CHAPTER 15
If I entered the NBA out of passion, I was called to the National Football League out of civic duty. The Seattle Seahawks had been mired in mediocrity even before Ken Behring bought the franchise in 1988. By the midnineties, the team was losing more than $5 million a year. It had an absentee owner and a lackluster coach. The Kingdome, which it shared with the Seattle Mariners, was falling apart. The roof leaked, and four heavy ceiling tiles had dropped into the stands just before a baseball game.
In February 1996, Behring declared that he was moving the team to Southern California. The NFL refused to sanction the move. King County sued Behring for trying to break his Kingdome lease, and the owner countersued. With the Seahawks’ future so precarious, I was approached by a contingent of local politicians on the hunt for a buyer to keep the team in Seattle.
I liked football, but I didn’t plant myself in front of the TV all day Sunday. And I wasn’t on a quest to take on a second major-league team and all the responsibilities that came with it. Still, I was sympathetic. I went to four or five Seahawks games a year. I thought of Seattle as a three-sport city, and I knew how hard it was to retrieve a major-league franchise once a community lost one. In April, I agreed to a $20 million option to buy the team within fifteen months for approximately $200 million. I had one stipulation: I would exercise my option only if we could get a new stadium. Based on my experience with the Blazers, it made no sense to get involved unless revenues could cover the costs of resigning top players and pursuing the best free agents. You needed a first-class facility to generate that kind of money, and the Kingdome was grossly inadequate.
A new stadium would run $430 million, and I was willing to chip in close to a third of it. But the rest had to come from public funding*—not just to give me a fighting chance to make a modest profit, but to forge a public-private partnership that would keep the franchise in Seattle for the long haul, regardless of who owned it. My hometown had asked for help, and I wanted to respond, but I wasn’t about to go it alone.
The day after I negotiated my purchase option, the Seattle Times ran a story headlined “Allen’s Rescue Makes Him City’s Latest, Greatest Sports Superhero.” I guessed that it wouldn’t be long before the media changed its tune.
IN A DECEMBER 1996 Seattle Times poll, opponents of a new Seahawks stadium outnumbered supporters by eight percentage points. The one bright spot: Among ten local figures involved in the issue, I was the only one rated favorably. Unlike the politicians, I had no legacy of unpopular decisions. People knew me as a low-profile guy who’d cofounded Microsoft and who now might save the franchise.
As the six-week campaign over Referendum 48 unfolded, I was surprised by how many people still liked the Kingdome. While cities like New York constantly tear down and revitalize, Seattleites cherish their architectural icons, even the unsightly ones. To expand our constituency beyond hardcore football fans, we emphasized the new stadium’s potential to lure a major-league soccer team. We were making headway in the polls and had pulled almost even when opposing groups found traction with a superficially convincing argument. There was no need to vote yes on the stadium, they maintained, because I’d never walk away and let the Seahawks leave town. Political cartoons struck the same theme: Why doesn’t Paul just pay for all of it, since he can? Our poll numbers dropped. It looked like my wealth was working against me. As a Seattle Times columnist wrote, “Mr. Allen is a splendid fellow whose only drawback may be that he has too much money.”
I knew about voter resistance firsthand from the Seattle Commons project, where we’d pushed for a sixty-one-acre waterfront park to anchor industrial and biotech development in the South Lake Union neighborhood. Despite my pledge of $20 million, the voters twice defeated our proposal. (We’ve continued to revitalize South Lake Union, but without the park.) Now I put aside my aversion to TV appearances and took my case for a new football stadium directly to the voters. On June 2, two weeks before the referendum, I sat in a staged living room backdrop and taped a thirty-second spot:
When I said yes to help save the Seahawks, I meant that I’d do my part in building something for the future—personally and financially. … I stand by that commitment. But if you say no, that means no for me, too, because I’m not going to do this without you.
The ad seemed to work. By Election Day, polls showed us with a narrow lead, but it was less than their margin of error and nothing was assured. When I arrived at our headquarters that night, I could feel the worry. Early returns from eastern Washington, where the case for a Seattle stadium was least persuasive, were worse than we’d projected. We were down thirty thousand votes.
If the ballot failed, I knew there was a good chance the Seahawks would leave town. The Kingdome would become a white elephant (actually a brownish gray elephant), hosting the occasional truck or home show. It was a glum prospect all around.
We were banking on late returns from King County and the suburbs to put us over. As Senator Warren Magnuson once said about Washington’s statewide elections, “You can see every vote that matters from the top of the Space Needle.” Every few minutes, I checked in—we were still behind, but gaining. By ten o’clock, it was clear that the suburban soccer moms had turned out in droves. By eleven, we knew that the referendum would pass in a squeaker. Months of tension drained away. I joined a local band in a celebration jam, and Bert Kolde jumped up to sing “Wild Thing.” I could see how people got addicted to electioneering.
And on top of it all, I was about to join the small and special club of NFL owners.
THE NEW STADIUM would be built in the footprint of the old one in Seattle’s International District, a transportation hub with restaurants and hotels within walking distance. The Kingdome’s destruction was slated for March 2000. As I watched from three hundred yards away, fifty thousand tons of concrete would be demolished by a rapid-fire series of 5,800 gelatin dynamite charges, the largest implosion in history. ESPN Classic covered the event live, and I was asked if I wanted to push the button that would set the whole thing off. I wasn’t sure about that, so they offered plan B. At the end of the countdown, I would give the high sign to the demolition man, and he would push the button. “OK,” I said. “That sounds like fun.”
I got my instructions. There would be an audible count over a PA from ten down to six, then a silent count to zero. (The logic was that if anybody happened to be inside the Kingdome and ran out yelling, we needed to be able to hear them and abort the blast.) I followed the audible count and continued it in my head. There was an awkward pause. The demolition man looked at me expectantly, his hand over the button.
And I froze. I can’t explain why. Maybe I had a flash of nostalgia for all the SuperSonics and NCAA Final Four games I’d seen at the Kingdome. At that pregnant moment, my brain just locked up.
The poor demolition guy was raising his eyebrows at me: Can we blow it up now? I finally snapped out of it and gave my thumbs-up. We heard what sounded like gigantic firecrackers going off in a timed sequence, with streaks of light flashing across the dome. Then the building imploded as people cheered from nearby office towers. Within seconds, all that remained was a tight mound of rubble and—moving toward us at highway speed—a billowing cloud of dust. On cue, we jumped into a van until it passed.
MY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE with big-time football was at the University of Washington, where my father and I sat in the stands and stomped on the risers as we cheered on the smashmouth teams of the early sixties. Later we went to see Sonny Sixkiller, the dynamic Cherokee quarterback who led the nation in passing in 1970. Win or lose, there was a special feeling to those games in the open air. When I met with the stadium architects, I talked about creating a twenty-first-century version of the experience I loved as a boy. Instead of an insulated bowl in a parking lot, I wanted an open-ended design and seats with a view. Husky Stadium looked out on Union Bay; Seahawks Stadium would have expansive vistas of downtown, Elliott Bay, and Mount Rainier. Because our winter weather is rainy, I asked for an overhang that would cantilever over the lower deck to keep fans dry and bring them as close to the action as possible.
Qwest Field would be the first NFL facility with field-level luxury suites. Behind our north end zone, we installed a “Hawks’ Nest” of budget-priced bleachers for some of our most fanatical supporters. The stadium’s architects managed to recreate the Kingdome’s acoustics and deafening crowd noise, so much so that the Seahawks are perennially among the league leaders in false-start penalties against the opposition.
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IN 1999, Bob Whitsitt signed a new head coach and general manager: Mike Holmgren, the charismatic “Walrus” who’d taken Green Bay to two conference championships and a victory in Super Bowl XXXI. In Holmgren’s first season, the Seahawks ended a ten-year playoff drought and won a division title, but then we hit a plateau. For reasons that seemed to make sense at the time, I kept Whitsitt on as the football team’s president after forcing him out of the Trail Blazers. I had a thin management bench in Seattle, with no one else strong enough to counterbalance Holmgren.
The shakeup began in June 2003, when I brought in Tod Leiweke as the Seahawks’ first CEO. A great communicator and savvy marketer, he had a proven track record with the National Hockey League’s Minnesota Wild. With Tod reporting to me directly, Whitsitt was no longer my sole conduit to the organization.
The 2004 Seahawks blew a number of late leads and ended with a frustrating wild-card loss at home to St. Louis. The franchise had gone twenty-one straight seasons without a playoff win, eight of them on my watch, and was living down to its cynical moniker: “Same Old Seahawks.” I kept asking why we were underachieving—what needed to change? I wondered about Holmgren’s conservative game plans. Wedded to the West Coast offense that had won him a Super Bowl, Mike refused to try the shotgun formation that had become the NFL’s standard third-down call. Was the game passing him by?
Bob Whitsitt had played a big role in helping me acquire the Seahawks and had brought in a successful coach. But the issues that had tripped him up in Portland also became his undoing in Seattle. He overpaid middle-of-the-road performers and failed to re-sign our top talent in a timely fashion. After the 2004 season, he inexplicably allowed sixteen players to enter unrestricted free agency, including quarterback Matt Hasselbeck and star running back Shaun Alexander, squandering our leverage in negotiations and costing me tens of millions of dollars.
Tod Leiweke and others reported that the organization was dysfunctional. Whitsitt and Holmgren weren’t speaking to each other, and the coach was on the verge of walking away from his contract. The only front-office solidarity came out of people’s shared dislike of Whitsitt, who seemed too casual about building our revenue base despite a first-class venue and ample on-field talent.
On January 14, 2005, six days after our season ended, I fired Whitsitt. I’d previously relieved Holmgren of his duties as general manager, where he was spread too thin, but kept him on as coach. Whatever his shortcomings as a personnel man, the Walrus was a strong and experienced on-field leader who commanded his players’ respect.
This time my patience would pay off.
HEADING INTO THE 2005 season, we were underdogs rated eighth most likely to represent the NFC in the Super Bowl. But our turnaround had already been set in motion at the NFL Draft that April. Tim Ruskell, our new GM, moved us up nine spots in the second round to choose an undersize linebacker named Lofa Tatupu, who would lead the team in tackles and make the Pro Bowl in his rookie season. Hasselbeck was in top form, and Alexander was unstoppable; he set an NFL record for rushing touchdowns and finished as the league’s MVP.
Everything clicked. Holmgren called great games; the Hawks’ Nest was appropriately out of control; the ball bounced our way. The team won eleven games in a row and finished at 13–3, the best record in franchise history. After beating Washington in a divisional playoff, we prepared to host the NFC championship game at Qwest Field against the Carolina Panthers.
In a tribute to our fans’ support of the eleven players on the field, Tod had revived our Twelfth Man tradition. Minutes before kickoff at each home game, we played the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” as the video board told a thirty-second story about a former Seahawk great or a local like Huston Riley, the soldier who made the cover of Life magazine storming Omaha Beach on D-Day. Then the camera trained on the upper deck, as the celebrity raised a flag that bore the number 12. The ritual became the talk of the town. Nobody outside the organization knew who Sunday’s flag raiser would be.
A few days before the conference championship, Tod said to me, “You’re raising the Twelfth Man flag on Sunday.” At first I was unconvinced. I wasn’t sure how people would react, and I wanted the crowd’s energy to stay high. But Tod insisted, and I made my way to the flagpole that afternoon in time for the scoreboard narrative: “His dad took him to Husky games. A passion was born. He saved our Seahawks, built the NFL’s most beautiful stadium. Now the NFL’s loudest stadium. Welcome, Paul Allen.”
As I read those words on the mammoth screen, my eyes were wet. I thought about my father, the man who’d taught me how to throw a tight spiral, and I wished he could have been at my side. As I pulled on the rope, the intensity of the crowd’s response amazed me. I lost count of how many people around the flagpole thanked me for keeping their team in town. I waved a white towel in the air to help boost the frenzy, not my usual style. It was the most passionate public celebration I’ve ever been part of.
Back up in my suite, I hopped on and off my chair, pacing throughout the game. Holmgren had told me that he’d be calling one of his rare trick plays with backup quarterback Seneca Wallace as wide receiver. The coach’s tricks often backfired, but this time Seneca made an over-the-shoulder catch for twenty-eight yards midway through the first quarter, setting up our first touchdown.
The Seahawks never looked back. Hasselbeck was near perfect, and Alexander ran roughshod. Tatupu made an early interception and knocked the Panthers’ running back out of the game. Steve Smith, Carolina’s star receiver, was stopped cold with double and triple teams. With the score mounting to a twenty-point blowout, I could hardly contain myself as I descended to the field for the last few minutes. At the postgame ceremony, Holmgren, Hasselbeck, and I stood under the lights, raising the NFC championship trophy over our heads.
I appreciated what the coach told the press afterward: “I was fortunate enough to have an owner who has been patient with me. In this business, that’s not always the case. … If you believe in something, and you stay the course, and you get people who believe in you, it gives you a chance.”
WE CAME INTO Super Bowl XL as four-point underdogs to the Pittsburgh Steelers. We had a three-point lead early but were hurt by some questionable officiating. (That isn’t sour grapes on my part. More than four years after the fact, the game’s referee acknowledged that he blew two pivotal calls in the fourth quarter.) We also had too many penalties and dropped passes and missed field goals. In the end, Pittsburgh was tougher and more poised that day. They outplayed us when it counted.
You’re always sorely disappointed to lose a Super Bowl, because who knows when you’ll be back? It may not happen in my lifetime, but we’re sure going to try—to me, that’s the point of owning a major-league franchise. The Seahawks don’t play in the largest market, but we spend what we need to spend to compete at the highest level. In 2010, after two sad seasons, I hired Pete Carroll away from USC to help get us back there, along with a new front office team in Peter McLoughlin and John Schneider. (Tod Leiweke returned to his first love, the National Hockey League.)
Football is much more than a civic chore for me now. I’ve gotten hooked on the weeklong buildup to Sunday, to the point where I can’t tell you which I enjoy more, the Seahawks or the Blazers. Every football playoff game is like a game seven in basketball, sudden death. And the sport pulls a community together in amazing ways. During our run to the Super Bowl in 2005, I’d look out my office window and see Twelfth Man flags flying from buildings all around the city. Those are moments you savor in life.
Along with the Mariners’ Safeco Field, Qwest Field has established a vibrant stadium district in Seattle. Our team helped revive the adjacent Pioneer Square, the original downtown that dates from the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s. We’ve also played a role in the largest United Way campaign in the country, matching funds for every game program sold and raising half a million dollars during a climb of Mount Rainier, where we planted the Twelfth Man flag.
In 2009, with the debut of Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders FC, we made good on the final piece of our promise to Washington’s voters. After one year, the Sounders had a season ticket base of thirty-two thousand and had sold out the team’s eighteen-game season. The majority owner is Hollywood producer Joe Roth; I’m a minority owner, along with Adrian Hanauer and comedian Drew Carey. We’re proud that our team has helped to raise the bar for community support for soccer in North America. And it feels all the sweeter that it’s happening in my hometown.