Click photo for larger image. After the NFL This is the first of two reports on former Steelers player Mike Webster and the NFL's pension and disability plan. Today: Webster's family and estate carries Tomorrow: Of more than 3,500 NFL Player's Association members, only 232 receive some form of disability payments. The blame: It falls on NFL, not the Rooneys

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.' "

Post-Gazette How Mike Webster is best remembered: In the middle of the line, taking on all comers, protecting his quarterback. Click photo for larger image.

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.

	Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Mike Webster jokes with Terry Bradshaw on the stage during Webster's induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in July 1997. It was later reported Webster used a healthy dose of stimulants to get through the day. Click photo for larger image.

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."

The downward spiral

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."

In a rambling, hand-written letter dated Sept. 29, 1993, Webster gave a donation to Spina Bifida Association of America -- a pet project -- and a glimpse into his mind:

The enclosed check "is in appreciation of all of you however it in no way could ever be large enough to be of any way to say thanks to all of you. Hope this last paragraph comes out right."

He lived anywhere, everywhere. A friend and business associate from West Virginia put up Webster in his Pittsburgh apartment from 1992-94. A friend and business associate in Philadelphia housed him there for three months in late 1994, early 1995. He lived in his truck and hotels for the next three and a half years, once telling a doctor, "I'm essentially homeless."

"The majority of times, I'd be trying to deal with him, and I'd be thinking, 'Who is this?' " said former Steelers linemate Steve Courson, with whom Webster and eldest son Colin stayed for two months after Webster's 1997 Hall of Fame induction, a speech given after Webster took 80mg of stimulants.

"OK, I had a dysfunctional heart, but my brain still worked," added Courson, who received disability from the plan for more than a decade until late 2004. "When you're incapacitated in your. . . cognitive thinking processes, there's nothing worse in a disability. It impedes your ability to help yourself."

Soon after Jani first paid him $1,500 to sign cards for a full day at a show in 1996, he would find Webster in the parking lot of Jani's Blue Eagle Market in McKees Rocks, asleep in the pickup truck given Webster by his brother Reid. Ex-teammates tried to help. Tunch Ilkin and Craig Wolfley arranged for a car and an apartment that Webster declined, and joined Courson one Christmas in buying Webster a plane ticket to Wisconsin so he wouldn't have to make the 17-hour drive that often left him confounded and calling Jani or son Garrett for directions. Franco Harris once gave him thousands of dollars. But it wasn't the way Iron Mike chose to live.

"He didn't want charity," Jani said. "Very prideful."

Instead of taking money, he used his four Super Bowl rings as collateral for loans, starting with $24,000 from a Pittsburgh jeweler, Jani said. The rings and loans later were turned over to an Altoona lawyer whom Jani knew through the collectibles business. The rings turned into a virtual line of credit for $5,000 a month, an unpaid debt that leaves them in Despoy's control.

Whenever Webster got money, he wired it to Pam and their four children. "He felt he betrayed them," said Jani, who took to hiding $20 bills in Webster's truck to avoid those late-night calls from a broke and lost traveler somewhere between Wisconsin and Pittsburgh. "He was giving them money for love. A lot of times, I told him, 'Mike, they need you and not the money.' "

He discussed applying for NFL disability at least twice in the mid-1990s, but never did, court documents show.

In a Nov. 29, 1995, letter from his Philadelphia attorney, the subject was broached.

On April 29, 1997, he told a doctor he planned to file "due to turf injuries" to feet and toes.

Ell, representing the plan, wrote in an argument filed Jan. 31 that plan officers sent Webster applications "several times during 1995 and 1996."

Was he troubled then?

That question could play a role in the federal judge's decision, all because a provision added in the 1998 Collective Bargaining Agreement allows the Retirement Board to find for a player if it deems that his incapacities interfered with him filing a claim.

Certainly, he received a variety of medical attention and prescriptions, as illustrated in court documents.

Diagnoses: Depression, agitation, suicidal ideas (in 1996 he told one physician he considered suicide every day but couldn't because of his children), obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention and concentration difficulties, brain trauma, pre-Parkinson's, and post-concussion syndrome. At one point, he was hospitalized for congestive heart failure and edema covering most of his body. He complained of back and foot pain. In short, he was a mess from head to toe. And if anyone still wonders, Webster told doctor after doctor he "only rarely experimented with steroid use," so that didn't seem to be an overriding problem.

He took Atavan, Lorazepam, Prozac, Zoloft (for depression and anxiety), Darvocet, Lorcet, Percocet, Ultram, Vicodin (pain killers), Lasix, magnesium, potassium (for kidney and blood levels), Dicloxacillin (antibiotic), Eldepryl (for Parkinson's disease), Klonopin (anti-convulsant), Lanoxin (for the heart), and Dexedrine plus Ritalin (for attention disorders).

"He had frontal-lobe syndrome," said Chuck Kelly, a Benwood, W.Va., physician who befriended and treated Webster in 1996, and believed oral accounts from Webster show that his mental capacities began to degrade as early as 1989. "It was injured from repeated blows to the forehead. . . , where all your executive function comes from. The chronic symptoms began to accumulate. At first, you might be a little forgetful, forget what you're going to the store for, forget how to get to the store."

Ritalin, normally prescribed to hyperactive children, such as his own son Garrett, was one drug that gave Webster peace of mind. He talked about needing it as badly as a diabetic requires insulin.

Webster so regularly telephoned one doctor to get Ritalin that the doctor supposedly handed him a pad of signed prescription orders and told him to fill out the dosages he knew too well. After a pharmacist discovered that the undersigned physician no longer practiced in Pennsylvania and alerted authorities, police in Beaver County arrested Webster at a Rochester drug store Feb. 20, 1999. He was charged with forging prescriptions 19 times.

It wasn't until June 30, 1999, with the help of Jani and Fitzsimmons and doctors and family, that he at long last made an official application for disability.

Unbeknownst to the family at the time, the Steelers' Dan Rooney lobbied the Retirement Board in Webster's favor.

Later that year, in Sept. 3, 1999, Webster pleaded no contest and was placed on five years probation over the Ritalin matter.

The next month, at the quarterly meeting of the Retirement Board, on Oct. 29, 1999, he was awarded Football Degenerative (post-career) Total and Permanent Disability -- by a unanimous 6-0 vote, Ell pointed out. Roughly $7,200 a month in benefits started three days later.

The Internal Revenue Service promptly froze the first eight months of those payments, Jani said.

And so it went.

For every upturn, the downward spiral started anew.

On Sept. 20, 2002, the same day a Coraopolis couple filed a civil suit seeking damages from Webster over a 2000 automobile accident, Iron Mike began having chest pains. That night, worriedly calling friends from the Wal-Mart parking lot in North Fayette, he was taken to Sewickley Valley Hospital and then transferred to Allegheny General Hospital. Doctors performed triple-bypass surgery, but Webster's kidneys and other organs began to shut down.

Jani remembers the eerie time that his friend died in Allegheny General Sept. 24, 2002: at 12:52 a.m., forever linking Terry Bradshaw's number with Webster's.

The final struggle

The Retirement Board met four months after his death -- Jan. 16, 2003 -- and agreed on how to compute the pre-1999 funds owed Webster in disability, to which they affixed a start date of Sept. 1, 1996. They awarded him lump sums of $152,000 in the Football Degenerative total-disability category and $157,230 in an additional Inactive partial-disability category .

Then, at its July 23, 2003, meeting, the board declined the Webster estate's appeal to reclassify his disability benefits at the higher Football Active rate and move back the start date to March 1991.

That's how the two sides wound up in Baltimore's Garmatz Courthouse, the next step in the legal appeal process under the Employee Retirement Insurance and Security Act that governs all U.S. disability plans.

"That's the only issue, really: When did Mike's disability occur?" said Fitzsimmons.

His co-counsel, Smith, added that the plan chose to "ignore the evidence of their own, board-certified neurologist," Dr. Edward Westbrook of Cleveland, who reported after examining Webster that the former center was disabled as of 1991. "Can you single out somebody who's going to provide you with a written, expert opinion, and then, when it doesn't go [your] way, decide you're going to criticize that opinion?" Smith wondered.

Ell, in his Jan. 31 argument filed with the federal court in Baltimore, argued that Westbrook's definition of disability differed from the plan's. To him, also, the matter falls upon the 42-month window, meaning "you can only go back to January 1996." Even then, he conceded, that could win the family and estate $56,680 in disability funds over that eight-month period between January 1996 and the Sept. 1, 1996, start date that the board affixed to his benefits.

Both sides agree on one thing: The case likely won't go to trial.

They expect the judge to rule from documents entered as evidence, possibly even a round of oral arguments in a hearing, long before October.

Whatever, Jani said, "It won't get their dad back."

He maintains he gets none of any sought disability money. Such benefits are to be split five ways, among Pam, who divorced Mike shortly before his death, Brooke, 28, Colin, 26, Garrett and Hilary, 17. Brooke and Hilary live with their mother in Lodi, Wis., where Pam works as an executive assistant in a medical office. Garrett, who said he is taking classes through an online university and receiving along with Hilary an NFL scholarship stipend of $3,000 per month while in school, expects to return from Lodi to Pittsburgh in the next month or so. Colin was living with his wife and two children in Pittsburgh, but recently returned to the Marines.

"We all think there's something more that we could've done," Garrett said. "But, in the end, we all realize we did the best we could at the time. You'd all love to cure him and still have him here."