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Thread ID: 17519 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-03-25
2005-03-25 22:02 | User Profile
The tragic death and unhappy legacy of "Iron Mike" Webster:
[img]http://www.post-gazette.com/images3/20050313HOwebster1copy_230.jpg[/img]
By Chuck Finder, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (3/13/05)
BALTIMORE -- Iron Mike Webster's final football collision is scheduled for a Monday next fall.
This one will be in the hushed chambers of the George H. Fallon Federal Building.
The Estate of Michael L. Webster vs. Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan, et al., is set for 9:30 a.m. Oct. 17 in U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Maryland.
Nearly 2 1/2 years after his death, the Steelers' Hall of Famer remains at the center of a struggle. It is a legal tussle seeking an additional $1.14 million from the NFL's $1 billion disability plan that ruled Webster incapacitated as of September 1996. His suit asks for the date to be pushed back to March 1991, upon his retirement from the league.
More than that, family and friends said, this clash in federal court takes a stand for professional football retirees past, present and future who tread the same dark path as the onetime Iron Mike, in whom America's most brutal sport helped brew a mixture of depression and dementia that produced a frail, pained, oft-confused 50-year-old man.
"It's not about Mike Webster," said his youngest son, Garrett Webster, 21. "We're not suing for damages, we're not suing for emotional damages, we're not suing for emotional distress. We're suing for what's supposed to be asked from the [disability plan].
"For God's sake, some player's going to need it down the road. If they don't help us out, who are they going to help?
"We have to do this fight ourselves. It's hard to do. Mike Webster had to fight this fight alone. And he was depressed. He was questioning why he had to do this. But he would sit me down and say, 'This is our fight.' "
About six years after Webster finally applied -- he considered it at least twice earlier -- and four years after being granted what the Bell/Rozelle Plan terms Total and Permanent Disability, the estate of Mike Webster takes this fight to federal court in Baltimore, where the plan is headquartered barely eight blocks from the courthouse. The headquarters is nine employees in an unremarkable, 24th-floor office space with rows of filing cabinets and PCs. Nevertheless, the adversary is the plan itself, backed by the high-powered Washington, D.C., lawyer who ardently represents a program that pays out about $1 million monthly, and the six-member board comprised evenly of NFL owners/managers and NFL Players Association representatives in the form of agents and former players.
Webster, the Steelers (1974-88) and Kansas City Chiefs (1989-90) center with the Popeye arms, died after a heart attack and other complications Sept. 24, 2002. His legacy after football was one of financial woes, an arrest and homelessness, a slide from Pittsburgh icon to pity that he didn't want.
Troubles continue to follow in his wake, matters that Garrett Webster simply called "a couple of estate things and debt things that we have to take care of."
A Common Pleas Court judge last September ruled that the estate owes two early-1990s Pittsburgh business associates $206,120.15 in damages from an 11-year-old lawsuit, though the old friends agreed to accept $65,000 and a couple of autographed helmets, jerseys and the like. In April 2003, a Coraopolis couple won their civil suit stemming from an earlier automobile accident with Webster, whose estate was ordered to pay them $13,950.40. Court records also indicate that the Internal Revenue Service hasn't yet been completely satisfied for a 1996 tax lien, claiming Webster owed $251,015.09 in back taxes -- although estate administrator Sunny Jani said the agency already took the first eight months of disability checks Webster received from the Plan.
With $309,000 or so in the estate account currently, Jani said, there remains another $100,000 owed to Altoona attorney Terry Despoy, who basically opened a line of credit for an out-of-work Webster more than a half-decade ago.
The collateral: The attorney holds Webster's four Super Bowl rings in a bank safe-deposit box. "As long as I have possession of them, they'll never be squandered or auctioned off," Despoy said. "They always will be Mike Webster's."
And now the family -- represented by the estate's attorneys Cyril Smith of Baltimore and Bob Fitzsimmons of Wheeling, W.Va. -- is back in court fighting another Mike Webster fight.
"Certainly," Doug Ell, the attorney representing the NFL plan, said of Webster's late-1990s plight, "[it is] a sad case."
"A lot of people are sick of hearing about our stuff," Garrett Webster added. "I can understand people saying, 'You're dad played football; he should know the risk.' But if a guy works construction and a brick falls on him, would you say, 'He should know the risk of a brick falling on him?' Can't he get disability?
"A brain injury isn't something every player has.
"And that's the one thing I want to see happen with this. People who are out there, people who are normal, everyday people, should know about brain injuries and depression."
[font=Arial]The downward spiral[/font]
The final few years of Webster's life, folks around him stayed tight-lipped about his health. He showed symptoms of Parkinson's disease. His fingers and feet and body were wracked from 17 years of NFL fury. That was about all the public knew.
From documents now entered as evidence and interviews, the picture crystallizes of a man approaching 50, looking closer to 70 and beset with both emotional and cognitive problems.
"After he retired, his health started to get gradually worse and worse," Garrett Webster said. "About a month or two after, problems started. He would make horrible investments. . . . Sometimes people are just bad investors. But dad made a lot of choices that were ridiculously stupid."
His attorneys claim he made only $3,500 in 1991 and nothing in 1992. The Internal Revenue Service claimed he owed it $34,543.58 in taxes for 1992 and $216,471.51 for 1993. The Bell/Rozelle Plan attorneys, in court documents, cited annuities that they say earned him $86,406 in 1995 alone.
Steve Truchan, a Warrendale businessman who worked with Webster and his late brother, Gary, on a Carnegie laser-painting business called Distinctively Lazer from 1991-93, said Webster invested some $84,000 in the company and tried to help, but couldn't. He attempted to work on the company floor, but his gnarled hands rendered him unable, and the Truchans shooed him away for everybody's good. In the boardroom, Steve Truchan said, Webster wasn't much use as far back as June 1991, three months after his NFL retirement. "He couldn't sell; he couldn't talk," said Truchan, who described him as "child-like" yet at the same time concerned with his own increasing mental problems. "Whatever human being in there was gone."
Continued at [url="http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05072/470301.stm"]http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05072/470301.stm[/url]
2005-03-26 13:20 | User Profile
Mike Webster, you will never be forgotten by Steeler Nation. We love you! :flex:
God bless you ST, and thanks for this post.