I grew up in Kennebunk, Maine. Kids in the neighborhood taught me to play football starting pretty much immediately after we moved there and I met the kids in 1975. I had just turned six. One of the kids, clearly the leader of the kids on our street, was the town police chief's son Chuck, who was three years older than I. He let me use his old shoulder pads and "Pat Patriot" helmet because he had moved on to bigger and better pads and helmet.
Both of my parents were big NFL fans, but while they liked some teams and didn't like others, neither one had any one favorite team. I had been watching bits and pieces of football games with one or both of them since before I could talk, and by '75, I was watching whole games (or the closest approximation to that I could do at age six) and starting to care about the results. We always watched the Super Bowl, and I ended up even liking the Steelers back then because they were for quite some time among the teams with the best chances of stopping the Cowboys and Raiders. But the first season when I really started following the league and paying attention to standings was 1976.
I was on my way outside to do something one day in August or so of '76 and saw that my dad was watching football.
In Kennebunk in the '70s, we could get broadcasts from an ABC affiliate in Poland Springs, Maine and CBS and NBC affiliates in Portland, Maine, plus a public-TV station in Durham, New Hampshire and occasionally another one in Augusta, Maine. We had an electric rotator for the TV antenna to get the best reception possible from these stations. We had the approximate best positions for those stations marked on the rotator control that sat near or on the TV. Cable TV didn't arrive until some time in the early '80s. So I have no idea why a station in Maine would play an expansion team's preseason game in 1976. Now (in the 2020s), of course, there's an audience for such things and it's a lot easier to see them, but since the Seahawks didn't play the Patriots in the '76 preseason, I'm almost sure no Maine TV station would show an entire Seahawks preseason game.
In any case, I looked at the TV and saw some uniforms I didn't recognize, but they sure looked cool. I asked my dad who that team was, and he told me it was an NFL "expansion team," a new team that was starting in the league that year, and that the team was called the Seattle Seahawks. Right then and there I decided they were my team. My dad thought it was really cool that I had my first favorite sports team, so he really supported me being a Seahawks fan immediately, and he kept it up right up until not long before he died in 2011. The only slightly sad thing for me on the glorious day of XLVIII was that Dad hadn't quite lived to see it. I don't think he would have called himself a Seahawks fan, but the Seahawks moved quickly into his "root for" category and I'm sure he developed a certain fondness for them because they were my team.
What's surprising to me is how I stuck by the Seahawks. As a kid and especially as an adolescent, I let other people influence my choices in clothes, music, and just about everything else way too much. But for whatever reason, I didn't let other people around me influence my choice of a football team. Almost all the kids I knew who watched footbal were Patriots fans. I knew a lot about the Patriots because of all the time I spent around Chuck. We called a long "bomb" pass in the huddle as "Grogan to Francis," for the Patriots' quarterback and Pro Bowl tight end. I knew a lot about guys like Sam "Bam" Cunningham, "Hog" Hannah, Leon Gray, Sam Adams, and Julius Adams. Guys like Stanley Morgan and Mike Haynes got some attention from the media, but Chuck was into Sam "Bam" the fullback and a load of linemen on both sides of the ball and talked a lot more about those guys.
At school in the '80s, I think a lot of my friends didn't even really watch football much (I was and am a giant nerd, but I walk between worlds), but I still used my Seahawks winter hat and occasionally other Seahawks gear, plus my winter coats tended to be blue and/or green. I don't know how or why I managed to stick by the Seahawks when I let peer pressure get to me in so many other ways, but as I've said many times around here, I was the only Seahawks fan I knew for most of my life.
I've only been to the Pacific Northwest once, in 2019, on a trip I made to Seattle over a weekend specifically to go to my first-ever Seahawks home game (as I've mentioned a jillion times around here, I went to Seahawks games in Foxborough in 1984 and '86) in the middle of a month-long visit to my mom in Maine. On the Friday, my mom took me to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I caught a bus to the Boston airport, from which I caught the first of two flights (BOS-MSP-SEA). I flew back to Boston on a direct "red-eye" flight from Seattle the Sunday night and then took a Monday-morning bus from Logan Airport in Boston back to Portsmouth, where my mom picked me up. It was nice that the birthday of a friend who lives in Puyallup fell on the Saturday.
