Despite Location, It’s No Centerpiece

If you were on the lam from the law or fleeing war crimes, where would you go to hide out? The Cayman Islands? Paraguay? A cabin in the Rockies? A secluded villa in the south of France?

How about center on an NFL football team? You wouldn’t even have to change your name.

It has long been the notion here that Judge Crater disappeared into the middle of a pro football line years ago. Amelia Earhart could have crashed there. Even your friends and neighbors lose track of you.

Take Mike Webster, for example. Webster is one of the registered legends of football. When Mike Webster started playing this game for money, Richard Nixon was President, gas was 35 cents a gallon and we were trying to get out of Vietnam.

He was a member of one of the most famous teams in all pro football history, the four-time Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers.

He should have been the most celebrated of all the athletes who ran out on the field of the Coliseum with the Kansas City Chiefs Sunday, but the cheers were for the upstarts like Bo Jackson and the new kids on the block who were in knee pants in Georgia when Mike first started making snaps in big-time football.

The press packet referred to the Chiefs’ starting quarterback, Steve DeBerg, as “venerable.” What about Mike Webster, who’s almost as old as George Foreman? Shoot! George Bush. He was playing football when Muhammad Ali was heavyweight champ, Arnold Palmer was still king of golf and Pete Rose only had his first 1,000 or so hits.

The record books say Fran Tarkenton holds the mark for passes attempted and completed--3,686 completions in 6,457 tries.

Webster figures he has successfully completed upward of 20,400 passes in his career. All of them, to be sure, were laterals between his legs, but he doesn’t recall missing a one. And none of them were intercepted.

He should be a household word in the great game. If so, the word is who? When a reporter went looking for him in the locker room after Sunday’s game and asked an official which one was Mike Webster, the reply was exactly that, a puzzled “Who?”

In a way, Webster was the star of the Chiefs’ 27-24 victory. Central to it was that Raider defensive end Howie Long was called four times for jumping offside, mistaking the count cadence of the play, and that the veteran tackle, Bob Golic, got fooled twice. Those were a crushing 30 yards added to the Kansas City offense by the con artists of DeBerg and Webster.

Centers are the most indestructible of the footballers who play for pay. Jim Otto, Ken Iman, Dave Dalby, Ray Mansfield . . . they seem to stay in this game forever.

“You have to be a special kind of person,” Jim Otto admits. “You have to kind of like pain.”

You can almost always tell a center. He’s the one who’s got this little cut on the bridge of his nose from getting his helmet slammed down on it by a charging nose tackle.

“It’s kind of like catcher in baseball,” Otto says. “Not everyone wants to do it.”

Adds Webster: “It’s not that easy a position to learn. It’s a technique position.”

It’s also a nosebleed position. After he has snapped the ball and blunted the nose guard’s charge, the center has to go looking for the nearest linebacker to take out of the play.

“What are the occupational hazards to playing center?” Webster responds. “I’d say salary. Everybody else gets a lot more money.”

Yes, but centers get it longer. Webster admits he takes a lot of good-natured kidding from the new faces in the clubhouse.

“How did Red Grange like the ball, high or low snap? What was it like, blocking for the Four Horsemen?”

Mike Webster never snapped for Red Grange or blocked for the Four Horsemen, but he did get the ball to Terry Bradshaw who, along with Joe Montana, is the winningest quarterback in Super bowl history. And Bradshaw hasn’t taken a snap in eight years, having long since faded back to a broadcast booth.

Webster played at Pittsburgh--he went to the Chiefs as a Plan B free agent and they won’t let him retire--with the storied lineup of Mean Joe Greene, Jack Lambert, Franco Harris, Rocky Bleier and Lynn Swann. Most of them are in, or are about to go in, the Hall of Fame. Webster will join them when he finishes playing--if he ever does.

“Webster was the dictionary in playing center,” a rival line coach once said.

Does the anonymity of the position contribute to its longevity? Webster shakes his head.

“It’s not brain surgery, but it’s like it in that some people can’t do it but even more don’t want to do it,” he says. “I didn’t want to be a center. John Jardine (the late coach at Wisconsin) made me a center. I wanted to be a linebacker. I wanted to be Dick Butkus.”

Mike likes his hide-out now. He accepts the fact that he’s in the 17th year of his mysterious disappearance. But it is a fact that he has played in more than 270 NFL games, counting exhibitions and playoffs. And he takes pride in the fact that they can’t start without him.