was no scientific consensus about the risks of playing football. One neurosurgeon connected to the NFL said children were more likely to sustain a brain injury riding a bike or falling down. Another neurosurgeon, also connected to the league, called for abolishing tackle football entirely for children younger than 14.

  The prevalence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)—the name for the insidious disease found in the brains of Seau, Duerson, and the others—is also unknown. The leading expert on the subject is a blond Green Bay Packers fan named Ann McKee, who works out of a redbrick building at the Department of Veterans Affairs outside Boston in an office cluttered with football helmets, bobblehead dolls, and a Packers cheesehead resting atop a plastic heart. In a nearby building, the largest collection of NFL brains is stored in a freezer at –80 degrees Celsius.

  By the fall of 2012, McKee had examined the brains of 34 former NFL players. Thirty-three had CTE. We asked her what percentage of NFL players probably had it.

  The following exchange ensued:

  McKee: I don’t think everybody has it, but I think it’s going to be a shockingly high percentage.

  Question: If you believe that there is a shockingly high number of football players who are bound to suffer from it, how can we even justify having people play professional football?

  McKee: Well, I think, you know … how come I just don’t say, “Let’s ban football immediately”?

  Question: Yeah.

  McKee: I think I would lose my audience.

  That brings us back to the question: What’s in it for ESPN to support this book? Why would the network that stages the rough equivalent of a Harry Potter movie every week let us dig into a subject that examines the darkest underside of the network’s biggest product.

  ESPN—itself worth an estimated $40 billion—subsists on sports information, any sports information, much the way the Wall Street Journal and CNBC subsist on financial information. “The value of the NFL to us is the ubiquity of the sport across all our platforms all the time,” John Skipper, now ESPN’s president, explained to the New York Times when asked about the staggering contract in 2011. “It’s just stupendous for us. It’s daily product—we don’t have a day without the NFL.”

  From its modest beginnings, journalism has been part of ESPN’s DNA. We work out of a cubbyhole of the empire, an investigative reporting unit with the unusual mandate to investigate the very products that ESPN is selling. It is, in many respects, a journalistic minefield. But for a network that traffics in sports information, one piece of sports information is in particularly high demand these days: Is football killing its players?

  Do we really want to know?

  “You mean that guy who was on TV?” Bennet Omalu asked his colleagues as he arrived at the coroner’s office.

  Omalu had seen the reports of Webster’s death, the stories about his life unraveling over the final few years. Omalu didn’t think much about it. He had never attended a football game. He found the sport brutal and strange, “extraterrestrials running around a large field and tackling one another, sometimes in a ferocious manner.”

  Omalu himself was something of an alien. At that moment, his visa had lapsed, and he was in the process of renewing it to stay in the United States. He was a small man, about 5-feet-6 and black, with a voice that went up several octaves when he was excited, which was often, and a perfectly round head, like a 16-inch softball. Omalu had been born in the middle of Nigeria’s civil war in the short-lived secessionist nation of Biafra. He came to the United States in 1994 and immediately began collecting degrees. He obtained his medical license in Indiana and Pennsylvania (later he would add California and Hawaii); an MBA; a master’s degree in public health; and board certifications in anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, forensic pathology, neuropathology, and medical management.

  Omalu’s specialty was the science of death.

  A deeply spiritual man, he believed, in fact, that he could talk to the dead. Before dissecting his subjects—murder victims, people who had died of unknown or suspicious causes—he carried on internal conversations with the people laid out before him, imploring the dead to help him figure out what had caused their demise.

  Now he talked to Webster.

  “Mike, you need to help me. I know there’s something wrong, but you need to help me tell the world what happened to you.”

  Omalu used a scalpel to make a Y-shaped incision along the length of Webster’s torso. He peeled back Webster’s abdomen, which was thick and taut from the embalming fluid. He removed Webster’s rib cage with a small oscillating saw. He inspected the internal organs in situ and then removed them one by one. He weighed the organs—the liver, the pancreas, the heart—on a scale and then sliced them into pieces on a plastic cutting board before placing them in jars.

  The assistant then propped up the back of Webster’s head on a rubber tee. She made incisions across the scalp and over the ears. She pushed the rough skin of Webster’s forehead over his eyes and pulled back his scalp to reveal the top of his head. To see the skull exposed is to understand the preciousness of its contents, the brain’s utter indispensability to who we are. The brain sits inside a quarter-inch-thick vault of bony plates, in a bath of cerebrospinal fluid. It is not easy to remove. The autopsy suite filled with the high-pitched whine of the circular saw as bone dust rose from Webster’s head.

  For all the punishment Webster’s body had absorbed, his brain looked normal. It had no visible bruises or aneurysms within its soft gray folds. In its natural state, the brain is almost gelatinous; to examine it further would require soaking it for weeks in a tub of formaldehyde and water, a process known as fixing. The process stiffens the brain until it can be sliced like pound cake and then shaved into slivers to be viewed under a microscope.

  But that wouldn’t be necessary here. The official cause of Webster’s death was “acute myocardial infarction”—a heart attack. The assistant began to gather Webster’s brain with his other organs, to be placed back inside his body.

  Omalu paused. The death certificate had noted somewhat mysteriously that Webster suffered from “depression secondary to postconcussion syndrome.” Omalu
thought about the reports he had seen on television that morning about Webster’s erratic behavior. He thought about a previous patient, a battered woman whose autopsy had shown signs of brain disease. “It was a decision that you just make in the spur of the moment,” he later would say.

  “Fix the brain,” he ordered.

  The assistant balked. Webster’s brain was normal, wasn’t it? He had died of a heart attack.

  “Fix the brain,” Omalu said, this time more firmly.

  PART ONE

  DISCOVERY

  1

  THE NUTCRACER

  On Monday morning, July 15, 1974, Mike Webster took the field for the first time as a Pittsburgh Steeler. It was the opening day of training camp. Not the official opening—that had taken place the day before, with routine meetings, room assignments, and the distribution of playbooks and equipment. This was the real opening of camp, when Chuck Noll and his coaching staff would toss out “the raw meat to find who’s hungriest.” Thousands of fans made the pilgrimage out to Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, about an hour east of Pittsburgh. The cars snaked down Route 30 and parked in a cornfield, the faithful walking the last mile to the tiny Benedictine school.

  They had turned out not only for practice but for one particular drill, a bloody annual rite so notorious that it had two names. Noll, always bland and officious, used its more decorous name: the Oklahoma drill, said to derive from its origins at the University of Oklahoma under Bud Wilkinson. But others had a more descriptive name that seemed closer to its essence: the Nutcracker. Its champions included Vince Lombardi, who viewed it as nothing less than a test of manhood. The players dreaded it. Future generations would look back and cringe at the ritual, almost a form of human cockfighting, thinking about the inevitable toll, but at the time it was a staple for all teams at all levels, as much a sign that football was back as the turning of the leaves.

  The rules of the Nutcracker were basic: An offensive player lined up against a defensive player. They stood between two tackling dummies set three yards apart, creating a gauntlet. A quarterback and a running back lined up behind the offensive player. At the whistle, the quarterback handed the ball to the running back, who followed the blocker and tried to get past the defender. But the quarterback and the running back were essentially props. The Nutcracker was about the collision, two opposing forces coming together, rams knocking heads. It was about setting a tone. New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick believed the Nutcracker answered some of football’s most fundamental questions: “Who is a man? Who’s tough? Who’s going to hit somebody?”

  Noll turned it into a public spectacle. The fans, watching from a hill, cheered it on like a blood sport, a modern-day gladiatorial battle. The players joined in, forming a ring around the pit and roaring their allegiances—offense or defense. The assistant coaches were ringleaders, selecting the players for combat. At one point in the 1970s, the Steelers had two coaches, Rollie Dotsch, on offense, and George Perles, on defense, who were both Michigan State grads. Perles in particular “was out of his fucking mind, and they would whip the players into a frenzy,” said Stan Savran, a veteran Pittsburgh broadcaster. The two coaches, themselves in a lather, sometimes came to blows, and “even though you thought it was probably fake, you were so into the emotion of it,” said Jon Kolb, the longtime Steelers tackle. “I mean, you’re talking about guys with an inordinate amount of testosterone.” Art Rooney Jr., the team’s scouting director, said the Nutcracker was about “huffing, puffing, bleeding, farting.” Once, as the team was about to run the drill, he asked a Steelers assistant, “Is this guy tough?” “Tough?” the coach replied. “He’s a fighter, a fucker, a wild horseback rider.”

  Webster, the Steelers’ fifth-round draft pick, found himself paired off against another rookie, linebacker Jack Lambert, who had been drafted in the second round. Few, if any, would have bet on Webster. Lambert was tall and lean, 215 pounds, fairly light for a linebacker. He had played at a midlevel school, Kent State, arriving one year after the protest shootings, when there was some doubt whether football, President Nixon’s sport, would even survive on campus. But he was quick, tough, and smart—an intimidator and a trash-talker. “You think I’m mean, you should see Lambert,” Joe Greene would later say. “He’s so mean he doesn’t even like himself.” Lambert literally had fangs: He had lost four upper teeth playing high school basketball and would remove his bridge for football, enhancing his image of menace. Lambert’s legend at Kent State included a story in which the star quarterback broke a team rule and would have to miss a game unless he accepted his punishment: running, rolling, and then crawling 100 times across the length of the field. The quarterback initially balked.

  “Look, asshole,” Lambert told him. “Do the drill. I’ll do it with you. It may be tough, but not as tough as it’s going to be if you don’t do it or don’t finish it. Because I’ll kill you.”

  Upon being drafted by the Steelers, Lambert informed reporters, “I get satisfaction out of hitting a guy and seeing him lay there for a while.” He confidently predicted that he would find a regular spot on a team that already had two All-Pro linebackers: Andy Russell and Jack Ham. Phil Musick, then the beat writer for the Pittsburgh Press, was already referring to Lambert as the Nureyev of linebackers.

  Webster, in contrast, was small and slow, an obscure farm kid from the northernmost edge of the country. Rooney, the scouting director, had fallen in love with Webster’s game films from Wisconsin, but even he had to admit that Webster was a reach—even as a fifth-rounder. The sense was that he might hook on as a special-teams player. The Steelers had begun to experiment with a computer for scouting, and the message the computer spit out was clear: You can’t win a championship with a center as small and as slow as Mike Webster. Musick was less effusive about the Steelers’ fifth-round pick than he’d been about Lambert: “In the fifth round they got a center—Wisconsin’s Mike Webster—which they need primarily to snap the ball in training camp.” Webster himself knew the odds. He had told his new wife to stay behind in Madison in case he didn’t make the team.

  It was a clear day, the temperature climbing toward the mid-eighties; back then, the punishing camp began in the middle of the sweltering summer and lasted all the way till fall. Webster squatted low. Lambert, a few feet away, bent down in a three-point stance. There was the whistle and then the explosion: Webster blasting his helmet into Lambert’s chest and head, his stumpy legs churning and churning, driving Lambert first up and then back—all the way into the ground, some recalled. The crowd roared and the offense roared, and the running back easily slid past. Lambert was beaten, “tattooed,” as Musick put it. They ran the play back with the same outcome: Jack Lambert destroyed. The whole thing had taken a few seconds, but it was a brief glimpse into the Steelers’ future. The Nutcracker was a drill that rewarded leverage and technique and relentlessness. It was mano a mano, a test of brute strength and sheer will, the same battle that takes place at the line of scrimmage on every down. Lambert, of course, was a future Hall of Famer, one of the best linebackers the game would produce, but his speed and agility were of little use to him here. He was in Webster’s territory.

  For years to come, it was always the same matchup when the Steelers opened camp: Lambert versus Webster. “I don’t remember Lambert ever making a tackle, not in the seven years I was there,” said Robin Cole, a linebacker who joined the team a few years later. “He was at a disadvantage. It really wasn’t fair.”

  Jack Lambert didn’t know—would never really know—the true nature of the force that had hit him.

  The story of escape—from poverty, from persecution, from violence—is timeless in American sports. But rarely has the urge to escape—and the fear of being sent back—so completely shaped an athlete as it did Mike Webster. Few Steelers would know the full extent of it, but Jon Kolb, one of Webster’s best friends, got a glimpse one morning while they were driving to practice at Three Rivers Stadium. Webster and Kolb were part of the
Steelers’ Bible study group, and as they drove, Webster began to reflect on the “depravity” of his childhood, his shattered family, his relationship with God. Kolb would spend years with Webster on and off the field, but he never forgot the emotion of the moment, during which Webster quoted 1 Timothy 1:15: “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”

  “We were coming down Interstate 79 and heading north toward the stadium and just coming down that hill before you get to the exit; I remember exactly where we were because it was so impactful,” Kolb recalled. “There were two things that he was talking about. One, how grateful he was for God’s love. But the other thing is how he really saw himself.”

  Years later, after examining Webster, a West Virginia clinical psychologist would write: “He indicated that he essentially had no childhood.” That wasn’t completely true. Later, Webster would recount many fond memories of sports, of hunting and fishing with his siblings and his friends, of working on his family’s potato farm, but it was a reflection of how Webster saw himself and the long road he had traveled. Asked what drove his son so maniacally to succeed, Bill Webster said, “I don’t know; maybe he just wanted to get away from it all.”