It would yield Webster as much as $12,000 a month. The highest level was "total disability, football-related," reserved for those who were disabled as a result of playing the game. There are several levels of disability with the NFL, and Mike Webster was awarded the lowest one: partial, about $3,000 a month.įitzsimmons said, "Oh, please." He said if ever there was a guy who qualified for the highest, it was Mike Webster. He sent Webster for four separate medical evaluations, and all four doctors confirmed Fitzsimmons’s suspicion: closed-head injury as a result of multiple concussions.įitzsimmons filed the disability claim with the NFL. It took Fitzsimmons a year and a half to hunt down all of Webster’s medical records, scattered in doctors’ offices throughout western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He couldn’t remember if he was married or not. He really couldn’t remember whom he’d seen or when. He had been to perhaps dozens of lawyers and dozens of doctors. Mike Webster sat down and told Fitzsimmons what he could remember about his life. It seemed like every one of those fingers had been broken many times over. 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. Webster was a hulk of a man with oak-tree arms and hands the size of ham hocks. As if the Webster case wasn’t already complicated enough.įitzsimmons had first met Webster back in 1997, when he showed up at his office asking for help untangling his messed-up life. Oh brother was Fitzsimmons’s initial thought. Permission from the Webster family to process Mike Webster’s brain for microscopic examination. He struggled to understand the man’s accent on the phone, jutted his head forward. It was not unusual for him to be at the office that late he was having a bad week. It was late, maybe midnight, when Bob Fitzsimmons, a lawyer working in a renovated firehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, got a call from the Pittsburgh coroner’s office. But Wecht was famously never one to shy away from a high-profile case-he had examined JFK, Elvis, JonBenét Ramsey-and he said, "Fine." He said, "Do what you need to do."Ī deeply religious man, Omalu regarded Wecht’s permission as a kind of blessing. Another boss might have said, "Stick with the protocol," especially to a rookie such as Omalu, who had not yet earned a track record, who was acting only on a hunch. There was nothing routine about this request. He went to his boss, pathologist Cyril Wecht, and asked if he could study the brain, run special tests, a microscopic analysis of the brain tissue, where there might be a hidden story. No shrinkage like you would see in Alzheimer’s disease_. No obvious contusions, like in dementia pugilistica. So Omalu carried Mike Webster’s brain to the cutting board and turned it upside down and on its side and then over again. Soon Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape. Mike Webster lost all his money, or maybe gave it away. What had happened to him? How does a guy go from four Super Bowl rings to.pissing in his own oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth? Mike Webster bought himself a Taser gun, used that on himself to treat his back pain, would zap himself into unconsciousness just to get some sleep. His life after football had been mysterious and tragic, and on the news they were going on and on about it. "Iron Mike," legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons. The coverage that week had been bracing and disturbing and exciting. In fact, had he not been watching the news that morning, he may not have suspected anything unusual at all about the body on the slab. From what he could tell, football was rather a pointless game, a lot of big fat guys bashing into each other. He was born in the jungles of Biafra during a Nigerian air raid, and certain aspects of American life puzzled him. Omalu did not, unlike most 34-year-old men living in a place like Pittsburgh, have an appreciation for American football. On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner’s office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player.
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