Recently, Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman invited NFL replacement referee Lance Easley to umpire his charity softball game in Tacoma, Washington. Easley is best only known for being the referee who signaled “TOUCHDOWN” on a desperation heave from Russell Wilson in the waning seconds of a Monday night game between the Seahawks and Green Bay Packers last season — a call that effectively ended the referee lockout.
Apparently, Sherman’s honoring of Easley didn’t sit well with Packers fans — well, at least one Packers fan. In a post authored by E. Wolf (who claims to have grown up in Seattle, but is probably from, like, Federal Way, or something) on Total Packers, Mr. Wolf rips the entire existence of the Seahawks, along with Easley’s existence as a human being. The Packers are lucky to have a guy like E. Wolf defending their proud tradition:
It has been almost a year since the infamous Fail Mary, in which victory, rightfully belonging to our beloved Green Bay Packers, was snatched away from our clutches by one of the most appalling instances of malfeasance and incompetence not just in the history of the NFL, but in the history of sport. Never before, to my knowledge, has a call been universally decried by the announcers and post-game analysts as this, analysts including Trent Dilfer and Steve Young — hardly Packers fans.
Saying it’s been “almost a year” at this point works if it was the tenth anniversary. The game was on September 24th, 2012. It’s July 12th as of this writing, which means we’re not quite at the ten-month anniversary. I’m arbitrarily defining “almost a year” as anything less than one month until the one-year anniversary. Unless, of course, we’re operating on the middle school scale of relationships, where every month counts exponentially.
We can never know for sure what effect this ultimately had. Ostensibly that lost game cost the Packers an opening-round bye in the playoffs, which allowed Jim Harbaugh to observe the difficulties the Packers had against the read option with Joe Webb and the hapless Minnesota Vikings. It could very well be that in this alternative, “true” universe, the Pack went on to capture their second Super Bowl victory in three years. On the other hand, Aaron Rodgers and the Pack may not have played with the same urgency in Houston against the Texans, who at that point, were the best team in football. The Packers, of course, ripped them apart. We do know, however, that it colored both teams’ post-season position.
All of that definitely would have happened.
Instead of being embarrassed or humbled by this, Seattle Seahawks players, staff and their fans continue to gloat — along with the man in question responsible for it all. This is a man who is attempting to capitalize on the harm he did to our beloved Green Bay Packers, all the while daring to call himself a Christian while he preys on our small to moderate and most assuredly temporary misfortune.
How dare he!
This author cares not to examine the psychology of this despicable human being. Rather, as a native Seattleite-in-exile and hardcore, maniacal Packers fan who is rumored to literally bleed Green and Gold in alteration, I seek to answer WHY Seahawks players, staff and fans act in this manner even today. The Seahawks most recently held a charity softball game making light of this. This, on top of fan behavior we have all observed on this blog and many sports forums, as well as in real life encounters. Simply consider this — had this softball game been scheduled in Green Bay, and had the roles been reversed in our favor, I can assure one and all with metaphysical certitude that Mike McCarthy, Mark Murphy and the Packers organization (let alone the fans) would never allow this to happen.
Literally.
And so we see once again that meaning arises from differences — here the differences between our Green Bay Packers, one of the most storied, hallowed franchises in NFL history, and an upstart expansion team spawned at the height of bad taste: the mid 1970s. The Seattle Seahawks are a pitiful failure that proves when you cannot cry, sometimes you have to laugh.
Just off the top of my head, consider this dreadful comedy:
- The Seahawks have never won a Super Bowl (obviously) and only just recently removed themselves from the ranks of the truly pitiful — Lions and Browns — who have never even been to a Super Bowl (Texans, Jags get a pass because they are so young). Even the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Super Bowl in the time the Seahawks have existed.
- Before last season, Seattle had not won a road playoff game since 1983.
- Check out those fugly, new-age uniforms that spit on the one glimmer of pride that stems from the days of Chuck Knox, Steve Largent, Jim Zorn, Dave Krieg, Kenny Easley and the original Curt Warner.
- Seattle is the birthplace of the Kingdome — that ugly dome also built in the1970s that collapsed on you. Packers fans, can you believe there was a more disgraceful shithole than the humpty-dump. There was, and it was a true blight on an otherwise beautiful Emerald City. I know, I lived there!
- The Seahawks are so devoid of history and tradition, so devoid of any true natural rivalry, the NFL moved the team into a different conference twice (from the NFC West to the AFC West in 1977 and back again in 2002) and the fans hardly know the difference. It would be like the Packers or Bears playing in the AFC Central (or North), or the Steelers playing in the Black and Blue Division that we know as home, or the Dallas Cowboys playing in the AFC South. What would be incomprehensible to us is merely a slight adjustment to you.
- Brian Bosworth. No further commentary needed.
At the very core, at the very essence of the matter is this one indisputable truth — the Seattle Seahawks have amounted to nothing more than a bad joke engrained in the DNA of every true Seattleite. I know, I was raised there. A local comedy skit show called Almost Live, which started in the mid 1980s and flourished in the 1990s made its heyday mocking this pathetic excuse for an NFL franchise. A montage of their skits can be found here:
Mr. Wolf redeems himself — slightly — with the Almost Live reference. It proves he’s from Seattle (or, at least, Federal Way). He also provides a bunch of facts that nobody would (or can) argue against.
As for division alignments, you know who was in the NFC West before the realignment in 2002? The New Orleans Saints, Carolina Panthers, St. Louis Rams and Atlanta Falcons. At least the Seahawks have always been a member of a division that makes sense geographically, even if the NFL couldn’t figure it out.
The hits — the laughs — just keep on coming. They just don’t stop. And if Almost Live had not run its natural course and continued through the naughts, the laughs would continue to this day. Matt Hasselbeck running his mouth off about how, “We want the ball, and we are going to score,” only to throw that pick six to Al Harris. An artificially intimidating home environment that deserves far less attribution to supposedly die-hard fans, and far more to Paul Allen’s architects. One sorry Super Bowl appearance, in which they could not overcome a couple of questionable calls — as opposed to a universally denounced, instantly result-changing call undone by incontrovertible photographic evidence that unleashed a backlash so severe it ended the referee lockout in an instant. All of these moments and more would have been comedy gold for John Keister and Co. of Almost Live. But we can still enjoy more than a few laughs all the same.
Because Week 4 is definitely the same thing as the Super Bowl.
Aside from one Super Bowl appearance featuring mediocre play at best, (which is hardly anything to cherish or boast about), probably the only bright spot you do have are the heady days of Zorn to Largent, and later Krieg to Largent, where a feisty band of upstarts led by Chuck Knox fought a valiant fight when hopelessly outclassed by outright superior teams of the AFC in the 1980s, like Dan Marino’s Dolphins, Boomer Esiason’s Bengals, or Marcus Allen’s Raiders.
One would hope that teams led by such NFL legends would prevail over “a feisty band of upstarts”. Or else something is very wrong.
Contrast that with the mystical legacy of the Green Bay Packers that exudes history, tradition, and excellence. This primordial, ancient power of the NFL, which rests in a small Midwest town, makes an impossible, surreal dream REALITY on the strength of this mystical aura alone. Whereas the Seattle Seahawks? A bad punch line in the DNA of every Seattleite — and by extension every football fan.
I have no idea what this even means.
So go ahead Seahawks and Seahawks fans, carry on about how you had to have the most infamous bit of malfeasance to “win” a regular season game. Go ahead and enable that sickening, despicable hypocrite who dares to call himself a Christian while attempting to capitalize on our small misfortune created by his buffoonery. For our illustrious Green Bay Packers — marked by their colors of Green and Gold, and symbolized by that iconic oval G symbol emblazoned on their helmets and ubiquitously adorned throughout all of Packerland like an eternal, undying sun — march forward in a vainglorious bid to capture yet further Lombardi trophies. And as we embark on this quest, we ALL know that the joke, as always, is really on YOU.
Somebody take Mr. Wolf’s thesaurus away. Please.
