Appreciation of Boom: Learning to love the Seahawks

A few years ago I got caught in the middle of a street protest in Bolivia. Gunshots were fired, by whom I’m not exactly sure, and for a while they were the loudest things I’d heard in my life. Then I went to CenturyLink Field in Seattle, Washington.

Now, I didn’t actually go inside. I was in Seattle in January, the night the Seahawks played Carolina in the divisional playoffs.

Tickets to the match were over $US300 (which given our miserable dollar translated to approximately $AU8000).

I couldn’t justify that for a game I thought (rightfully so) would be a blowout. But I walked to the stadium anyway, just 10 minutes from downtown, to check out the atmosphere.

Regret is a strange phenomenon. Sometimes it eats away at you slowly, gradually building over time. And then sometimes it hits you in one precise moment of clarity as you’re standing outside ‘The Clink’ and the ground is literally shaking underneath your feet from the noise inside – so loud that it feels more like the prelude to a ritualistic sacrifice than a football game.

One of the best things about sport is when a team’s style of play embodies its city. That’s what made the 1980s Celtics-Lakers rivalry so special, with the working-class grit of Boston against the show-time of Los Angeles. Suffice to say, there’s a perfect marriage between the people of Seattle and this incarnation of the Seahawks. These fans are loud and, love them or hate them, so are these Seahawks.

In an era of the NFL where the rules are titled towards offence, quarterbacks and the passing game, Seattle is a throwback. Watching Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck throw for 400 yards every second week is fantastic, but sometimes it feels too easy, like they’re playing against a Madden difficulty one level lower than it should be.

Illegal contact, defensive holding, pass interference and a (justified) obsession with player safety has made things harder than ever for teams to win Super Bowls primarily with defence. Except for Seattle, who are too brilliantly arrogant to care.

The hypocrisy of the NFL is that in order to support football, you have to effectively support violence. The Seahawks make that worryingly easy to do. Like Quentin Tarantino, they’ve made violence their art-form.

Their masterpiece was the 2014 Super Bowl, where they beat Denver for a number of reasons, but primarily because they were just scarier human beings. When Kam Chancellor cannon-balled Demaryius Thomas backwards five yards from the spot two minutes into the first quarter, the game’s brutal rhythm was set, and it was something Denver’s finesse offence wanted nothing to do with.

Chancellor, Earl Thomas, Richard Sherman, Michael Bennett… these guys are God Warriors. They’re arrogant, but their arrogance is earned. They talk trash, but they’re allowed to because they spend game day taking out the garbage. They’re players to be feared as much as revered.

Marshawn Lynch and Russell Wilson are the two best-known players on the team (although Sherman has an argument, and I’m guessing he’d like to make it) because they play on the marketable side of the ball. But the heart of this team has always been the Legion of Boom secondary – probably the best collection of defensive backs the game has ever seen. Their combination of physical ferocity and technical perfection is transcendent. They’re a weekly joy to watch for anyone who appreciates football.

The reasons to dislike the Seahawks are numerous. Their arrogance rubs people the wrong way. Beast Mode turns into Anti-Social Mode around the media. There’s something way too perfect about Russell Wilson – you half expect there to be circuitry and hardware where his internal organs should be. There’s the persistent winning (sure to antagonise anyone), the PED controversy and then there’s The Sherman.

I get all that. But when Kam Chancellor levels an overmatched slot receiver, Richard Sherman makes a superstar wide-out his prison inmate, and Earl Thomas climbs into the heavens to pluck an interception, all that other stuff just becomes petty noise. Greatness has a habit of eclipsing chatter.

Seattle is a team whose core is comprised almost entirely of players who never should have been as good as they’ve become. Sherman and Chancellor are fifth-round picks, Wilson and KJ Wright went in the third round, Bobby Wagner was the 45th pick and Lynch was a league-wide afterthought by the time he arrived in the Pacific Northwest. This group has been defined by its ability to overcome adversity, and now they’re coming off arguably the most devastating loss in the history of North American sport.

There are many compelling stories in the NFL this year – the return of Adrian Peterson, the debacle in Washington, the renovations in Philadelphia and Denver – but they all might end up paling in comparison to an aggrieved Seattle using seven months of pain as fuel to wreak vengeance upon the rest of the league.

The Seahawks have won 11 or more games in each of the past three seasons, and if they do so again, and Sherman keeps on talking in the process, they’re only going to cement themselves as the league’s villain (especially now that people are coming around on the Patriots after the Deflate Gate farce).

They’ll have the NFL’s loudest fans and the most unsociable style of play once again. They’ll be easy to hate, but for the exact same reasons they’ll be easier than ever to love.