I had a silver Seahawks helmet and a royal-blue Seahawks jersey big enough to fit shoulder pads between it and me. I used them in countless neighborhood football games, the majority on my family's front lawn. When the Seahawks beat the Dolphins in Miami in the Divisional round of the playoffs after the '83 season, I put on my helmet (I was already wearing the jersey) and ran around the neighborhood yelling and waving my arms in celebration.
The original uniforms are almost certainly what first attracted me to the Seahawks. It was the NFL preseason of 1976. My dad was watching TV and some football was on the screen. I wish I could ask Dad if there was an actual game on or if it was just highlights I saw, because I can't for the life of me imagine why a preseason game for an expansion team from the other side of the country would be on TV in Maine in 1976. My only guess was shot down when I saw that the Seahawks did not play the Patriots in the '76 preseason. Anyway, I pointed at some players on the screen and asked my dad who that team was. He told me it was a new team, the Seattle Seahawks. I decided they were my team, and my dad thought that was pretty cool. Again, I think what got my attention was the uniforms.
I don't think my dad would have said he was a Seahawks fan, tho' he came to have a certain fondness for them because of me, but he really supported me being a Seahawks fan over the years. He missed XLVIII by almost three years. There were many times in 2012-2015 when I thought "I wish Dad could see this" when the Seahawks were so good, and I thought about him a lot in 2019, when I finally got to Seattle for the first time, and I finally went to my first Seahawks home game.
When my dad took me to my first two Seahawks games in Foxborough in 1984 and 1986, the Seahawks wore those silver helmets and the white "away" jerseys with blue numbers and blue-and-green Seahawks logos on the sleeves, like in the images in the linked story. My jersey was the 1976-1982 model, with stripes on the sleeves. In Foxborough in '84, the Seahawks were winning comfortably at halftime, or so we thought, and the Patriots came from behind to win. Even so, the car trip down to Foxborough and back with my dad was cool, and after the game, we waited near the team buses to ask players for their autographs in the game program, and that was the day I got to tell Zorn, my first childhood sports hero, to his face that I had had his autographed picture framed on the wall of my room in Maine for years. And in '86, it was a battle, but the Seahawks won. Plus I got to see Curt Warner play that time.
Those colors, those uniforms, are a reminder of my childhood, of playing football with other kids from the neighborhood, of being known as the town Seahawks fan, of just a few examples of what a great father my dad was, of the magical 1983 season, of so many Seahawks players who wore those uniforms. So I'm 100% in favor of the Seahawks having throwback uniforms. For a long time, NFL rules didn't allow teams to have multiple helmets - only decals could be changed - so the Seahawks couldn't have such a "throwback" helmet. When that rule was changed, I hoped we'd get to see 1980s throwbacks, and it looks like we will. As for waiting until 2023, well, I waited more than 37 years for XLVIII. I don't think it'll be a problem to wait until next year to see the Seahawks playing in 1980s throwback unis.
I think the pics are the uniforms from after the change in 1983. The facemasks are blue. The one on my helmet, a pre-1983 model, was gray. The sleeves have Seahawks logos, not just colored stripes. So it's just barely from when Zorn was QB, because it was in '83 that Krieg took over, and in '84 Krieg started all 16 games.
