In college, on the East coast, I was surrounded by New Yorkers. Sundays, we would watch pro football on communal TV in the dorm lounges. Most games were local, meaning the Jets and Giants were the teams folks followed. Since I was not a local boy – I had grown up following the Cleveland Browns, the only Ohio entry in the NFL – I felt I needed to adopt a competing entry to cheer for. The Browns, top of the heap in the ‘50s, had fallen on hard times with the retirement of Jim Brown (here’s all you need to know about Jim Brown: he is the only NFL rusher to average over 100 yards per game for his career, and his career yards per carry of 5.22 leads all rushing backs).
My sophomore year, the Green Bay Packers met the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl II. For some reason, I was entranced by the brawlers from the Bay Area, and adopted them as my team. I followed them through the ‘70s, and exalted as they chased and caught the Pittsburgh Steelers finally winning it all in ’77 and ’81. They were a seedy lot: Kenny “the Snake” Stabler, an Alabama boy who looked like he was smoking a cigarette and drinking rye as he exited the huddle; Fred Biletnikoff, a fiery receiver with hippie blond locks flowing out of his helmet; Mark Van Eeghen, a gutsy white boy from Colgate who carried the ball for them; the nonpareil left side of the O-Line, Art Shell and Gene Upshaw.
By 1979, I had moved to Washington State, began to follow the Seahawks, and started to marvel at Steve Largent’s pass routes and Dave Krieg’s quirky throws. But they retired, I grew up and away from that world, and stopped paying attention to football in any form. It seemed more and more a dismal sport, dedicated to mayhem and destruction, churning through men’s bodies, leaving them broken and at times, confused.
Even the Seahawks visit to the Super Bowl in 2006 couldn’t draw me back in. I did watch that game, but mainly as an excuse to re-connect with old friends from Denver in my new house in Snowmass.
Then, signals started reaching my sentry post about 3 or 4 years ago, about the noisy crowds in the new stadium, the owner with a bottomless check book, and a new coach who seemed intent on relentless winning. The personalities took shape, the stories grabbed my thoughts, and, in the end, the gravitational pull of simple dedication to and success in achieving victories sucked me in.
As the ‘Hawks approach their second consecutive Super Bowl next week, with an opportunity to stamp their mark on future historians, I’m drawn to a few basic facts about their approach which underlie their continued success. Each tenet has meaning for me as an athlete, a value worth emulating, the artistic means to a simple end: “Just Win, Baby!” (which of course was the Raider’s motto under their maverick owner Al Davis.)
Always Compete The coach, Pete Carroll, emphasizes that every practice, every game, is an opportunity to compete. An opportunity to not only compete with yourself, and improve your performance, but compete for the right to compete. Meaning, he’s not afraid to move players in and out of the lineup based on their performance, not just on the value of their contracts. The sentinel example: in 2012, the Hawks hired a new quarterback, paying him $8 million a year, intending that he be their man for the foreseeable future. They also drafted an unlikely back-up named Russell Wilson, after 5 other QBs had already been picked. But that August, in training camp, Wilson had the opportunity to compete for the job. He made it very obvious that he was the better choice, and Carroll did not hesitate to give the rookie the most important position on the team. Wilson promptly took the reins, and has wan more games in his first 3 years than any NFL QB before him. The Eight Million Dollar Man moved on to play back-up for the Green Bay Packers.
Play FOR Each Other, Not WITH Each other The Seahawks embody the true value of a team. This is a very subtle nuance. Teams can play well together, and perform well, yet still, each individual is doing his job, because it is his job, and because he wants to be seen doing his job well. That works most of the time, but in moments of crisis, or at times when failure is not an option, then an individual focus sometimes impedes group success. To a man, the Seahawks repeat the mantra, “I’m doing this for the other guys on the team.” The concept of individual credit or blame is not permitted; the only thing that matters is team success. They are going for the Lombardi Trophy, named for the man who is purported to have told his team, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
This seems very straightforward at first: a football coach so crazed by the need for success that winning becomes an all-consuming passion and focus, at the expense of everything else. But roll over the phrase several times, and it becomes a Zen koan. Winning is both there and not there. On the one hand, winning is not all there is – there’s more to life, and even to competing, than simply winning. But, in the end, the only way we will keep score is how we perform in the competition. So, winning; not the be all and end all of an athlete’s existence or performance. But when someone asks how good the football team is, there is one simple metric: did they win or not?
The Separation is in the Preparation; I’m Not Scared Because I’m Prepared
(To be Cont’d)