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The Dynasty That Never Was: A Retrospective

Permit me for a moment to talk about mirrors. I know, I know, this is off to a bad start. Fear not; it will get worse.

Now, mirrors. We know, or can reasonably conclude, that mirrors have been around for more than 8,000 years. They require relative flatness, reflectivity, and at least some degree of opaqueness. While the earliest mirrors were probably no more than pools of water, or another liquid of similar viscosity, especially placed in a shallow bowl, the long history of mirror production bore witness to a conflict between those requirements - by the time it became common knowledge that glass made for a better mirror-surface than metal, it was impossible to blow glass that was smooth, flat, and of uniform thickness. Instead, mirrors were always curved.

We also know many useless things about mirrors: they were beloved of ancient Romans; writers as varied as Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, and Jorge Luis Borges ascribed to them numerous powers; that mirrors were once purported by superstition to represent projections instead of reflections, as well as to aid in the identification of vampires.

Or take our knowledge that, like many old things that were not obvious tools, they were largely a luxury, and possessed almost entirely by the wealthy, who in turn used them, one suspects, in furtherance of vanity. In fact, the poorer the quality of a mirror, the more blurred or distorted the reflected image, which may have aided them in their popularity among those sad souls who wished to see in their own reflection something that was not there. And this, in turn, reflects a profound truth: that mirrors are compelling because of the degree to which they can allow us to commit self-deceptions. Indeed, even Socrates was supposed to have made a distinction between the passive mirror of imitation and the active mirror of transformation.

But none of this is really interesting. What is interesting, vis-a-vis mirrors, is the extent to which we make accidental mirrors all the time. Take a look at any modern smartphone, and there you are. Go for a walk in any modern office building, and whether in glass walls, doors, encased artwork, there you are again. Even the stainless steel surfaces of our appliances show us ourselves. Whether intentionally or not, by design or accident, you probably see your own face reflected back at you, dozens, if not hundreds of times every day. Indeed, mirrors have desensitized us to our own reflections; when confronted with an actual mirror, most of us shy away from them, confident in a wisdom from our childhoods that mirrors are not to be trusted.

And this reveals two important truths. First, that the best mirrors are neither obvious nor accidental, but concealed; and second, that Bishop and Klemko’s The Dynasty That Never Was is a perfect concealed mirror.

In their portraiture of the great diminishing of the Seattle Seahawks, the authors engage in an exercise of duality. As the good journalists that - I have to imagine, insofar as they are presumably getting paid to do this work - they are, their story is more of a narration of competing possibilities than an objective tale of truth. It begins, predictably, with "disdain" for our loveable android of a quarterback, Russell Wilson; but what is most compelling for me is that we don’t know who feels disdain, or who calls it a dynasty that never was (aside from Richard Sherman, obviously). And while no one should expect them to reveal the names of their mysterious sources, the fact of the matter is that that very mystery requires us to speculate about what it is ultimately a matter of opinion. The speculative nature of this story is clearest in this truism: "What kept coming back up at Sherman’s wedding wasn’t the massive overhaul the Seahawks had made. What kept coming back up was why."

The why of it, according to former and current players is simple - Coach Pete Carroll, that eternal optimist whose sermon was always one of the power of grit and utter selfhood, treated his QB differently. (In my view, the hidden underbelly of this presentation is that, unlike his teammates, Russell Wilson didn’t have any self at all, and so was of course exempt from Pete’s coaching.) Always compete meant, in fact, always compete at every position other than QB. But it’s worth questioning, how much did that competition spread to CB? Or to either safety position? Two out of three LB spots? Any of the DE spots? Poor drafts aside, did the Seahawks bring in personnel incapable of competing through the defensive side of the ball, or had the always-compete mantra that sparked fire in this team’s soul already began to sputter when they played that fateful game on February 1, 2015? We’re also told, conspiratorially, that Russell Wilson is, in fact, a snitch, the quintessential younger sibling who runs to daddy and tells on the elder siblings, who in turn insist the younger can’t hang with them. Others, relatedly, claim that Russell Wilson was akin to a favored child - polarizing more by what does or doesn’t happen to him than by what he does, incapable of the apparently brutal accountability by which the rest of the team kept their dominance, never knowing when a younger player was going to try to dislodge them. And yet, the real and true crux of it all, the firmament to which these once-mighty heroes screamed in furious desperation, was the treachery of Carroll’s message - that smirking lie, that withering of competition, cost them not only a loss, or even losses, but The Loss: that of a dynasty.

However, every narrative, especially one presented so nebulously as the one in this piece, has a counter-narrative, such that finding truth is near-impossible. While the evidence does seem to suggest that Russell Wilson is indeed a snitch, consider: 1) the claim that he didn’t work hard enough is absurd, particularly to one who watched his 2016 season, in which he operated with about half of one functioning leg, or when in 2017 he voluntarily checked himself out of the concussion tent, like a prisoner released of his own recognizance. (I won’t bring up 49, except to say that that was the right call.) 2) McDaniel’s criticism, that he was benched for younger and lesser talent (presumably Jarran Reed), can be easily elided by noting that the team gets better when it allows its rookies to learn through play, and that the team has always been at its best when it maintains a rotation of defensive frontmen. 3) Members of the defense criticizing the FO for not bringing in better OL talent while on the other hand criticizing Russ seems strange if unironic. 4) Kasen Williams, 2017 preseason darling, caught 9 passes for 84 yards, which, while more receptions than the beneficiary of his being cut, Tanner McEvoy, was less than the latter’s total yardage (113).

Of course, this is the truest and most lasting impression of duality - it is elusive. The story offers perspective, not truth. For every narrative - we should confront Russell Wilson when he plays poorly, because he’s one of us - there’s an opposite counter-narrative - no we shouldn’t, because he isn’t like us. For every appeal to brotherhood, inviolate and eternal, there is the abject reminder of a QB who stands apart and who, by all accounts, has always stood apart. In spite of the lauded "celebration of uniqueness" that seemed somehow so carefree and daunting simultaneously, there is a line - etched in steel so strong it cannot be melted by jet fuel - beyond which the celebration and/or the uniqueness cannot endure. The end of any era is, necessarily, equidistant to the beginning of another.

If this were a courtroom, the story would end with a judge or jury ruling that one or the other narratives was more persuasive, and would thus pronounce that narrative as the Truth. Now, of course, there is no judge or jury among the litigating public; while this fact is benefitted by the lack of a set of institutions that are exclusive and often deeply unfair, it is diminished by the absence of any common rules or practice through which the public can agree on a framework, premise, line of reasoning, etc. The same concern can be levied upon the idea of a sports "dynasty" - what does the word mean, and why does there seem to be no common understanding? Undoubtedly, the current Patriots, helmed by Bill Belichick and his sidekick Tom Brady, are a dynasty - the former’s brilliance, coupled with the latter’s willingness to be paid far less than he’s worth (or would be worth on the open market, anyways), plus the historical weakness of the AFC East have led them to 5 Superbowl wins and 8 appearances in the past 20 years. But does this mean a dynasty consists solely of a coach and QB duo? The 1981-89 49ers had the same QB but were coached by Bill Walsh and George Seiffert. The 1972-79 Steelers may well be another, but wasn’t that team largely supported by a dominant defense, such that the definition needs expansion? Considering this top-3, should the title dynasty be limited to teams that appeared in or won a certain number of Superbowls? Would this disqualify Troy Aikmen’s Cowboys of the 90s, or Gibbs’ [insert racist football team name here] of the 80s, or the Davis/Lamonica and Madden/Stabler Raiders of the 70s and 80s? No, much like the story itself, our loving use of the word dynasty smacks of the ineffable, a I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it quality that cannot be reduced to a common understanding, and thus requires everyone who uses the appellation to make of it a mirror, reflecting merely what one thinks about oneself.

The story that Bishop and Klemko told is indeed a mirror insofar as it reveals more about its beholder than it does about its makers. Whether this team was or should have been a dynasty is a question that can only be answered by its inquirer - if you read it and said, yep, this team is done, then you’re buying into that narrative; if not, then you’re buying into a different narrative. Mirrors have 8,000 years of practice in telling us truths, or lies.

For me, the mirror tells a story of loss; and my story becomes less a retrospective than an elegy.

When interviewed before the start of the season, we’re told that "[Russell] Wilson said then that not much had changed. ‘There are definitely some different faces out there, but it really doesn’t [feel different]. Coach Carroll does a tremendous job of being consistent every day. He does a tremendous job of making sure the culture is the way that we want it to be—a culture of excellence, a culture of love, a culture of guys who love the game.’ " But of course, this is also a narrative, and false; for me, the truest narrative was that the team was a great one, "awesome" in the words of now-retired Avril, not for their competitiveness or playmaking abilities, or even their fluency in all manner of trash-talk (though all of those things were great), so much as for their uniqueness. The team fielded so many loveable personalities, even Wilson’s anti-personality. If the team was a dynasty, and I believe they were, they should have been accounted a dynasty of personalities, of the induction of awe. For no team before them had done what they had done, and no coach had seemed, at least, to celebrate that anarchic and wild approach to football before Carroll.

But no more; Carroll, has assumed the mantle, a comfort to most if not all other coaches, of autocrat. The personalities that were are gone, and this rings the loudest in the team’s consolidation behind Russell Wilson, whose personality is so monotonous I sometimes question whether he’d pass a Turing test. I don’t know what the Seahawks will bring to professional football in 2018, but win or lose, cheer or no, I don’t imagine that I will be unable to not mourn for the dynasty that was.