Colin Kaepernick: Mangoprism Person of the Decade

by

Mangoprism Editors

Season Categories Published
MP115 Person of the Year

Jan 01, 2020


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Colin Kaepernick, whose modest but courageous act of protest cast a provocative new light on nationalism and racism in the United States, is the Mangoprism Person of the Decade™ spanning from 2010 to 2019.

Through his NFL career, Kaepernick attained outsized privileges with which few in the United States could identify. His decision to kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality, which ultimately got him blackballed from the league, is hardly one many of us are in a position to explicitly replicate. But the form his story took, of a person who happened to face down his particularly high-profile context with self-assured thoughtfulness, in effect sacrificing the relative privileges of his situation for a more interesting and meaningful existence beyond it, serves as a lesson that anyone can absorb and apply in concrete ways.

Drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2011 after a productive college football career at the University of Nevada, Kaepernick started his first NFL game in 2012. With a long stride and an improvisational playing style, he found immediate success, leading the 49ers to the Super Bowl and breaking Michael Vick’s playoff rushing record along the way. His 2013 season ended in a loss to the Seattle Seahawks in a dramatic NFC Championship Game. The game constituted a matchup of two dynamic black quarterbacks whose self-representations vis a vis Instagram were juxtaposed in a Seahawk’s fan’s viral post, which portrayed Russell Wilson amidst dogs, military personnel, and charitable events, and Kaepernick hanging with J. Cole and showcasing his impressive shoe collection. This post epitomized Kaepernick’s racialized media framing in the national consciousness. After a loss to the Seahawks, Kaepernick signed a $126 million contract extension with the Niners.

Kaepernick’s performance dipped somewhat in 2014 and 2015, but he remained the 49ers starting quarterback going into the 2016 preseason, when a reporter noticed him sitting down on the bench during a pregame rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. Mainstream national discourse regarding a spate of well-publicized police killings of unarmed black men had been influenced in part by the Black Lives Matter movement, and after the game Kaepernick told reporters: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

In order to render a more precise message amid bad faith interpretations regarding his lack of patriotism, he knelt for the anthem during a subsequent game, in part as a show of respect to U.S. military members, and he knelt during the anthem for the entire rest of the season, inspiring similar acts among other athletes in professional and amateur contexts across the nation. The protests came amid the rising pitch of the 2016 presidential contest, in which Donald Trump effectively used the kneeling movement as a cudgel to highlight the supposed excesses of a political opposition that did not respect America’s greatness. Kaepernick, beset by injuries, missed numerous games that season, while continuing to kneel prior to each of them. In 12 games, he passed for 16 touchdowns and four interceptions and occasionally demonstrated some of the flair that propelled him to the national stage in the first place. In March of 2017, facing a release from the 49ers, Kaepernick opted out of his contract.

In the time since, in a league where the likes of Nathan Peterman, DeShone Kizer, Blaine Gabbert, Mark Sanchez, David Blough, Geno Smith, and Devlin “Duck” Hodges have started games at quarterback in the last three seasons, no team has signed Colin Kaepernick. In October 2017, Kaepernick filed a grievance with the NFL – since settled – for colluding to keep him out of the league. That same month, at an owners meeting about how best to deal with plummeting favorability ratings and boycott threats from fans who were offended by players kneeling during the anthem, Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, a major financial backer of President Trump, said of the players in a majority-black league run by a nearly entirely white ownership class: “We can’t have the inmates running the prison.” This comment prompted much of his own team to kneel during the following game in Seattle, at which, according to a Mangoprism correspondent present at CenturyLink Field, some Seahawks fans could be found casting their hands to the air in disbelief as they screamed at kneeling Texans players to “grow up!”

One thing about this whole story – and decade – is that it could be challenging to parse the substance from the noise. Kaepernick made it clear that police brutality in the United States was the subject of his protest, but media perpetuated the asinine and incoherent narrative that Kaepernick and his comrades were protesting the anthem itself and all the things it represents. (FWIW, the MP editorial board agrees with Vince Staples’ assessment that the Star-Spangled Banner “don’t even slap.”) The internet in particular has supercharged the blunt meanings of certain performative shorthand identity markers by which a person can assert their tribal affiliation in the culture wars. Sometimes, the markers became so potent that we had no choice but to choose a side. As the anthem began, anxiety swept through stadiums at the start of every game the nation round and, whether on the field or in the stands, the very fact of one’s action – or inaction – all of the sudden became meaningful in itself (with a few notable exceptions, white players opted not to protest during the anthem). An invisible political ritual previously only explicitly considered on the fringes of mainstream discourse became entirely conspicuous to pretty much everyone. Does this matter?

As Ameer Loggins, who shared political reading materials with and had a class on black media representation audited by Kaepernick at UC Berkeley during the summer of 2016 told the journalist Rembert Browne, “Colin represents an inconvenience.” The NFL’s brand – violence, military partnerships, the lucrative Viagra marketing contracts that adorn its every game, its evident comfort at the center of American nationalism and consumer culture – proved shockingly fragile in the face of this gentle disruption of its harmoniously choreographed antiseptic image. Notably, the people who were triggered by this disruption stood not on the supposedly reactionary political left, but among the true believers, the diehards who have staked so much of their identity – or in the case of owners and ad partners, finances – in the NFL’s inane theatrics.

That a mere “inconvenience” could so shake such a powerful institution is a testament to the power of rhetoric and action that does not conform to the banal political platitude perpetuated in the interests of that institution. As the writer George Orwell wrote in his classic “Politics and the English Language,” political, as opposed to meaningful speech like Kaepernick’s, “give[s] an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Enjoining us to deal in authentic and thoughtful discourse generated from our own personal convictions and feelings, Orwell added, “probably, it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.”

Kaepernick, whose fabulous afro no doubt in itself rankled some of the more unsubtly racist owners in the National Football League, cut a powerful image on the sidelines that demonstrated his dissent from one of the most idiotic and thoughtless mainstream institutions in American cultural life. Kaepernick chose a meaningful life on his own terms and solidarity with those who have less power than himself, over mere status contingent on the edicts and regulations of the cynical power-hungry men who own the NFL and, more broadly, so much of American society.

For the inconvenient example he set, the Mangoprism editorial board is delighted to award Colin Kaepernick our highest honor: the Mangoprism Person of the Decade™. ▩


Runners up: Beyoncé, Marshawn Lynch

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.

What the 2012 Seahawks Meant to Seattle

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP00 Sports

Jan 15, 2013


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Two days ago, on the 14th play of an 80-yard drive, Jason Snelling took a shovel pass from Matt Ryan and waltzed into the end zone, giving the Atlanta Falcons a 27-7 lead over the Seattle Seahawks with 2:11 left in the 3rd quarter. It was their 5th score in 6 drives. At this point, a theoretical Seahawks victory would be one of the greatest playoff comebacks of all-time, by any calculation.

As a Seahawks fan watching alone on my computer in my room, I was distressed, but never in despair. I knew this game was not over. I had watched the Seahawks make the absurd look ordinary all season. Observe:

  • Week 4: Down 12-7 to the Packers with 7 seconds left, Russell Wilson heaves a Hail Mary to Golden Tate, giving the Seahawks a controversial 14-12 win.
  • Week 6: Down 23-10 to the Patriots with 13 minutes left, the Seahawks defense forces two punts and the offense scores the go-ahead TD with 1:18 on the clock to give the Seahawks a 24-23 win.
  • Week 13: Down 14-10 at Chicago with 3:40 left, Wilson engineers an 97-yard TD drive to give the Seahawks a 3-point lead with 24 seconds on the clock. After the Bears miraculously kick a field goal at the end of regulation, Wilson leads an 80-yard game-winning drive on first possession of OT.
  • Weeks 14-16: Seahawks bust 58 points on the Cardinals, 50 on the Bills, and then 42 on the 49ers.
  • Wild Card Round: Down 14-0 after the 1st quarter, the Seahawks outgain the Redskins 371 yards to 74 the rest of the way and win 24-14.

Clearly if there was ever a team who could make up a 20-point deficit in 17 minutes on the road in the playoffs, it was the Seattle Seahawks. And so I welled with pride as I watched my team fight back on both sides of the ball. Quick touchdown. 27-14. Earl Thomas interception, another touchdown. 27-21. 9 minutes left. Defensive 3-and-out, punt, defensive 4-and-out. Then with 31 seconds left, Marshawn Lynch ran it in to put the Seahawks up 28-27. It was a beautiful thing to behold, not just as a fan, but as a human, watching a team forge its own destiny.

A kickoff and two plays later, Atlanta had driven into field goal territory. Their 49-yard attempt cut effortlessly through the Georgia Dome air and split the uprights. Final score: Falcons 30, Seahawks 28.

From distress to ecstasy to shock. I suddenly felt in touch with the elemental side of life. This game carried significance beyond its temporal boundaries. It was the culmination of a breathtaking season by a young team of entertaining characters that formed a distinct collective personality in step with their improved performance, from a 4-4 start to an 11-5 finish. Slowly but surely, the 2012 Seahawks captured imaginations, gaining national recognition as they actualized their goals and blossomed into something pure. I now know what it feels like to be a parent.  After the loss to the Falcons, I was not mad, or even sad – only proud. The 4th quarter was so captivating that I could not process what was happening in real time. The game left me in disbelief, not that this team could stage such a dramatic comeback, but that this resilient, electrifying, swagged-out team was not of Boston or New York or Los Angeles, but of Seattle.

I read an article after the New York Giants won the Super Bowl in which Eli Manning was asked if he did it for the fans. No, he said, we do it for the guys in this locker room. It is not wishful thinking to believe that the players on the 2012 Seahawks do it not only for themselves, but also for the city and the name on the jersey. The 12th Man crowd, with the help of some well-designed stadium acoustics, is responsible for making Century Link Field the best home-field advantage in the NFL. In this age of Twitter, there is greater transparency between player and fan, and Seahawk players tweet thanks to the Seattle faithful on a regular basis. This should be taken with a grain of salt, but the time they take to express their gratitude is a nice gesture.

Seahawk fans were rooting for more than just laundry this season because we got to know the players both on and off the field. Starting in training camp, fullback Michael Robinson posted weekly 15-20 minute shows to his YouTube channel, The Real Rob Report. He films casual interviews and portrays the atmosphere inside the Seahawks practice facility locker room. Over the course of the season, Robinson introduced almost every player on the 53-man roster.

Football is a sport that dehumanizes the players. They are much more athletic than regular people, and they experience routine acts of violence that are far removed from everyday life. Helmets and masks obscure their faces. The drama is condensed to only 16 regular season games and a few playoff games. The game doesn’t have a consistent flow like basketball or soccer: the drama is then condensed even further into 4-7 second bursts. Offensive linemen are human shields and safeties are human projectiles. It’s almost impossible to relate to the players as they do battle. And that’s what makes The Real Rob Report so great. Robinson, a captain, welcomes you to meet the players with their helmets off. He has shown us how the Seahawks interact, what music they like, how they dance, and who they voted for in the election, or if they voted at all. He has shown us Red Bryant’s passion for cookies, and he has shown us Chris Maragos, the overconfident, white, backup safety, talk trash to Marshawn Lynch. Now, seeing Maragos standing on the sideline during a game brought me great pleasure.

Seattle has had a lackluster sports history, and the 2012 Seahawks have probably been the most exciting team the city has ever seen. More exciting than the GP/Kemp ’96 Sonics, more exciting than the 116-win ’01 Mariners, more exciting than the ’05 Seahawks who went 13-3 and played in the Super Bowl. That Seahawks team won methodically; The 2012 Seahawks won with style. With crazy comebacks. With dreadlocks flowing out the helmets of half of its star players, including cornerback Richard Sherman, indubitably the cockiest player in the league. With a potent read-option offensive attack. With a 5’10” quarterback named Russell Wilson who scrambles like a young McNabb and passes from the pocket like a young Brady. This season was a cultural movement the likes of which Seattle fandom has been waiting on forever.  This particular team’s identity cannot be separated from its symbiotic relationship between fans and players.

I must finish with Russell Wilson. He inspires me to become a better person. He inspires me to work hard and fulfill my potential. He won the starting job in training camp over big free agent signee Matt Flynn by waking up at 6:30 every day to watch film. He watched film the day after the Falcons loss. He visits sick kids in Seattle Children’s Hospital every week.  “I want to be great,” he said in December. “I want to be one of the people a 100 years from now, everyone talks about. That is the way I treat every single day.” He is the number one reason for the Seahawks improvement over the course of the season; he threw 10 TDs and 8 INTs Weeks 1-8, and 19 TDs and 3 INTs the rest of the way. He is the number one reason there has been a special relationship between players and fans this season. He is an underdog by virtue of his height, and we are all underdogs in one way or another. Russell Wilson transcends football. He is living proof that sports can be a valuable and even vital distillation of what we want to achieve and experience in life.

When the Seahawks plane landed in Boeing Field at dawn the morning after the Falcons game, Wilson tweeted, “Best feeling in the world seeing all the #12thman at the airport! Wow I love this team and this amazing city. #GoHawks.” The power of positive thinking in the face of defeat. The cult of Russell Wilson is growing fast, and there is little doubt that he will inevitably achieve his biggest goal.

The New Breed of Seahawk

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP00 Sports

Oct 19, 2012


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This past Sunday, New England led the Seahawks 23-10 in the 4th quarter when Tom Brady locked eyes with dreadlocked Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman. “He looked at me like, ‘talk to me after the game,’” Sherman later said. “It’s just one of these things where I think Newton’s third law of motion applies. Every action has an equal or greater reaction.”

The Seahawks scored two late touchdowns to squeeze by the Patriots 24-23 for one of the most dramatic regular season victories in team history. Sherman took care not to do Isaac Newton right after the game.

“Me and Earl walked up to him and said, ‘We’re greater than you. We’re better than you. You’re just a man — we’re a team.’” An hour later, he tweeted the above picture, setting off an instant firestorm among the New England faithful. “Patriots fans mad lol…” said Sherman in his next tweet. “Talking bout Super Bowl rings…. What have u done lately? Oh ur 3-3 lol”

That is not a rational statement. One win does not outweigh 3 Super Bowl rings and 5 Super Bowl appearances in the Brady-Belichick era. Sherman doesn’t sound confident – he sounds arrogant.

And yet, I am delighted. Sherman has some attitude. It is significant here that he plays defense and not offense. Unlike on offense, everyone on defense plays with the singular goal of stopping the ball; to play defense, you need that strong carnal instinct. To me, this incident with Sherman shows that he possesses the type of competitive edge that’s essential to success on the defensive side of the football. If he is so happy with the Seahawks win that he talks trash to Brady after the game, then flaunts his trash-talking on Twitter, then backs up his flaunting – he is a real competitor.

Last year the Seahawks secondary anointed itself the Legion of Boom: Sherman, cornerback Brandon Browner, free safety Earl Thomas, and strong safety Kam Chancellor.  Sherman was the only member of the Legion of Boom not to receive an invitation to the 2012 Pro Bowl. Defensive backs are usually small and swift, like 5’11” Darrelle Revis. The Legion of Boom is huge. Chancellor is 6’3”/230, Sherman is 6’3”/200, and Browner is 6’4”/220. Sherman and Browner use their size best on bump-and-run and their length best to deflect balls. They aren’t the quickest, but they have a valuable counterweight in Earl Thomas, who at 5’10” uses his short legs to accelerate quickly from his position in center field; he has as much range as any safety in the league. So while these cornerbacks play an unorthodox style, their secondary is consonant as a whole.  Shit is working. Right now the Seahawks rank 5th in total defense and 3rds in scoring defense.

The Seahawks gave up 200 more yards to the Patriots than they had to any team all season. The Pats put together back to back 80-yard touchdown drives in the 1st half. But from then on, they scored only 9 points on 5 trips to the red zone. Sherman and Thomas each had a 2nd half interceptions, and the defense forced back-to-back punts with their offense down 13 points in the 4th quarter. They held Tom Brady to his lowest rating of the season.

Last night, the Seahawks lost 13-6 to the 49ers. They are 4-3. But still, this is the most exciting Seahawks season since they went 13-3 en route to the Super Bowl in 2005. Something feels different. New Nike uniforms help relieve the unsavory stank of the last 4 years (combined 23-41). The defense is young – rookie Bruce Irvin is on pace for double-digit sacks, rookie Bobby Wagner starts at middle linebacker. Starting OLB K.J. Wright is 23; Thomas is 23; Sherman is 24; Chancellor is 24; Browner is 28, but in only his second year in the league after a stint in the CFL. QB Russell Wilson is 23. Marshawn Lynch leads the league in yards after contact. It’s a youth movement…something great is in the works.

Shannon Sharpe once said,”Ray Lewis is the type of guy, if he were in a fight with a bear I wouldn’t help him, I’d pour honey on him because he likes to fight. That’s the type of guy Ray Lewis is.” Ray Lewis and Ed Reed applied the mischievous traditions they learned as Miami Hurricanes to the Baltimore Ravens, making it the most fearsome defense in the NFL for over a decade. They are animals, with no regard for human life. The Ravens D has been the Muhammad Ali of the league. But now Lewis is out for the year. The Seahawks D feels like the new Ravens. Fearless. Dickish. Brotherhood.

At the very least, they are giving the city of Seattle a sports team with a real edge, which was last seen in the Gary Payton/Shawn Kemp era in the mid-90s (Payton is still an active trash-talker on Twitter). The Mariners can’t score for shit, nor will they ever in the cavernous Safeco Field. The Sonics are gone. The Sounders are good, but the MLS is lame. It’s fun to rally around athletes who want nothing in life more than to win. If they talk excessive shit as a symptom, and if they can back up that sass, it’s even more fun. After the Tom Brady incident, Richard Sherman said, “People, they don’t look at the film. They don’t analyze anything. That’s why these analysts and commentators need to shut their mouth.”  Amazing. I’d like to thank Sherman, the Legion of Boom, and the 2012 Seattle Seahawks for restoring my faith in humanity.