Lessons from the Shadow Side of Football: Building the Religious Counterculture

Seeing Shadows by Jeff Gomez

Jeff Gomez (jeff-gomez.com)

Dr. bennet omalu was uninterested in football. The game had always seemed bizarre to him. Growing up in Nigeria, in his own words, “I thought these were people dressed like extraterrestrials, you know, like they were going to Mars or something . . . headgears and shoulder pads. And I wondered why, as a child, why did they have to dress that way?” He figured they must get hit in the head a lot if they had to wear those ridiculous helmets. But back then, no one gave it much thought.

In their book League of Denial: the NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru describe a Saturday morning in 2002 when Omalu pulled into the parking lot at a Pittsburgh coroner’s office to do a routine autopsy. He was annoyed to be stuck working the weekend shift and apparently had been out clubbing the night before. As he arrived, he found the parking lot packed with news trucks, reporters, and cameras. He had to fight his way through to get inside the building.

“What’s going on?” he asked inside.

“That’s Mike Webster on the table,” they said.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Bennet Omalu was probably the only person in all of Pittsburgh at that time who did not know who Mike Webster was. Mike Webster was the legendary center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, considered by some to be the best center in NFL history. Five years prior he had been inducted into the Hall of Fame. He was fifty years old and he had just died of a heart attack. Everybody knew all of that — except for the man who was about to perform his autopsy. And it was this man who, from his singular vantage point outside of the culture of football, was able to change the course of history. His story illustrates the power of a countercultural vision to uproot even our most entrenched institutions.

Omalu’s Discovery

Omalu considers himself a very spiritual person and when he’s doing an autopsy, he seeks to communicate with the spirit of the dead person. He talks to the corpse and asks how it died, and he feels guided. So there he was in 2002 with the body of Mike Webster, saying, “Mike, you need to help me. I know there’s something wrong, but you need to help me tell the world what happened to you.” He commented later that the body seemed worn and drained.

Webster had ostensibly died of a heart attack, but he had also suffered from some kind of extreme dementia toward the end of his life. He had lost all his money, couldn’t keep a job, and was living in his truck, addicted to prescription drugs. Depressed and paranoid, he had accumulated an arsenal of weapons and was constantly threatening NFL officials. He had gone to see doctors about memory loss and excruciating headaches, and when asked if he had ever been in a car accident, he answered, “Only about 25,000 times.”

As part of the autopsy, Omalu opened up Webster’s skull. His brain looked normal. He had died of a heart attack, after all, and everything seemed OK. The technicians asked Omalu if they could sew him back up and go home. But Omalu did something a little unconventional for the circumstances. He ordered that the brain be “fixed,” which is a chemical process that allows the brain to be solidified and sliced and examined on the inside. People thought he was crazy.

But when Omalu got the images back from the lab, he couldn’t believe this was Webster’s brain. It was profoundly damaged in a way that was not consistent with Alzheimer’s or any other known condition. There were changes that, according to Omalu, shouldn’t have been in a fifty-year-old’s brain — that shouldn’t be in any brain at all. He soon realized that he had stumbled upon something huge. He...