Idea Man

by Paul Allen

  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.

  * * *

  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 ele
ven 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.

  CHAPTER 16

  SPACE

  In the library, when I was young, I’d head straight to the science and science fiction sections. I got hooked on sci-fi by Robert Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo, the story of teenage boys who build a rocket in the desert and blast off to the moon. But I also loved nonfiction like Willy Ley’s Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel, the story of the birth of German rocketry.

  Novels were hard-pressed to keep up with reality in those days. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space—a riveting event, even for a second-grader. That night I went out on our front porch, where my mother had taught me the constellations. I looked up and wondered, Can we see him up there? I didn’t know that Gagarin’s one-orbit trip had lasted less than two hours and that he’d already parachuted safely to earth.

  I knew by heart the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts, our country’s original space heroes. Three weeks after Gagarin, I watched a grainy TV picture of Alan Shepard, the first of them to lift off. Nine months later, when John Glenn became the first American to reach orbit, his name was on everyone’s lips. Space science was a national crusade, with JFK pushing for an American on the moon before the end of the decade. Like countless other boys, I planned to become an astronaut when I grew up. For sheer adventure, you couldn’t beat outer space.

  That was also the year of the Seattle World’s Fair, and my cousin Tommy came up from Oklahoma to stay the whole summer. I remember how we thrilled to the movie Moon Pilot, with Dany Saval, an exotic French actress who played an alien. Our headquarters—the closest thing I had to a tree house—was my bedroom closet, under a sloping roofline. We’d take out my hangers of clothes and sit on cushions on the floor, and the fantasy was on (with occasional intermissions for my mother’s tuna fish sandwiches).

  “It’s T minus five minutes to launch. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, ready. All systems go.”

  My drawings from that time were elaborate: a spaceman with a full complement of tools and supplies, including a backpack that converted carbon dioxide to water; a spherical spacecraft that featured a space taxi landing pod and an “ion engine.” Beneath a rocket ship being readied for takeoff, I scrawled a message to my cousin, whose copiloting I’d missed: “Dear Tommy, this big rocket is called the Eagle Thunderbolt. It was designed by me. It is a rocket to be used to explore Mars. I wish you were here to help me make the plans, because this job is too big for me to do alone. So hurry back and we will get started. Love, Paul Allen.”

  Then I got jerked back to earth. In fifth grade, I kept changing seats to get closer to the blackboard, until my teacher noticed me squinting from the front row. My parents got my eyes checked, with tragic results for an aspiring space pioneer: 20/400. I’d never make the cut at NASA or even a commercial airline.

  Still, I kept reading. After exhausting the public library’s catalog, I went with my father to the university stacks and browsed in the rocket and aviation section, shelf upon shelf. What could be
more fun than that? I can still remember those musty pages and illustrations. My favorites were the Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft books. I memorized the specs of World War II planes and their engines, like the German Junkers Ju-88. I began to sort out how a rocket motor worked.

  With its mix of technology and adventure, science fiction holds a natural appeal for adolescent boys. In my early Lakeside years, I’d spend my weekend mornings lying in bed, making my way through the Ace Double genre novels. I moved on to more sophisticated writers: Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, and that wonderful stylist and personal favorite, Jack Vance. I especially liked Heinlein’s “hard” science fiction, which paired authentic scientific theories with ray-gun battles. And I’d get irked by authors whose characters traveled faster than the speed of light, which I knew was theoretically impossible.

  (A quarter-century after I’d left home, I went up to my old room to hunt for a book and found them all missing. “I sold them,” my mother explained. “And would you believe it, Paul, a man gave me seventy-five dollars!” It was hard to forgive her for that, but an old photograph saved the day. After enlarging the picture, I was able to make out the titles on my old collection’s spines. I had copies tracked down and retrieved almost all of them.)

  Science fiction led me to wonder about parallel universes and how the wildest ideas might be possible. Some of those notions are now seen as scientifically unattainable (antigravity, warp drive) or financially and logistically impractical (flying cars). But others, from videoconferencing to communications satellites, turned out to be sneak previews of the future. Either way, those paperbacks got me thinking about where technology might be headed. I’ve tried to repay my debt by opening the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, the only facility of its kind in the world.