Sports teams’ failures increase Seattle’s gloom

By TIM BOOTH | The Associated Press • Published October 11, 2008

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SEATTLE — The baseball team spent $100 million and rolled it into 101 losses. The NFL team, once the Super Bowl-bound pride of the loudest crowd in the league, is 1-3 and fading.

The college football team, long a perennial Rose Bowl contender, has taken out a long-term lease on the Pac-10 basement, with a fractured fan base and a crumbling stadium adding to its misery.

And the NBA team, the one with the city’s only major pro sports championship? It’s just plain gone, shuttled 2,000 miles away to the Midwest. Not so long ago, Seattle was a proud sports town.

Now the gloom settling over the fans of the Emerald City will only be matched by the impending months of gray and drizzle.

“It’s just tough right now,” said Anders Miller, a Seahawks’ season-ticket holder while taking a break from his job tossing seafood around Pike Place Market as one of the landmark’s famous fishmongers. Miller, who plans to load his Seahawks-blue 1978 Toyota and tailgate before Sunday’s game against Green Bay, still counts himself as an optimist.

“I want to be one, actually,” he said.

But fan optimism is rarely rewarded in Seattle. The city’s teams are remembered more for their many failures — no Super Bowl titles, no World Series appearances, the loss of their oldest professional franchise — than the four championships teams: the 1979 NBA SuperSonics, the 1991 University of Washington football team, the 2004 WNBA Storm and the 1917 Stanley Cup champion Seattle Metropolitans.

The current scene in Seattle might be the dreariest since the late 1960s, without a single team worth cheering for. In the digital age of anonymous message boards and barking sports radio hosts, Seattle fans are filled with anger and angst.

Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren urged them to resist the negative vibe.

“I choose to live my life with the glass half full,” he said. “I think that’s a choice we can all make. You’re going to have tough things happen. You can’t allow it to knock you down.”

The civic mood was already turning sour even before the harshest blow of 2008 — the July settlement between SuperSonics owner Clay Bennett and the city of Seattle allowing the team to move to Oklahoma City, ending 41 seasons of professional basketball in the city.