Ask a Bororo tribesman: Who are you? He may reply: I am parakeet.
(Ask an L.S.U. fan at a football game: Who are you? He may reply: I am a tiger.)
— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
The ticket stub was worth $1.00 off one family-size pizza at all participating Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, but it’s a good thing I didn’t redeem it, or I’d be up one long-forgotten pizza and down a significant memory prompt. Flip the ticket over and you’ll see a graphic of the original Seahawks logo. They played the Los Angeles Rams on August 17, 1978, and this stub from that game represents one of the best birthday presents I’ve ever received. I must have lost the accompanying note my dad wrote decades ago, but I kept the stub, despite the fact that it provided admission to a mere preseason game and we sat in the 300 level of the Kingdome, just a few rows from the top.
Didn’t matter—for I, a native of the Pacific Northwest, was thrilled to not only be attending my first NFL game but to catch my favorite team: the visiting Rams. Why a team from L.A.? The formative years in my sports-fan psyche occurred before the NFL existed in Seattle. The same can be said for Major League Baseball, which found me following the Yankees in the early ’70s until the Mariners came along.
I had pledged my allegiance to the Rams in 1973 because they were good (12-2 that year) and because I liked their uniforms. I memorized the players by position, was a fan of their coach, Chuck Knox. I begged to be allowed to stay up until halftime of Monday Night Football to catch the highlights of that Sunday’s Ram game, to hear the halting diction of Howard Cosell as he described how a team’s comeback was “too little, too late.” If the Rams lost, I cried, which happened only twice that year until the playoffs. (Damn you, Dallas Cowboys and the horse you rode in on!)
After the Seahawks hatched in 1976, I certainly became a fan, but a fan with conditions. It took a while before I could recognize myself in that peering raptor’s eye. It took a few years before I stopped pretending to be Lawrence McCutcheon or Harold Jackson on the playground and identified with burgeoning local heroes such as Jim Zorn and Steve Largent.
I can recall the day my allegiance shifted for good. By 1979, my dad had purchased season tickets, and the Rams were back for a game on November 4 of that year. The teams had similar records, hovering around .500. We were now sitting in the corner of the end zone on the 200 level of the Kingdome, and the Rams proceeded to pummel the Seahawks 24-0. The most depressing stat? The Seahawks had -7 total yards, the worst offensive performance in NFL history.
The fact that I was so depressed belied my changing heart. How dare the Rams do that to us! To us! I could’ve stuck with the Rams, who went on to play in the Super Bowl that season, but I didn’t. (Yes, I still rooted for them when they lost to the Steelers in Super Bowl XIV, but the air had been leaking from my L.A. balloon for quite a while by the time Cheryl Ladd sang the national anthem and Up with People presented the halftime show, “A Salute to the Big Band Era.”)
And so I became a Seahawk through and through. At a certain point, I even started hating the Rams, who had become like a bad ex-girlfriend to me. They found new fans in St. Louis (until they abandoned those fans and returned to L.A.). And, more recently, they’ve been messing with my Seahawk heart like a faulty defibrillator: Think fake field goals and duplicitous punts and devious the-ball’s-over-here-no-it’s-over-there returns.
__________
When Chuck Knox became coach of the Seahawks in 1983 and delivered them to the playoff promised land, it only seemed fitting to me. Coach Knox, “Ground Chuck,” had made the transformation from Ram to Seahawk (by way of the Bills) just like me. We were shape-shifters of a sort, shedding old hide for new feathers. We had taken on new totems, joined new tribes. Such are the rights of passage in the American education system that most of us join new tribes as we matriculate from one school to another. I, for instance, have been a Cougar, a Wolverine, an Indian, a Fighting Missionary, and a Cavalier (or Wahoo). (Two of these mascots have either been changed since my graduation or come under scrutiny; I’ll let you guess which.) Add in Little League teams and miscellaneous intramural teams, and I’ve also been a Jet, a Cardinal, a Smasher, an Eagle, a Red, and a Mercenary, among others. It’s enough to give you an identity crisis.
Of course, sports tribalism doesn’t require you to be an actual attendee of a school or a player on a team or a resident of a team’s city. But it’s only natural to fall for your home squad, to nurture it, to wish it the best, to roar from the depths of your diaphragm when things go well and to weep like your nine-year-old self when things go poorly. The Greeks and Romans figured out long ago that the collective viewing of sports could displace some of the bloodlust of combat. (And often those events included just about as much blood and lust as actual fighting.) Sports can operate as a kind of civic release valve that allows for the tribal inclination toward warfare to be satisfied and settled under mostly safer, more controlled conditions.
What’s more, tribal identity in the sports world is a curious act of self-assimilation. The self becomes part of the collective—and sometimes at an elite level. In Seattle, where the “12th Man” has transmogrified into “12s,” (a somewhat irksome happenstance involving a Texas A&M trademark), fans are not just Seahawks but über-Seahawks. The field of play is not just restricted to the green gridiron. In the stands, Seahawks fans take pride in affecting the outcome of the game by creating so much noise that the opponent jumps offside and Guinness World Records are achieved. (Louder than a jackhammer! Louder than a turbine jet engine!—are the usual decibel-related ejaculations.) That’s not just a Seattle thing, of course, but the 12s seem to be especially good at it.
Still, tribal affiliation can be challenged as quickly as saying, “You’ve been cut.” That’s the business of sports, and sometimes it’s hard for fans to keep up. What, wait, Griffey’s been traded for Mike Cameron and a can of magic Hormel beans? It can be a shock to the system when your favorite player leaves. It can create a temporary displacement of your tribal identity if you really, really identify with the player as much as you do the team.
One solution is to have multiple affiliations, creating a kind of Venn diagram of who you are and whom you’ll root for: I hate the Oklahoma Thunder because they stole our Sonics, but damn if I’m not gonna cheer for Kevin Durant. Another solution is to excommunicate the player: You are nothing to me now. So long, A-Rod.
Selfhood, self-identity, within a collective enterprise is an odd phenomenon to think about (this self, this independent being that I am, is somehow defined by its associations?), but people do it all the time. We are Spartans or Trojans or Yankees or Southerners or Republicans or Democrats or Christians or Muslims or lawyers, journalists, developers, pipe fitters, baristas, magicians, musicians, monks. And usually we are many of these selves at once. Not only are we who we cheer for, but we are where we come from, what we believe, and what we do. It’s kind of like a stew—or maybe a can of mixed nuts.
Which raises a phenomenological question: Is the self an onion or a nut? A Shrek (“Ogres have layers. Onions have layers.”) or an Austin Powers (“This is me in a nutshell.”)? Is my “self” just a series of layers that can be peeled away until there’s nothing, or is there some me-kernel within an outer shell?
Is a 12 an onion or a nut?
I am not just a Seahawks fan, of course. (Nobody is.) I hesitate to even call myself a “12” because I don’t have the dedication that other fans possess. I don’t particularly care to join clubs, churches, or political parties. And yet I love that feeling of being part of a team, especially in an improvisational way. I like the loosely collaborative nature of pick-up games and jam sessions. I like working toward a common goal.
Perhaps I learned when I was a child that too much devotion to your team could lead to too much pain during a loss. So I adjusted my thinking, matured (perhaps), and developed a stoic approach to fandom. If I missed a game on TV and heard that my team lost, I told myself I didn’t want to see the game anyway and had more important things to do. If my team won (unless it was a championship finale), I told myself there’d be another game to watch. I learned to temper my seasonal frustrations by looking to the future. A lot of sports fans resort to this kind of emotional template when the season seems gone: No playoffs? Well, at least we got a high draft pick! “Suck for Luck!”
But there are dangers in cloaking yourself in a carapace of nonchalance. Focus too much on controlling your emotions and soon you realize how much they are controlling you. The self becomes its own battlefield, its own gridiron. The nut becomes mush. The onion diced and confused.
I can never be the childhood fan I was because I can’t truly be a child again. There have been too many seasons for me to feel the newness of it all, the puppy love of being a fan. But I do have the memory of that feeling. I do remember crushing on my team, and every now and then that sense of exhilaration returns (the Seahawks win the Super Bowl in a dominating performance!) as well as that sense of utter despair (the Seahawks return to the Super Bowl and lose on a heartbreaking interception at the goal line!).
And thinking back on it, I take an odd pride in the Seahawks’ ineptitude during that 1979 game against the Rams. Negative seven yards? Really? Nobody can top that! It’s the self that experiences ineptitude which better understands greatness when greatness arrives. Just ask Cubs fans.
Maybe a fuller version of the self is accessed via an artifact like my ticket stub, stowed away for nearly 40 years, that’s no longer redeemable for its original purpose but capable of being redeemed in another way. Half that torn ticket left my possession on the very day of its use, but the other half is what I keep with me in the field of memory, providing admission to an earlier version of who I am.