They wheeled the body in. It had been embalmed so that the family and the city and all of Steeler Nation could come pay their respects at the funeral the day before. Now it was just a gray corpse wearing jeans. No shirt. No shoes. Such dense tissue, Bennet thought. Thick. So much wear and tear. His blocky forehead was one massive scar, perhaps from his helmet? Bennet had never seen such scar tissue on a face. Webster’s hands were huge as hams, the fingers mangled and twisted like the roots of a willow. His feet were cracked open and bent in places you never knew feet could bend. The skin on the thighs had been seared, over and over again, by the prongs of a Taser.
“They were making fun of him because he went crazy,” Bennet said.
“No one made fun of him,” the tech said. “This is Iron Mike.”
“They were calling him a lunatic,” Bennet said.
If football had battered Webster’s body this badly, Bennet could only imagine what it might have done to his brain. He was just finishing his neuropathology training at the University of Pittsburgh, and he was loving brains. Every brain like an innocent child, tender as a naked baby nestled inside the protective cradle of the skull. Bennet was looking forward to seeing what Mike Webster’s brain looked like.
—
As it was for Pittsburgh, football for Mike Webster was salvation. He grew up on a potato farm in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, barely survived a childhood of crippling poverty and regular beatings by his dad. He seemed to never outgrow the singular trait of desperation that got him out of that hellhole. A person could not work physically harder or push himself further. He trained maniacally when he played for the University of Wisconsin and became the best center in the Big Ten. He was small for a football player, six foot one, a little over two hundred pounds. He got picked up by the Steelers in the fifth round in 1974, but his stature didn’t overly impress trainers, or maybe they were too busy being dazzled by the team’s superstar picks that year: Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth, a once-in-a-lifetime haul of talent.
Webby, they called him in the locker room. He was the goofy prankster who kept the place happy. He had a wife, Pam, and four kids, and he loved being a dad—the kind of dad to volunteer for homeroom duty. He had a fire inside, a well of determination so deep. The Steelers used him as backup center for two years, and he paced the sidelines like a caged bull, needing so much more.
Determination. Sheer will. Whatever it took. He doubled, tripled, quadrupled the already insane training regimen he had developed in college. Even guys on the team thought it was extreme. He’d be out there in his front yard in the snow at dawn, full pads, helmet, doing drills by himself, pushing the blocking sled. He took amphetamines, steroids, supplements, anything anyone said was any good. By 1976 he had increased his body weight by 25 percent, most of it muscle. “The Strongest Man in Football,” they said on TV, when during a CBS special he lifted 275 pounds over his head twelve times, then bench-pressed 350 pounds fifteen times. In 1976, he became the Steelers’ starting center—and he did not stop. He played in bare arms so no one could grab his sleeves. Five degrees below zero: bare arms. Collision football. Snap the ball back to Bradshaw, then explode into other guys, head first, smashmouth football, the sound of helmets crashing, grunting, howling. War. He was low to the ground so he could get under people with his head. He would get under and then pull up with his head, uproot guys. One by one, then the next, play after play—for more than ten years, 177 straight games, never missed a snap—a streak of 5,871 consecutive offensive plays—four Super Bowls, eight consecutive seasons in the Pro Bowl.
Iron Mike. The best center in the NFL.
Then in 1988 the Steelers were done with him and he went off and played two years for Kansas City. He was the last of the guys from the old Steelers Super Bowl days to retire. He was thirty-eight years old. He was in Kansas. Kansas? He built a giant house in Kansas City. Pam loved it. The kids loved it. Mike loved it, and then he hated it. Hated it with a passion and without reason. He would fly into rages. Plenty of guys had a hard time after retiring from football—you had to adjust to a new identity and a new schedule, like coming out of the army, like coming home from war. Maybe this was some kind of PTSD? He got lethargic. He forgot to eat. He was getting so weird. One day he peed in the oven. “Why did Daddy pee in the oven?” The kids were becoming frightened. What was happening to Dad? The family started running out of money. He had made over a million dollars in his last three years of football alone.
“Where did all the money go?” Pam cried.
“Money?” he said.
He had no idea what she was talking about. He couldn’t remember. Couldn’t keep his thoughts straight.
They sold the house at a loss and moved to Wisconsin, where he and Pam had grown up. He disappeared, came back. Months at a time disappeared, wandered back. His youngest son, Garrett, was seven, so happy to see his dad again whenever he showed up. He would take Garrett to the drugstore, sit in the parking lot, tell him to go on in there and talk the pharmacist into giving him some painkillers. “Don’t tell him I’m out here.” Garrett would obey, and Webster would fly into a rage when he came back to the car empty-handed. “Dad! Dad! I’m sorry!” He’d wander off again. He slept in train stations, went back to Kansas City, took up residence in the storage closet above the weight room at Arrowhead Stadium. Plenty of people tried to help him, but no one could keep track of him. Here one day, gone the next. He went back to Pittsburgh, slept in the Greyhound bus station, fell into the hands of an opportunist who recognized him—Iron Mike!—and in no time figured out how to profit off him. Selling autographs at bowling alleys. Speeches in parking lots. For three hundred bucks you could have Mike Webster come to your home and watch a game with you! He did what he was told. He had pain everywhere. His neck, his hands and feet. Pain. He got pills, finally. Apparently, Pam filed for divorce, but he was so out of it he had no idea. People tried to help, Terry Bradshaw sent checks, Steelers owner Dan Rooney put him up in the Pittsburgh Hilton—for three months. Then he wandered off, meandered through Pittsburgh, slept under bridges, in the Amtrak station, then lived in his truck. He drove to Philadelphia. He showed up in the historic Warwick Hotel. Beautiful hotel! Wandering. Somehow he got guns. A SIG SAUER P226 semiautomatic pistol, an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle, a .357 Magnum revolver. He would walk up to strangers and rant. “Kill ’em! I’m gonna kill ’em!” He would say that about Steelers execs and other NFL people. “Kill ’em!” And his feet. All cracked up. His teeth started falling out. Stupid teeth. He got Super Glue, squirted each fallen tooth, tried to stick them back in. His fingers were all bent so it was hard to master the dental work. He wrapped his hands with duct tape and stuck a pen in the tape so he could write letters. He wrote thousands of letters.
What Do I do, I am over fucking overwhelmed…what to Do…Have NO way Be able to Help my Kids Everyone other Family Dependents and Keep Them Healthy Safe….Maybe me worthless piece of crap but can NOT Let That Get to me have to Keep Trying Keep Work at all this but How Do I Do anything Now?
He bought himself a Taser, used it on his stomach or his thigh, thwack! He zapped himself into unconsciousness, just to get some sleep.
—
In the autopsy room, Bennet put on his rubber apron and his plastic face shield and his headset and turned the music up: Teddy Pendergrass, Bob Marley, Julio Iglesias. He lined up his instruments. He was easily the most meticulous medical examiner in the morgue; this was, after all, his art. He was the Michael Jackson of autopsy. He sterilized the instruments before each autopsy, which seemed ridiculous to the techs. Infection was not an issue with dead bodies. But Bennet thought it only right. “Would you want dirty instruments used on your dad’s autopsy?”
He snapped on his purple gloves, pulled up his plastic sleeve liners and approached the slab. He noted that Mike Webster’s body was sixty-nine inches long and weighed 244 pounds, and he told the tech to please write that down. Then he propped up Mike Webster’s head.
“Okay, Mike
,” he said.
The tech assisting him on the autopsy pursed her lips. Oh, here he goes. No other pathologist at the morgue did this. Nobody but Bennet talked to the dead.
I spoke quietly while standing by Mike Webster’s body on the table. I reached out and held his forehead and said, “Mike, you have been misjudged. It is not right. They do not understand. We have to prove them wrong. Please help me. Guide me to the truth, let me use my education to establish the truth. Let us vindicate you.”
Bennet picked up his scalpel, sliced open the chest, and cracked open Mike Webster’s ribs. He took out the heart and found everything he expected of a man who was believed to have died of a heart attack—thickened, way oversized. Then he took out the liver, the stomach, the kidneys. He measured and snapped pictures, rinsed his instruments, went back in, rinsed, kept his area neat and clean as always.
He respected the dead. There but for the grace of God go I. It could be Oba on the table. It could be Winny or Uche or Mie-Mie or his mom.
Then he took Mike Webster’s head and he made a cut from behind the right ear, across the forehead, to the other ear and around. He peeled the scalp away from the skull in two flaps. With the electric saw he carefully cut a cap out of the skull, pulled off the cap, and gently reached inside for the brain.
How did this big athletic man, only fifty years old, end up so crazy in the head?
He was thinking about football and brain trauma. He was thinking of Mike Webster, the guinea pigs bashing. The leap in logic was hardly extreme. He was thinking, dementia pugilistica? “Punch-drunk syndrome,” they called it in boxers. The clinical picture was somewhat like Mike Webster’s: severe dementia—delusion, paranoia, explosive behavior, loss of memory—caused by repeated blows to the head. Bennet figured if chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer’s brain, couldn’t it also destroy a football player’s brain? Could that be what made Mike Webster crazy? It seemed like an obvious question. Had no one ever asked that question? Perhaps someone had. Perhaps there was a whole body of literature investigating dementia pugilistica and football and he had somehow missed it? The thought disappointed him. He had been so scrupulous in his reading ever since he picked pathology—not like when he was in med school, back in Nigeria, when he was such a foolish boy. Now he was a man and he had chosen this specialty and he was the Michael Jackson of autopsy and he had done a fellowship in neuropathology at the University of Pittsburgh. He was a neuropathologist, the kind of scientist who never skipped a chapter. Surely someone in the history of football had thought to look for dementia pugilistica?
Then again, unlike boxers, football players wear helmets, good protection for the skull. So it would be reasonable to think that the brain would be spared damaging impact. But plenty of people knew better. Anybody who knew anything about the anatomy of the head knew better. It was a simple matter of physics. The brain floats, is suspended in a kind of thick jelly inside the skull. If you hit the head hard enough, that brain is going to move, no matter what kind of protection you put around the skull. A helmet protects the skull. A helmet can’t keep the brain from sloshing around in that skull. If you hit your head hard enough, the brain goes bashing against the walls of the skull. Bennet had seen plenty of cases of brains destroyed despite helmets. People in motorcycle crashes wore helmets. On the surface is nothing, but you open the skull and the brain is mush. Bennet picked up Webster’s brain, carried it slowly to the cutting board, and turned it upside down and on its side and then over again. He reached for his camera and snapped pictures of the brain, as he routinely did for organs he removed from the body for further study.
I had my earphones on playing Teddy Pendergrass. I believe it was “Love 4/2.” And guess what, I was extremely disappointed when I looked at Mike Webster’s brain. Mike Webster’s brain looked grossly normal by naked-eye examination. There was mild atrophy, but it was negligible.
It was not at all what he expected Webster’s brain to look like. Regular folds of gray matter. No mush. No obvious contusions, like you find in dementia pugilistica. No shrinkage like you would see in Alzheimer’s disease. He reviewed the CT and MRI scans. All normal.
Honestly, I was extremely disappointed. I may have said in my heart to Mike, hey Mike, what is going on? Please do not let me down. I examined all the external surfaces, and there was no single significant gross finding on his brain. Not even one contusion. Typically, I would then have cut the brain in the fresh state, taken one or two small 2 x 2 cm sections and saved them, without performing any comprehensive brain examination. That is what you typically do at that point, when you have no evidence of brain damage. I already had a cause of death. The autopsy had shown that Mike died of heart disease. I should not have saved his brain. I had no reason or justification to save his brain. It should have been cut in the fresh state and placed back in the body. In fact I had the brain knife in my hand, about to slice the brain into two, with the brain lying on the tissue chopping board.
The most important moment in the entire quagmire that befell my life was that moment when I did not cut the brain in the fresh state. I decided to save the brain, fix it in formalin, and examine it at a later date. I had to spend time with this brain. Something just did not match. I could not understand it. I even became more flustered. The technician challenged me and asked me why I was fixing the brain, the brain should not be saved. I looked sternly at her, and said in a deep, firm monotone: “Fix that brain for me.” While I walked away from Mike’s body, I said to him, in my heart: “Thank you, Mike, thank you. I promise, I will not let you down, but you have to help me and guide me.” Every fiber of being in me believed that there was something wrong, but I did not understand it.
You don’t just go fixing random brains. This wasn’t cadavers in school. This was Mike Webster.
“You might need to talk to Dr. Wecht,” the tech said. “And the family. I’m not sure if you can just take the brain—”
“Fix the brain,” Bennet said, and he flipped off his rubber apron and his face mask and snapped off his gloves and went up to his office to call his boss.
There was nothing usual about the request. Another boss might have said, “Stick with the protocol,” especially to a rookie like Bennet, who was acting only on a hunch. But Wecht had already made a professional investment in Bennet; he was becoming a valuable asset to Wecht’s booming personal business. And Bennet was such a loyal soldier. Junior Wecht on this neuropathology kick. And, wow, this was Mike Webster.
“Okay if I study his brain?” Bennet said.
“Mike Webster,” Wecht said. “What are you looking for?”
“Anything.”
“Iron Mike,” Wecht said. “Yeah, go ahead. Just be sure to make me fucking famous.”
—
It was late, nearly midnight, by the time Bennet finished the other three autopsies on the roster that day and then completed his paperwork and his reports for the week. He liked working after everyone else was gone. Productive time. He picked up Webster’s file and thought about how he might talk to the family about studying Mike Webster’s brain. He was glad there was a family attorney listed in the file; he would call the guy’s office, leave a voicemail, get the conversation started.
“Bob Fitzsimmons,” said the voice.
Oh. So late? On a Saturday night?
“Hello?” Bennet said. “Bob Fitzsimmons?”
“Who’s calling?”
He introduced himself. “I didn’t expect anyone to pick up,” Bennet said.
“I work late,” Fitzsimmons said.
A kindred spirit.
Fitzsimmons’s office was in a renovated firehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, and he often would come to the office after he got done taking care of his dying mother. It was a rough time. Work helped. He struggled to understand Bennet’s accent on the phone, jutted his head forward. “Okay, wait. What do you need?”
The brain. Permission from the Webster family to process Mike Webster’s brain for microscopic examination
.
Oh, brother, was Fitzsimmons’s initial thought. As if the Webster case wasn’t already complicated enough.
Fitzsimmons knew more about Mike Webster than perhaps any other person in the world did at that point. He had first met him in 1997, when Webster showed up unannounced at his office asking for help untangling his messed-up life. It was confusing. “Wait—Iron Mike?” Fitzsimmons said, at first. Webster was a hulk of a man with oak-tree arms, and Fitzsimmons was not sure how or why he had made it out to Wheeling, West Virginia, for help. Fitzsimmons shook his hand and got lost in it, mangled fingers going every which way, hitting his palm in creepy places that made him flinch. Every one of those fingers had been broken many times. Webster sat down and told Fitzsimmons what he could remember about his life. He had been to dozens of lawyers and dozens of doctors, and at that point Fitzsimmons was another stop along the road. Webster really couldn’t remember whom he’d seen or when. He couldn’t remember if he was married or not. He had a vague memory of divorce court. And Ritalin. Lots of Ritalin.
“With all due respect, you’re losing your train of thought, sir,” Fitzsimmons said to Webster that first time they met. “You appear to have a serious illness, sir.” Not a pleasant thing to tell anyone, and here was a local icon, a famous football player Fitzsimmons once bowed to, as did all young guys in the Ohio Valley worth the Terrible Towels they proudly waved in the 1970s. The black and the gold. It fueled optimism here, too, just like in Pittsburgh, all along this region, up and down the rivers, abandoned mills and crippled mill towns held tight in the folds of the Allegheny Mountains.
As a personal injury lawyer, Fitzsimmons had fought for plenty of people with closed-head injuries—car and motorcycle crash victims, people getting blasted in industrial accidents. Some of his clients had developed severe psychiatric problems, memory loss, personality changes, aggressive behavior as a result of their injuries. It went with the territory. Was this what he was seeing in Webster?
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