When Did You Become A Seattle Seahawk Fan?
By Keith Myers
Every 12 starts somewhere. Even those who grew up with the team like I did have to have had a moment when their fandom went from hanging out with their dad on Sundays to being something tangible. I’ll tell you my story, but I’m really interested in when your membership in the 12th Man became crystalized.
For me, I really was born a Seahawks fan. My parents had always lived in the Northwest, and thus they were huge supporters of every Seattle team. Watching the games on Sundays just part of my weakly routine as long as I could remember.
But football is a very complex game. I remember asking my father a lot of (probably very annoying) question just trying to figure out what was going on. Had it not been a couple winning seasons, I might have given up; it’s tough to say.
My first real memory of what happened on the field was in 1983. The Curt Warner led Seahawks were a force to be reckoned with. Winning was fun, but the “ground Chuck” offense wasn’t exciting to a kid still struggling with the intricacies of the game. Every running play looked the same. If that was all football was, I probably wouldn’t be writing for this site. I’d still be fan, but not the diehard crazy one that spends his free time analyzing all things Seahawks.
My moment came the following year. There were ton of predictions of 2000 yards for Warner and a Super Bowl, but Warner blew out his knee on the nasty Kingdome turf in week 1. Instead, Chuck Knox has to reinvent his offense and style on the fly, and turned Dave Kreig loose to fling the ball all over the place. Kreig finished with over 3600 yards and 32 TDs, and when those kind of numbers were really rare.
It was fun. It was exciting. And I was hooked. I was still clueless, but I was young enough that it didn’t matter.
AS the Seahawks begin what I expect will be a era of sustained winning this season, they are bound to pick up a large number of bandwagon fans. To those of us that are diehard fans, Bandwagoners can be annoying, but I believe we need to cut them some slack. After it’s over, a few of them will stick around and join us as diehard fans. We all started somewhere, didn’t we?
So that’s my story. What’s yours?