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know Mike more and more, I realized how scared he was,” said Stage. “It didn’t matter if he was All-Pro every year. That was never a comfort to Mike. He was such a gentleman, such a nice person, but at the height of his career, I felt that he never really enjoyed his success.” In Pittsburgh,Webster built the stable family life he had never had as a child. He and Pam had four children: two boys and two girls. They lived in a gray-and-white two-story colonial outside the city. In the morning, the kids clambered out of bed to the smell of their father’s freshly baked bread. “He was like a big superhero,” said his daughter Brooke, the oldest of his children, “and I was a daddy’s girl.” One winter, Daddy came back from the Pro Bowl bearing pineapples and grass skirts and held a luau for her second-grade class. Yet Pam agreed that her husband was never totally happy. “That was so sad for me,” she said. “You know, he just never felt like happy down to your toes.”
    Asked what motivated Webster, one of his former teammates replied: “Total fear.”
    By 1978, Webster was the best center in the NFL. From that year forward, he would make the Pro Bowl eight straight seasons. If off the field he was a bit awkward, on the field Webster was totally in hiselement. Before the snap, the center is responsible for making the line calls, adjusting blocking assignments in response to the configuration of the defense. Webster was a master, barking out audibles, some of them decoys, assuming the role of the Steelers’ field general. He studied game films endlessly—he often took them home—and came to know the Steelers’ offense so well that hesometimes overruled Bradshaw in the huddle. “Ultimately he became the leader to the extent that he would call the plays,” said Bleier. “Bradshaw would just say, ‘Okay.’ ”
    Webster was low to the ground, and he used that to his advantage. As the center, he often drew the gnarliest blocking assignments, the biggest and baddest linemen and linebackers. In the 3–4 defense (three down linemen) he was head up on nose tackles sometimes 50 pounds heavier. In the 4–3, he was responsible for taking on the middle linebacker. Gerry Sullivan, a former Cleveland center, recalled watching film of Webster taking on Oilers nose tackle Curley Culp, a former college wrestling champion and future Hall of Famer. Sullivan was astounded: Webster wasn’t just blocking Curley Culp. He was
uprooting
him. “To me, the physics of it weren’t even possible, you know?” Sullivan said. The Browns ran the film over and over, mesmerized. “You could hear a pin drop as we watched him do it like four times in a row. I don’t know how he did what he did. He was just a force of nature.”
    One of Webster’s greatest assets was his head. He used it as a battering ram, smashing it into his opponent as he exploded off the line. To stop Webster, nose tackles and linebackers tried to neutralize his head. Harry Carson, the great New York Giants linebacker, came into the NFL when Webster was in his prime. He found that his best strategy often was to bludgeon Webster as he fired off the line. “When I would explode into Mike, it was power against power,” Carson said. “I would hit him in the face. That’s what we were taught: to hit a guy right in the face so hard that they’re dazed and stunned.” Sullivan, who stayed friends with Webster for years, began to notice that a thick layer of scar tissue had formed on his forehead at the exact spot where he thrust his helmet into opposing linemen. Sullivan was jealous. It was a sign Webster was executing his block—play after play. “I was kind of disappointed that my forehead wasn’t, um, disfigured,” Sullivan said.
    It wasn’t just the games that had hardened Webster’s head. ManySteelers considered the games a break from their normal reality. “We were a collision football team,” said Kolb. Years later, through collective bargaining,