Pete Carroll reinvented himself, and he helped me do the same thing
On the occasion of his departure from his 14-year position as the Seattle Seahawks’ head coach, it’s worth remembering that very few people were excited about Pete Carroll’s hire. Carroll had been wildly successful at USC, but he had failed in a relative sense with the New York Jets and the New England Patriots in the 1990s, and he was thought of at the time to be the kind of coach without the gravitas to make it all the way in the NFL.
2010 was Pete Carroll’s first year in Seattle. It was also my first year covering the Seahawks in an official sense. I had been on the outside for years until my time with Yahoo Sports broke me though with the team’s public relations staff, and I could finally be what I had always wanted to be – an actual credentialed reporter. About halfway through his first season, I asked Carroll – probably with less tact than I should have – why people should believe that he was different than he was before.
Some coaches would have spit the bit at such a question. I once asked Jon Gruden why his play call names were so long, and he stormed away from the podium. Not Pete Carroll. He have a long, thoughtful answer about the year 2000, when he was between gigs after the Patriots and before USC. Carroll wrote some columns for NFL.com in that year, but he also re-read his John Wooden books and took a very deep look at himself, and what he needed to do, and be, better.
I walked away from that press conference impressed with Carroll’s answer. I had no earthly clue what was coming over the next half-decade. Carroll and general manager John Schneider went through literally hundreds of transactions over the next couple of seasons, just trying to get a good team together. Former GM Tim Ruskell had left the cupboard just about bare, but in a short time, the new braintrust had put a solid team together worthy of contention. The 2010 trade with the Buffalo Bills for running back Marshawn Lynch, now one of the more interesting fleecings in recent NFL history, manifested itself in the “Beastquake” run against the New Orleans Saints in the 2010 playoffs, when the 7-9 Seahawks snuck in the back door of the postseason and shocked the defending Super Bowl champions.
Over time, Carroll and Schneider built one of the greatest defenses in NFL history, and they got themselves a franchise quarterback in the person of third-round draft pick Russell Wilson, and sooner than anybody thought, they were no longer sneaking in through the back door – they were busting the damned thing down.
In my life, such wins with such self-confidence meant a lot, and became an example.
When I started covering the Seahawks in 2010, I was the only caretaker for my mother, who had been sick for years. It was a complicated relationship that’s best left out of this discussion, but the ability to finally live a dream at a time when the rest of my life was a disaster meant more than anyone I was covering will ever know.
My personal ascent out of that particular hell started about the same time the Seahawks were rising to the top. My mother passed away on February 1, 2012. I was busy covering my first Super Bowl in person, and I got the call at my hotel room at 2:30 that morning.
I knew, as Pete Carroll knew a couple years before, that I now had a clean slate, and that I could make of the world what I wanted.
The pinnacle of our shared experience was the week of Super Bowl XLVIII. By then, I was writing for Sports Illustrated when that still meant something, and to work from the old SI offices in Manhattan for the full week, and then go to see the team I had watched grow from infancy demolish the Peyton Manning-led Denver Broncos was a watershed moment. I was no longer a fan of any NFL team – you get that beaten out of you after a point in time – but to watch my two hometown teams (I grew up in Denver) was quite something, especially given why and how I was there to observe it.
Our paths started to diverge after the next Super Bowl, when the Seahawks lost to the Patriots on what I still believe was the worst play call in the history of sports. Not because my interest in the team had dwindled; I was just covering the NFL at a national level at that point, and when that’s your beat, you have to keep your head on a swivel for the Next Big Thing.
In the half-decade after that, the Seahawks made several personnel decisions that ultimately led to what happened on Wednesday morning. But Pete Carroll never stopped being interesting to me. I remember sitting with him at an event a few years back. It was an informal interview setting with no real time constraints, and we were just shooting the breeze. Somehow, the conversation came around to Abraham Maslow’s theories of self-actualization, which I had leaned on heavily as I tried to make my way into the world after my mother’s death. Carroll was all over that – it turned out that he had written his doctoral thesis on that exact subject. That opened a door into his mind, and I got to see a different side of the ball coach. But there was a sameness to it, because there would have been no Super Bowls, no Legion of Boom, and no Russell Wilson without Pete Carroll’s ability to reshape himself in the way he wanted.
Carroll also gave me the most remarkable interview I’ve ever had with any coach when he talked openly and honestly about race relations in America and in the NFL at a time when most people in power were trying to sweep reality under the rug.
At his final press conference on Wednesday, Carroll was asked what advice he’d give to other coaches. He responded that you have to know who you are before you know what you can do.
Those words made me want to write this piece. I doubt that Pete Carroll will ever know that he helped me know who I am, and what I can do. It was not a personal relationship; you could call it one of direct inspiration by word and deed.
Pete Carroll talked at length before his departure about how fortunate he felt to have gone through this particular ride.
I feel the same way, because I wouldn’t be who I am today, doing what I do today, without that direct inspiration.
