League of Denial

by Mark Fainaru-Wada

  Webster was born in 1952 in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, in the heart of the Northwoods, a tourist destination on the Wisconsin River where people hunt quail and deer and fish for musky, walleye, and largemouth bass. He was the second of five children: three boys and two girls. His parents met at a local bar called Tower Hill and soon afterward eloped to Michigan. “We had five kids before we even knew what was causing them,” said Bill.

  For a child, it could have been idyllic. Webster was raised on a farm situated in an enchanted forest of sweet-smelling timber and folklore. The name of his high school football team was the Hodags, a mythical horned creature said to roam the Northwoods. But the reality of Webster’s early life was chaos, poverty, and shame. Bill Webster was a potato farmer and a local hell-raiser, a harsh disciplinarian who was quick to anger, quick to grab a belt to punish his kids. Mike Webster later told his son Colin that his father had beaten him “with sticks, switches, belts until he was black and blue.” Bill Webster’s own family history was riddled with turmoil and mental illness, including a brother who committed suicide. Webster’s mother had mental illness on her side of the family and eventually would have a nervous breakdown. A doctor later reported that among Webster’s four siblings, “all have had manic depressive illnesses, one requiring shock therapy and one who has had several suicide attempts.” His youngest brother, Joey, would spend much of his life in prison for a variety of crimes; in 1978, Webster’s fourth year in the NFL, Joey was convicted in Michigan on charges of bank robbery and illegal possession of firearms and sent to federal prison for 15 years.

  Webster later told doctors that both of his parents were alcoholics. “My mom used to get scared and take off running with us five kids,” said Reid Webster, Mike’s older brother by a year, who also battled depression.

  When she and her husband fought, Betty Webster would take her five kids to a motel or to her mother’s house or the neighbors’ houses until the storm had passed. Betty and Bill divorced in 1962, when Mike was 10. Both of his parents would remarry twice.

  When Mike and Reid were old enough for high school, the two boys returned to their dad’s potato farm to live with him, his new wife, and her two children. The farm, about four miles square, was in Harshaw, an unincorporated hamlet of scattered farms and dilapidated houses. On weekends and in the summers, Mike and Reid worked with their dad. They drove the tractor, sprayed the potatoes with pesticides, irrigated the soil, and harvested the potato crop in the fall. Mike and Reid would each grab one end of the 100-pound potato sacks and heave them onto trucks. By the time he reached high school, Mike could easily lift the bags by himself.

  The Websters had a small black-and-white television, and when Mike was little, he announced to his father that he intended to play for the Green Bay Packers; he only needed to get big and strong. From that moment, sports became Mike’s main outlet. When he and his brother finished their chores, they often played one-on-one tackle football in a hay field. As the boys grew older, the games got rougher. One afternoon before Mike’s freshman year at Rhinelander High School, Reid chopped his younger brother at the knees. Mike flipped over backward and broke his wrist in two places. He had intended to play football that year, but his season was over before it started.

  A few weeks later, Mike was standing on the grass in his cast, staring out at the football field. One of the players, Billy Makris, was running late for practice when he noticed Webster, stocky and blond, about 5-feet-10, big for a freshman.

  “You playing football?” Makris asked.

  “I can’t. I broke my arm,” Webster said.

  It was just a fleeting image: a teenager staring longingly at an empty football field. But Makris never forgot it: “The sadness in his eyes, that’s the best way to explain it, sadness in his eyes that he wasn’t playing.” Makris and Webster became best friends. Football, Makris believed, was Webster’s refuge from his gothic childhood, almost a matter of survival.

  Once Webster healed, he poured all his energy into training. To his coaches and teammates, it became clear that he was different. More than dedication, there was a kind of desperation in the way he prepared, as if he feared that the slightest letdown would lead to failure. By then, Bill Webster, already living on the margins, had moved from potato farming into a business digging for water wells. That meant more back-breaking labor for his sons, who at times were required to lift a 200-pound steel casing, slide it over the drill bar, lock it in place, and drive the casing into the earth.

  Webster’s only consolation was that he was able to salvage parts from the well business and use them for his training. An old piece of pipe became a weight bar. Water buckets were filled up and used as weights. Webster’s weight bench was a piece of plywood resting atop two cinder blocks. By his senior year, he was lifting twice a day and wearing out the dirt roads around Bill’s property.

  Mike was turning himself into a small truck. It wasn’t that he was so tall or imposing—6 feet, just over 200 pounds at the time of his graduation. But he was chiseled, fairly bulging out of his skin. He had large hands, “like a St. Bernard pup,” said Makris. He wasn’t yet an elite athlete, but what stood out was his intensity—his refusal to quit. Another injury like the one that had put him out his freshman year became unthinkable. When Webster broke his arm again, he had it fitted with an inflatable cast. Makris watched in awe as Webster blew up the cast on the sideline like a pool toy, then took his broken arm back out onto the field.

  Webster was recruited to play at the University of Wisconsin. It was there that he began his transformation into “Iron Mike,” the force so familiar to a generation of football fans. He anchored the Badgers’ offensive line and became even more obsessive about his training. On the field, Webster adopted the habit of sprinting out of the huddle. At first, his teammates thought he was showboating, but they soon realized it was part of the same relentless package.

  By his senior year, Webster was team captain and the best center in the Big Ten. He also got married. His new wife, Pam, worked in the Badgers’ ticket office. Her upbringing was everything Webster’s was not. She had grown up in Lodi, a small town 25 miles north of Madison, in a stable family of seven brothers and sisters. Her father drove the school bus that shuttled local sports teams to their games and worked in the heating and sheet-metal business. Her mother was a nurse. Her family led a typical Wisconsin life: “hunting, brats, and the Packers.”

  Pam found Mike strangely endearing. He was socially awkward and could barely dress himself, his shirts mismatched and ill fitting. Even his sense of humor seemed slightly off; he meant well but was prone to saying and doing the wrong thing. But unlike other athletes she had been around, he was a gentle soul, polite and soft-spoken, and seemed entirely unimpressed with himself. “Mike had just a really kind heart,” she said. He didn’t tell her much about his family, but she sensed he was the caretaker for not only his brothers and his sisters but also his mother.

  “I think there was a part of him that seemed wounded to me—like his soul—that just reached out to me,” she said.

  Webster was part of perhaps the greatest single draft by a team in NFL history. In 1974, the Steelers took USC wide receiver Lynn Swann in the first round, Lambert in the second, Alabama A&M receiver John Stallworth in the fourth, and Webster in the fifth. All four were future Hall of Famers. Between 1969, Noll’s first season as head coach, and 1974, the Steelers drafted 11 Hall of Famers, the foundation of one of the NFL’s great dynasties.

  Webster was the biggest long shot of them all. There were those like Rooney Jr., the scouting director and son of the Steelers’ patriarch, who admired Webster. At the Senior Bowl that year, Webster had manhandled a big Tennessee State middle linebacker named Waymond Bryant, whom the Bears took with the fourth overall pick. The more film the Steelers watched, the more they were intrigued. “You gotta see this Webster,” Dick Haley, the team’s director of player personnel, told Rooney. “He hits like Rocky Marciano.” Webster’s technique seemed flawless: He had
a knack for smashing his head like a sledgehammer underneath an opposing lineman’s chin, then controlling the bigger man by using his leverage. He had surprisingly quick feet, stuffing one oncoming pass rusher and then gliding over to pick up another.

  But there was the lingering issue of his size. He was listed at 6 feet, 2½ inches, 225 pounds, but no one believed that. He was—maybe—6-feet-1, 215. Some people had thought Webster wouldn’t be drafted at all and the Steelers could pick him up as a free agent.

  Webster did make the team, benefiting from a players strike that allowed him to get a long look from the Steelers coaches. He played mostly as a backup to Ray Mansfield, a beloved veteran center known as “the Old Ranger.” Webster’s rookie year culminated with the Steelers winning the first Super Bowl in the team’s history.

  As they packed up for the year, Ralph Berlin, the team’s longtime trainer, ran into Webster and asked him what he had planned for the off-season.

  “I’m gonna go home and get bigger,” Webster told him. “You can’t play in this league where I am.”

  When Webster returned the next season, Berlin was stunned. Webster now weighed between 250 and 260 pounds, he recalled.

  By then, Webster’s dedication to his training had become so maniacal that in hindsight, his closest friends wondered if it wasn’t a sign of insecurity so profound that it was almost a sickness. On most days, Webster could be found in the basement of a Pittsburgh steak house, the Red Bull Inn in McMurray, a suburb south of the city. Jon Kolb had gotten to know the manager, a power-lifting fanatic named Lou Curinga, who had turned the restaurant’s boiler room into a gym. It was a lifter’s dungeon, windowless and stifling, the air thick with the smell of sweat and athletic tape. Kolb recruited Webster and several other Steelers into what he called the 500 Club—players who could bench-press 500 pounds. The Red Bull Inn became Webster’s second home, so central to his life that he and Pam moved closer to McMurray to cut down on his “commute.”

  Webster often brought his training home with him. In the winter, he would head out into the knee-deep snow with a barbell behind his head and do lunges. When the snow thawed, he put on shoulder pads and a helmet and hammered against a blocking sled he kept in his yard. Craig Wolfley, a Steelers offensive lineman, pulled up at Webster’s house early one morning to find Webster “in a helmet, shoulder pads, and spikes, pushing a sled across the front yard. Six-thirty in the morning! I said, ‘Webby, do you know how crazy this looks?’ ” Wolfley joked that Webster should hook up the blocking sled to a lawn mower to kill two birds with one stone. Webster pounded his blocking sled so often, it carved a trench in the yard. Sometimes his youngest son, Garrett, hopped on for the ride.

  Webster’s training regimen included anabolic steroids. Decades later, this would still be a matter of debate in some circles, but the evidence was conclusive. Most notable was Webster’s own admission: At least two reports in his lengthy medical file contain references to steroids. In 1993, less than three years after Webster retired, a Pittsburgh doctor reported: “He took anabolic steroids for a very short time when he was in his twenties.” Another report in 1993, based on a doctor’s conversation with Webster, asserted that he “only rarely experimented with steroid use” during his playing career. Those reports contradicted Webster’s repeated public denials and almost certainly understated the extent of steroid use.

  Webster’s involvement with performance-enhancing drugs coincided with their emergence in the NFL, which didn’t officially ban steroids until 1983. At least two of Webster’s teammates, running back Rocky Bleier and guard Steve Courson, later admitted using steroids while they were legal. Courson, who was killed in 2005 when a tree fell on him while he was cutting it down, asserted “unequivocally” in his 1991 autobiography, False Glory: Steelers and Steroids, that 75 percent of his teammates on the offensive line used steroids. Bleier, in an interview, said he also saw Webster take amphetamines before and during games and wondered if his drug use later affected him. “I mean, the question with Mike has always been, the effect of steroidal use on his body—did this have an effect or not—and then taking amphetamines during the game,” Bleier said. “It was all legal stuff at the time, but there was still a stigma.”

  In truth, Webster stopped at nothing to transform himself from a high school lineman playing in the obscurity of the Wisconsin Northwoods into perhaps the finest center in history. He ingested something called spirulina—a blue-green algae taken by humans but also used as a feed supplement in the fish and poultry industries. He took desiccated liver tablets, brewer’s yeast, royal honey. Colin said his father toted around a bag containing some 20 different pills. One of the side effects of this amalgam of pills and potions was flatulence, which was known to firebomb the Steelers’ huddle. “Webby, was that you?” Terry Bradshaw would shout at his center.

  By 1976, Webster was nearly 270 pounds. He had increased his body weight by roughly 25 percent, almost all of it muscle.

  By 1980, he was literally the strongest man in the game. That year, CBS staged a made-for-TV event called “The Strongest Man in Football.” Eight of the game’s giants met for a weight-lifting showdown inside Auburn’s Memorial Coliseum. The Red Bull Inn tandem dominated the event. Webster, listed at 267 pounds, edged out Kolb for the $10,000 first prize. Webster opened the competition by lifting 275 pounds over his head 12 times, struggling only at the finish. He clinched his victory in the bench press, pumping 350 pounds 15 times—over 2½ tons in one set. Kolb could muster only 11.

  Webster “had arms like legs,” Steve Courson would say, “and legs like people.”

  Between 1974 and 1980, the period in which the Steelers won four Super Bowls, Webster appeared in every game. To his teammates and his close friends, he was always “Webby,” a nickname that seemed to fit his good-natured personality. Webster was slightly goofy, a bit of an odd duck, a locker room prankster. He left mousetraps in his teammates’ lockers and rigged weights so that they stuck to the floor. During one Steelers blowout, Bradshaw walked up to the line, reached under the center, and then jumped back in horror. Webby had slit open his pants, and when Bradshaw reached down, he found himself holding his center’s balls.

  Webster was a conspiracy theorist who liked to regale teammates with a weekly news summary they called “Webby’s Gloom and Doom Report.” “Anything that was crazy, like the guy that got killed at the Indianapolis 500 when the tire went flying up 43 rows, that would freak him out,” said his close friend the tackle Tunch Ilkin. A John Wayne fanatic, Webster wore cowboy boots and jeans to formal dinners and recited dialogue from McLintock! (“I’ve got a touch of hangover, bureaucrat. Don’t push me.”) on the field while the Steelers stretched.

  To fans, Webster was simply Iron Mike. As much as superstars like Bradshaw, Lambert, Lynn Swann, Franco Harris, and Mean Joe Greene would come to define the Steelers of the 1970s, no player better represented the synergy between the city and the team.

  Part of it was the times. As the steel industry collapsed, Pittsburgh was being depopulated, going from the twelfth largest city in the country to the thirtieth. An estimated 30,000 steelworkers were laid off. But Webster was indestructible. “If you wanted to see a guy who represented the city of Pittsburgh, with no fancy frills, where people just go to work and do your job, that was Mike,” said Bob Stage, who for years piloted the Steelers’ plane and became close with Webster. Fans hung a sign over the mezzanine at Three Rivers; it depicted a bulging biceps with Webster’s number, 52.

  In fact, Webster was as terrified of losing his job as everyone else in the city. “Obviously he was tough, but as I got to know Mike more and more, I realized how scared he was,” said Stage. “It didn’t matter if he was All-Pro every year. That was never a comfort to Mike. He was such a gentleman, such a nice person, but at the height of his career, I felt that he never really enjoyed his success.” In Pittsburgh, Webster built the stable family life he had never had as a child. He and Pam had four children: two boys and two girls. They live
d in a gray-and-white two-story colonial outside the city. In the morning, the kids clambered out of bed to the smell of their father’s freshly baked bread. “He was like a big superhero,” said his daughter Brooke, the oldest of his children, “and I was a daddy’s girl.” One winter, Daddy came back from the Pro Bowl bearing pineapples and grass skirts and held a luau for her second-grade class. Yet Pam agreed that her husband was never totally happy. “That was so sad for me,” she said. “You know, he just never felt like happy down to your toes.”

  Asked what motivated Webster, one of his former teammates replied: “Total fear.”

  By 1978, Webster was the best center in the NFL. From that year forward, he would make the Pro Bowl eight straight seasons. If off the field he was a bit awkward, on the field Webster was totally in his element. Before the snap, the center is responsible for making the line calls, adjusting blocking assignments in response to the configuration of the defense. Webster was a master, barking out audibles, some of them decoys, assuming the role of the Steelers’ field general. He studied game films endlessly—he often took them home—and came to know the Steelers’ offense so well that he sometimes overruled Bradshaw in the huddle. “Ultimately he became the leader to the extent that he would call the plays,” said Bleier. “Bradshaw would just say, ‘Okay.’ ”

  Webster was low to the ground, and he used that to his advantage. As the center, he often drew the gnarliest blocking assignments, the biggest and baddest linemen and linebackers. In the 3–4 defense (three down linemen) he was head up on nose tackles sometimes 50 pounds heavier. In the 4–3, he was responsible for taking on the middle linebacker. Gerry Sullivan, a former Cleveland center, recalled watching film of Webster taking on Oilers nose tackle Curley Culp, a former college wrestling champion and future Hall of Famer. Sullivan was astounded: Webster wasn’t just blocking Curley Culp. He was uprooting him. “To me, the physics of it weren’t even possible, you know?” Sullivan said. The Browns ran the film over and over, mesmerized. “You could hear a pin drop as we watched him do it like four times in a row. I don’t know how he did what he did. He was just a force of nature.”