Stranded in Kenya: The Seahawks Win Super Bowl XLVIII

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP00 Sports Travel

Feb 25, 2014


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The Seattle Seahawks played nineteen games this season, and I watched all of them — all of them, except one. As the Seahawks took the field at MetLife Stadium to do battle with the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII, I was fast asleep in the Kenyan bush, 100 miles west of Nairobi. It was 2:30 in the morning. When I emerged from my tent at dawn the game was long over. I dreamed that the Seahawks had beaten the Broncos, 16-14.

Team Kenya Safari consisted of my brother Andrew, Mom, Mom’s friend Betsy, and Mom’s sister Margaret, and myself. Safari! Wooo!!! The morning after the Super Bowl, we went on a hike to visit a primary school and learn about the trees that heal gonorrhea (‘gon-OR-rhe-a’ in Kenyan parlance). Jonathan, a Maasai warrior, was our guide. We had visited his village the day before. I asked him if his village played any sports for fun. “No,” he said, “but I ran relays in college.”

We would next have Wi-Fi in four days’ time, at the Lake Nakuru hotel. We could stream the Super Bowl there. By some T-Mobile voodoo magic, Margaret’s husband was able to deliver her the final score. She told Betsy, and they were on strict orders not to discuss the game until the rest of us had watched it ourselves.

We mingled with lions, zebras, and elephants on the Serengeti, paid visits to villages, farms, and schools, and made escapes from hordes of rabid whittled-giraffe salesmen. At last, we made it to the Lake Nakuru hotel. Andrew, Mom, and I sat outside at a picnic table overlooking the lake, sipping Tusker (the local brew of choice) and downloading the NFL Game Rewind app on Mom’s iPad so we could watch the game. The app loaded at a glacial pace, but our spirits soared high above the Kenyan savanna. The wait was finally over. Seahawks! Broncos! The big enchilada! Let the rumble begin!!!

I tapped Begin Stream. A message popped up. It read: “Sorry, NFL Game Rewind has not been cleared for use in your region.”

What happened immediately next was a blur. Profanities were uttered. Tusker was consumed. “Isn’t the NFL supposed to be trying to expand into foreign markets?” Andrew asked.

Marooned by the National Football League. Classic. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. But if I had endured the four-day wait with anything less than 100% hope for a successful viewing, I would have folded and asked Margaret the score. It was a valiant effort, and for that I patted myself on the back. Now there was little choice but to rip off the band-aid. Mom checked the score and announced the result: the Seahawks won. 43-8.

It was the first Seattle championship of my lifetime and instantly the greatest moment in Seattle sports history. As such, I got up and humped the air triumphantly, but I could already tell something was wrong. There was no euphoric rush, no pleasant tingle, not even the kind that comes from swishing a three-pointer. There was nothing to savor. I hadn’t earned the emotional reward of victory. I hadn’t hiked to the mountaintop, I flew there by helicopter. I had cheated. Or rather, I had been cheated. I would be better off in Jonathan’s village, I thought, having never heard of the Seattle Seahawks, never grasping the concept of sports because sports only exist on the upper rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I self-diagnosed myself with acute retroactive FOMO. It can be more or less summed up in terms of my friend Larson Gunnarsson. Heart of gold, lover of dogs, he was that kid in 3rd grade who licked slugs and cried when his team lost in football at recess. He is the truest sports fan I know. He flew out from Seattle to New York, where I live, to attend the Super Bowl with his brother. After the game, he posted on Facebook: “Tonight is the single best day of my life and nothing has ever come close. SEAHAWKS!!!!!!!”

I know exactly what sort of afterparty went down, because I’ve constructed it in my imagination. Immersed in a giant army of Seahawks fans, Larson, our friends, and I take to the streets of Manhattan full of Jim Beam and jubilation, first the East Village, then Downtown, then up to Midtown, then to Central Park as the sun rises to share what remains in our flasks with the homeless, and finally to the Upper West Side for Monday brunch.

***

Stranded in a distant land. A victim of injustice. I couldn’t even relate my plight to my own brother, a diehard Mariners fan but only a casual Seahawks fan. For the first time, I found myself craving the 12th Man.

Over the course of the 2013 season, I grew increasingly cynical about the Seahawks’ famously loud home crowd, the 12th Man. As the Seahawks’ record progressed from 4-0 to 8-1 to 12-2, the national media paid the 12th Man progressively more attention and fair-weathers piled onto the bandwagon. I rolled my eyes as the 12th Man attempted to coronate itself with the Guinness record for world’s loudest crowd. I rolled my eyes as people posted pictures of their freshly needled ‘12’ tattoos, as one young couple named their newborn Cydnee Leigh 12th Mann. What a bunch of tools, I thought. I didn’t need the 12th Man as a prop to prove my devotion to the Seahawks. If there is a God, he knows I’m a real fan.

A couple days before the Super Bowl, at the elephant orphanage in Nairobi National Park, we spotted a woman taking pictures with a 12th Man flag, and Mom chatted her up. Margaret, a Denverite, sidled up alongside the woman and nudged her in the ribs. “Go Broncos,” she said.

The woman nudged Margaret back. “Go Hawks,” she said.

This jocular ribbing amongst women in their late fifties continued for about ten minutes, after which Andrew and I were coerced into posing for a picture with the 12th Man flag. To my horror, Mom later posted the picture to Facebook.

Mom isn’t much of a football fan. But if we had been able to stream the Super Bowl at the Lake Nakuru hotel, I would have watched in relative silence while she screamed obscenities and made herky-jerky guttural noises at the screen. The line between the fair-weather and the diehard blurs in the moment of reckoning.

Mom is a lot like Ramsey from the Bud Light “It’s only weird if it doesn’t work” commercial in which the narrator, who we’ll call Steve, is forced to watch the Patriots game with the overzealous Ramsey. I hate watching football with Ramsey. All he does is yell. They can’t hear you, Ramsey! But the Patriots never lose when Ramsey comes over to watch. I love you, Ramsey, Steve says.

Who is crazier, Ramsey or Steve? Ramsey becomes so engrossed in the drama of the game that he loses contact with reality and forgets he’s with people. Ramsey is Alan from “The Hangover” gone berserk. Steve keeps his composure, but he’s convinced himself that Ramsey, if sitting in Steve’s living room, possesses the ability to bend cosmic vibrations such that they align in the Patriots’ favor. Within every fan there is both Ramsey and Steve, both the passion and the superstition that sustain the belief that fans are as integral to the sport as the players. If players are artists and no one recognizes their work, did they create anything to begin with? Arrogant and selfless, fans want above all to compel their players to dig deeper, until they become more than just an audience – until they become actors.

The 12th Man isn’t an expression of tradition. It’s an expression of this belief that fans matter. The central precept of the 12th Man is to be heard, the goal to disrupt the opposing offense’s play calls and snap counts. Since 2012, the Seahawks are 10-8 on the road and 17-1 at home. The cause is worthy. The cause is virtuous. As the 2013 season progressed and the stakes rose, the cause broiled itself into a tsunami that breached the walls of CenturyLink Field and swept across greater Seattle. Fair-weathers everywhere, their capacity to emote no less than that of the diehards. My dad reported that during his trip to the grocery store the day before the Super Bowl, “every woman from age 5 to 85 was wearing a Seahawks jersey.”

The 12th Man isn’t an expression of tradition. It’s an expression of a civic pride Seattle never before knew it had.

The morning after the failed attempt to watch the Super Bowl, we went on a game drive in Lake Nakuru National Park. As the rest of Team Kenya Safari clutched their binoculars and scanned the horizon for rhinos, I laid despondent and wistful in the backseat, my mind elsewhere. I wasn’t thinking about the highlights I’d ended up watching on repeat the night before, or the Seahawk players who had fulfilled their lifelong dream of winning a Super Bowl. I thought about Larson Gunnarsson and company going buckwild in New York. I thought about the 700,000 Seattleites who turned out for the victory parade.

When a team wins a championship, how much ownership can fans claim? They exist on the same emotional plane as the players. But unlike fans, players both participate in and bear witness to greatness. The role of the fans is ambiguous and peripheral, no matter how intense their fervor. If fans lay dubious claim to the real trophy, they at least can claim a parallel simulacrum of a trophy and pass it around amongst themselves. A fan isn’t on a journey with the players – he’s on a journey with other fans. The players aren’t his brothers — the fans are.

Watching the Seahawks has been a reliable source of emotional and existential purpose for me over the years. If my reaction to them winning the Super Bowl by a score of 43-8 is any indication, sharing the viewing experience with others, however remotely, must be meaningful. When I watch a Seahawks game alone in my New York apartment, I am not Bear Grylls, self-sufficient in a wilderness of degenerate Patriots, Giants, and Jets fans. I am occupying the same psychic space as other Seahawk fans watching the game same as me. If Andrew, Mom, and I had been able to watch Super Bowl XLVIII, it’s not as if we would have been the only three Seahawk fans on Earth. Through time and space we would have rode with the 12th Man.

“It’s Not Just About Sports”

by

Frankie Pavia

Season Categories Published
MP00 Life Sports

Feb 19, 2014


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I was still in a bit of a stupor the morning after the Super Bowl. Actually I was completely delirious. My voice was hoarse from screaming Richard Sherman quotes at passersby after the game. A Seattle team was world champions, in the most convincing fashion imaginable, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. I drunkenly stumbled around in a snowstorm at 10:30 AM trying to decide whether I was in any state capable of going to work. I then got an email from Sunil Gulati, co-instructor of the course I TA, saying that Casey Ichniowski had suddenly passed away.

When I arrived at Columbia three years ago, sports were everything. Growing up, my dream was to become a sportswriter. My friends and I started a copyright-infringing paper called “Fox Sports World” in second grade. I had written for my high school newspaper, a local sports blog, and a national NBA scouting website. The path to becoming a sports journalist was clear, bordered by lush vegetation and the scent of fresh flowers. A dense fog obscured all other paths.

The sports path became even more enticing my freshman year when I got a job with Casey Ichniowski, a labor economist and professor at the Columbia Business School. I began working as a research assistant on two projects. The first project sought to quantify the effect a player’s March Madness performance had on where he would be picked in the NBA Draft. The second project sought to establish whether star players on relatively weak national soccer teams made their teammates better.

Of course, I was just excited to be doing research on sports. My goals at this point were shifting from journalism to the front office – to be general manager of a sports team. I tried to shift my academic interests towards advancing that end. There was just one problem – I simply did not enjoy economics classes. During my sophomore year it became readily apparent that my academic passion was earth science, not anything related to sports.

My meetings with Casey became more frequent during that year as the paper about March Madness approached completion. In early March, the paper was submitted and released to positive reviews from fellow economists, but a tepid response from those in the basketball industry. I relayed some of the negative comments from basketball writers and scouts the next time I met Casey and received a surprising response.

He told me, “It’s not just about sports.” He explained what I’d known all along, but never truly grasped about the basketball and soccer projects I’d worked on – the research was about something bigger. Sports were just a medium Casey used to answer fundamental questions about labor economics. In the basketball paper he found that executives use rational decision-making processes when evaluating employees. In the soccer paper he found that peer effects are hugely important in the workplace, that “Hiring high talent workers has spillover effects.”

Casey and I, it turns out, had blazed similar paths. Our athletic careers ended in high school, but our love for sports never waned. Our academic interests deviated from sports, but we kept them in our lives nonetheless. The past two years, Casey and I worked together to develop a sports management course for MBA students at Columbia. The first edition of the class, last spring, was a success, though an incredible amount of work. We met every week, sometimes getting distracted and talking about sports, sometimes rigorously planning our next steps to improve the course. No two meetings were the same – the only constants were his impeccably groomed mustache, thirty years in the making, and the fuss of hair that migrated from on top of his head to the front no matter how often he fixed it.

At that point, Casey and I were the only remaining members of the sports group that had once bustled with undergraduate research assistants. The course we were planning was six years in the making, but had never gotten off the ground. I like to think the class finally happened because Casey wanted to keep sports an active part of his life. His children had all entered college; his time coaching youth sports was over. The basketball and soccer projects had mostly concluded. The course was the link back to what he loved so much. It was certainly that way for me – working on my thesis in oceanography, spending almost all my time in the lab, meeting with Casey in his office was my escape back to my purest love.

The course was off to a strong start this semester. With a year of experience and improvements under our belts, the first class went swimmingly. It seemed that Casey, Professor Gulati, and I had created an exceptional class. Then Professor Gulati’s email came, Casey was gone from our lives, and my world had been jolted into disequilibrium. The week after the Super Bowl was extraordinarily difficult. I struggled to balance the exuberance of winning the Super Bowl with the sorrow of losing one of my closest mentors.

I attended Casey’s funeral the Saturday after the Super Bowl to pay my respects. Casey was always there for me – he talked me about my academic path, my career goals, and my general interests. He was the first person I talked to about my mom receiving chemotherapy, the first person to give me perspective and hope about the situation. We talked about our families a lot. I had only met his wife and one of his children briefly, but Casey made me feel like a member of his family, and I tried to make him feel like part of mine.

“It’s not just about sports” is the most important advice I have ever received in my life. It drove me to seek out a path in earth science, which provides fulfillment in a way sports never could. I could have easily followed the first path presented to me and worked for a sports team, with the highest priority making an owner more money – even winning is simply a conduit for that. But Casey helped me see that there was more to the world than that – that I could make a bigger impact somewhere else and still be just as passionate.

The course was how we both connected back to the sports world. It was a bond we shared that was forged by our mutual love for it. The course is continuing on after Casey’s death, with Casey, as Professor Gulati eloquently put it, “working remotely.”

At his funeral, I listened to speaker after speaker share their memories with Casey. Everyone in his life relished the moments they spent sharing their love of sports with him, how strong a connection they were able to develop over that one topic.  I thought about how excited I’d been to talk about the Super Bowl with him, for him to share my joy in the Seahawks winning, to hear him talk about the greatest sports teams of his lifetime.

The week after the Super Bowl, my greatest joys, my favorite moments, came from watching the videos of Seahawks celebrating afterwards. Seattle fans felt personal, emotional connections to the individual players in a way I have never seen before in sports. We danced to Bay Area rap with Marshawn Lynch. We screamed at opposing fans with Richard Sherman. We got chills every time Pete Carroll referenced the impeccable connection the players had with “The 12s” in locker room speeches because we knew it was true. I was unable to share my joy with Casey, but I could share it with the team itself – I coped with Casey’s loss by watching and rewatching the Sound F/X videos of Seahawks players mic’d up during the games. I’ve listened to the same song Marshawn listened to in the locker room, Philthy Rich’s Ready to Ride Remix, hundreds of times on repeat. Doing these things created abstract tie points in my life chronology that connect otherwise disparate events – they allowed the joy of winning the Super Bowl to spill over and counteract the sorrow of losing one of my mentors and idols.

Casey’s mantra “It’s not just about sports” never rang truer than during these moments after the game. I was excited that the Seahawks had won the Super Bowl because I wanted to share my happiness with all my friends, with the Seahawks players, with all my fellow Seahawks supporters, and with everyone who knew the joy that a Super Bowl win would bring Seattle fans. Sports do have true value. It’s not just about sports – it’s about the people who share your experiences with, the community of fans, players and sports lovers around you, and there is nothing greater than that.