"Then Zorn Said to Largent. . .": The Best Seattle Seahawks Stories Ever Told

Honor

introduction

The Seattle Seahawks have been a study in contrast for more than three decades. They have gone from lovable underdogs in the 1970s to playoff contenders in the 1980s to less-lovable losers in the 1990s to the Super Bowl contenders they are today. It has been a roller-coaster ride full of highs and lows, with good guys and not-so-good guys, great moments and horrible ones, happy times and sad.

Paul Moyer has been associated with the team as a player, coach, or broadcaster for 25 years; Dave Wyman was a Seahawk during the team’s first heyday in the 1980s and is a radio analyst of the current team. Together in this compilation, they reminisce about some of the best and worst moments in team history, along with many of the players and coaches who have populated the franchise over the past 32 years.

Paul and Dave will re-introduce you to some of the team’s most popular (or infamous) figures—Chuck Knox, Dave Krieg, Curt Warner, Kenny Easley, Brian Bosworth, Cortez Kennedy, and others—and share stories that give you insights into the personalities of many of their former teammates. Some of them are studies in contrast themselves.

Paul and Dave also will take you behind the scenes at team headquarters, where you will learn how players dreaded paydays and went through preposterous rituals to make weight on weigh-in days, and where you will raise your eyebrows over a particular incident that took place in the training room. And then they will let you join them on game days, showing you just how tough and mean players needed to be to play in the NFL.

Paul will take you on a guided tour through the 1983 and 1984 seasons, when Knox first turned the Seahawks into a playoff team and Super Bowl contender. And Paul and Dave will revisit the 1987 players strike, giving you two slightly different views on the season that forever changed the NFL and the relationships between teammates, owners, and fans.

They will relive the 1988 season, in which they helped the Seahawks win their first division title under the new ownership of Ken Behring. And they will talk about how the team changed in the seasons following and sank from a classy, businesslike franchise under the Nordstroms to something quite different under Behring.

By the end of it, you’ll have gotten a first-person glimpse at the team’s rise in the 1980s and fall in the 1990s, and gotten the former players’ look at its rebirth under Mike Holmgren.

So sit back and enjoy Then Zorn Said to Largent…—a firstperson collection of some of the best stories in the history of the Seattle Seahawks…

chapter 1

The Early Days

The late, great Kingdome was home to not only Seattle’s Seahawks, but the Mariners from MLB and the SuperSonics from the NBA, as well. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

Birth of the Seahawks

When the Seahawks played their first game—an exhibition at the Kingdome against the San Francisco 49ers on August 1, 1976— it was the culmination of a four-year quest to bring an NFL franchise to Seattle.

The genesis for pro football in Seattle came from Northwest businessmen Herman Sarkowsky and Ned Skinner.

Sarkowsky was a national figure in thoroughbred racing and one of Seattle’s most successful real estate developers; Skinner was a Seattle shipping magnate and one of the first owners of the Space Needle.

Sarkowsky had cofounded the Portland Trail Blazers of the NBA in 1970, and soon after that he and Skinner began talking about bringing an NFL franchise to the Northwest. They formed Seattle Professional Football in 1972 in an effort to lobby for an expansion club. And two years later, their efforts paid off as the NFL awarded Seattle a franchise, even though Sarkowsky and Skinner had not yet put together a complete ownership group.

The league actually began to interview other prospective groups, and Sarkowsky and Skinner recruited four other prominent Seattle businessmen to their group. Lloyd Nordstrom was the last of the partners to sign on, but once he got there, he agreed to become the majority owner by paying 51 percent of the $16 million franchise fee. And that sealed the deal for the NFL.

The league awarded the franchise to Seattle in June 1974 and approved the Nordstrom-led ownership group six months later. The group also included Howard Wright, Lamont Bean, and Lynn Himmelman.

Sarkowsky led the search for a general manager and landed on John Thompson, who had been the executive director of the NFL Management Council. Thompson was hired in March 1975, and in June 1975 the group chose Seahawks as the team name from among 20,365 entries (151 suggested Seahawks).

Sarkowsky and Thompson then began to look for a coach. They decided on Minnesota defensive line coach Jack Patera over Marv Levy, Leeman Bennett, and Monte Clark. Levy had turned the Montreal Alouettes into one of the Canadian Football League’s best teams. Bennett was coaching receivers for the Los Angeles Rams, who happened to be run by future Seahawks coach Chuck Knox, and Clark was in charge of the Miami Dolphins’ offense. All three would be head coaches in the NFL within the next two years, but Sarkowsky fell in love with Patera.

John and I flew to Minnesota and interviewed Jack, Sarkowsky said in a 1979 interview. We had interviewed all the others twice, but this was our first talk with Jack. There was something about him. Afterwards, I said, ‘That’s our guy.’ Of all the people we interviewed, my reaction was that that’s the guy we want. John agreed.

Sarkowsky said Patera had all of the qualities he was looking for in the coach of an expansion team.

The way he answered questions, his philosophy about the game, Sarkowsky said, stability, a tendency not to get over-emotional—which I think is important when you’re dealing with a lot of young people of questionable talent the first couple of years—leadership qualities, the ability to make good staff decisions, and a certain charisma was apparent to us.

Patera certainly had the résumé for the job. He had coached two of the most talented defensive lines in NFL history—the Los Angeles Rams’ Fearsome Foursome and the Minnesota Vikings’ Purple People Eaters.

It also probably did not hurt that Patera had Northwest roots. He had grown up in Portland, Oregon, and attended the University of Oregon.

So, four years after Sarkowsky and Skinner had conceived the idea, Seattle had its football team and the men who would run it.

Tragically, however, the majority owner never got to see it in action. Lloyd Nordstrom died of a heart attack while vacationing in Mexico on January 20, 1976—just 17 days after Patera had been hired and less than seven months before the Seahawks were to play their first game.

The Zorn Identity

The Seahawks were assembled in the usual expansionist way, cobbled together with other teams’ castoffs and a bunch of young players acquired through the draft. Like most expansion teams, they weren’t very talented.

Patera tried to use his own brand of discipline to turn them into a cohesive unit. Among his tactics, he refused to allow water during 90-degree practices at training camp in Cheney, Washington; he didn’t allow players to sit on their helmets during practice; he required them all to wear business attire when on road trips; he forbade fraternization with opposing team members. He made it clear that everyone was replaceable.

That was the old-school disciplinarian. Then there was the new-age strategist who ran an offense unlike the NFL had ever seen—one that seemed to have all of the discipline of a three-ring circus.

It was one of the most innovative offenses of that era, and it was run by a spindly, undrafted left-handed quarterback out of Cal Poly-Pomona named Jim Zorn. His favorite target was another castoff, a wide receiver the Houston Oilers shipped to Seattle for an eighth-round draft pick just before the 1976 season started. His name, of course, was Steve Largent.

Because the Seahawks weren’t very talented, Patera felt he needed to be creative. It worked. Zorn and Largent soon had the league taking notice of the Seahawks’ unpredictable offense, which featured plenty of trick plays and unusual tactics.

Most of what we did was by design and scripted, Zorn said years later. "For us it was lots of bootleg. It was sprint-outs. We had the sprint draw with [running back] Sherman Smith. I would sprint out. I scrambled. With us, we had a very wide-open offense when it came to the AFC West.

We were one of the first teams to put three receivers on the field and put people in motion. I remember Kansas City went the other way. They put three running backs on the field and tried to cram it down your throat. We had a different approach.

Although the Seahawks won only two games in their first year—including an ugly one against fellow expansion team Tampa Bay—they quickly became a team to contend with.

We were a struggling franchise, yet we had some very interesting talent, Largent said. We actually did exceedingly better than people anticipated us doing from year one.

In 1976 Zorn set a rookie record for passing yards (2,571) and led the NFL in attempts (439). Those numbers earned him the honor of NFC Offensive Rookie of the Year.

By 1978—their third season—the Seahawks had become a winning team. Zorn threw for more than 3,000 yards, and Largent surpassed 1,000 receiving yards for the first time as the Hawks swept the Oakland Raiders and finished 9–7 in the league’s first 16-game season. Patera was named NFL Coach of the Year, and Thompson was Executive of the Year.

Jimmy had a knack for scrambling, and we were never dead, said former linebacker Keith Butler, who was drafted in the second round in 1978. So many things could happen. He would end up making a lot of plays because of his feet and Steve Largent getting open. We could never be counted out. The defense started catching up with the offense, and we became a pretty good team. But the reason we were 9–7 was because of our offense.

The Hawks rebounded from a 1–5 start to win eight of their last 11 games in 1979. After a slow start, the offense picked it up and was at its creative best, particularly when the Seahawks made their first appearance on Monday Night Football. In one of the most fabled plays in franchise history, Zorn hit kicker Efren Herrera with a pass on a fake field goal for a first down that helped the Seahawks rally from a 14–0 deficit to beat the Atlanta Falcons 31–28.

But once again, 9–7 was not good enough to get the Seahawks into the playoffs. Then, as the schedule got tougher and injuries hit, they sank to 4–12 in 1980. After a 4–3 start, they lost their final nine games that year.

Patera let the players know that was not acceptable.

Jack was a straightforward guy, Butler said. "He didn’t mince words. Our facility was down on Lake Washington back then, and we were practicing before one game in December, and Jack called everyone together.

"He said, ‘Now, men, take a look around you.’ And he started talking about how beautiful it was around us, pointing out the Cascade Mountains to the east and the Olympics to the west, pristine Lake Washington and the beautiful skyline of Seattle. ‘Now, there’s a lot worse places to play in the NFL,’ he said. ‘So if you like what you see, you’d better start playing, or you won’t be here.’

That showed us it was a business.

Something Zorn and Patera found out firsthand soon after that.

Patera Strikes Out

The Seahawks continued to struggle in 1981, going 6–10. That led Patera to bench Zorn and put in another unheralded quarterback, an undrafted second-year player from soon-to-be-defunct Milton College named Dave Krieg.

Krieg started the first two games of 1982—both of which ended in losses—and then the season was shut down by a players’ strike. That was when the Nordstroms decided to fire Patera and Thompson.

The coach and GM had drawn the players’ wrath when they had waived starting receiver Sam McCullum before the season. McCullum was one of the most popular players on the team, and his teammates accused Patera and Thompson of cutting him because he was the team’s union representative. The release of McCullum had created a public backlash by union supporters against the Nordstrom department store chain. On top of that, Patera had been arrested for drunken driving the week before the strike.

So there were a lot of reasons for the Nordstroms to be unhappy, but they insisted the firing was completely based on the team’s record—the Seahawks had gone 10–24 over the past two-plus seasons and were 35–57 in six-plus years under Patera and Thompson.

We have been disappointed at our lack of progress on the football field, and that is the sole reason for the dismissal, Elmer Nordstrom told reporters on October 14, 1982. It became apparent in our early-season performance that things hadn’t turned around.

When the strike ended eight weeks later, Mike McCormack, the team’s director of football operations, who was doubling as interim coach, reinstated Zorn as the starting quarterback. The Seahawks won four of the final seven games, finishing the disrupted season with a 4–5 record and failing to qualify for the AFC’s eight-team, loser-out postseason tournament.

It was really unfortunate what the Seahawks did with that strike, Largent said. It took us a while to recover. That was a little unsettling for everybody. When you lose a coach, it’s not an easy thing.

It turned out for the better, though, as the Seahawks hired Chuck Knox and turned into one of the AFC’s top teams for the next decade.

Zorn’s days as the team’s star ended halfway through the 1983 season, when Krieg replaced him for good and led the Seahawks to the playoffs.

Zorn never quarterbacked a playoff team himself, but he always gave the fans a great show and was perhaps the most entertaining quarterback in team history. He started 100 games for the Seahawks and finished with 20,122 passing yards, 107 touchdowns, and 133 interceptions in nine seasons with the team.

Zorn was let go by the Seahawks after the 1984 season and finished his career with backup stints in Green Bay (1985) and Tampa Bay (1987) before embarking on a coaching career that brought him back to Seattle twice and culminated with a position as head coach of the Washington Redskins in 2008.

Largent, meanwhile, went on to become the Seahawks’ first homegrown Hall of Famer while helping the team go to the playoffs four times in the 1980s with Krieg at quarterback and Knox as coach.

chapter 2

Ground Chuck

Chuck Knox instilled toughness and a winning attitude in the franchise during his tenure in Seattle.

In 1983 Chuck Taught Our Team to Believe

(by Paul Moyer)

When Chuck Knox was hired to coach the Seahawks in 1983, we had a nucleus that was very talented. He knew the one ingredient that was missing was a team that believed in itself. He was trying to instill a winning attitude. So he brought in guys who had been there and won before—guys like Reggie McKenzie, Blair Bush, Charle Young, and Cullen Bryant.

A lot of them were past their prime, maybe even over the hill. But they were intelligent, high-character guys who knew how to play and were winners. They were the perfect complement to a team with a lot of first-round draft picks that just didn’t know how to win.

We were certainly talented. We had first-round picks such as Kenny Easley and Jacob Green and the new guy, Curt Warner. We had a few leaders such as Dave Brown and Steve Largent. But the one thing that was missing was a belief that we were good enough.

So when these veteran guys came in and told us this was the most talented team they had been on, we began to think that maybe we were good. They were leaders, guys who could mentor and inspire the young players. We had a great coaching staff and great youth, and Chuck infused it with veteran leadership that had been sorely lacking.

In player meetings, Reggie ran the court. No one messed with him. At age 33, he was definitely past his prime, at the end of his career. But we believed him when he said we were going to win. All year, he demanded that we believe in ourselves. He had been to the playoffs a lot, and he said we didn’t take a backseat in talent to anybody in the league.

Charle had won a Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers. He also was a preacher, and when he spoke, his words were piercing. They rang loud and clear. So when he said we were the most talented team he had been on, we believed him.

Largent said he never faced defensive backs in games who were as good as the ones he went against in practice every day— Dave Brown, Kenny