Art Thiel is a longtime sports columnist in Seattle, for many years at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and now as founding editor at SportsPressNW.com.
"We just never got better . . . It's a learning point we all have to take accountability for. If it happens once, that's one too many; more than that, it's a habit."
Almost always, things start out swell, with flowery statements, grand visions and lots of tra-la and rose petals. Not long after, things often get weird.
Sports outcomes apparently are the new frontier for presidential power freed from the rules-based global order that the U.S. had largely created and sustained.
Since several days remain to speculate on their chances ahead of a largely meaningless match, now is a worthy time to consider just what fueled (besides breakfast beers) the human tsunami that delighted global soccer, and marked the apex moment in Seattle's sports-hosting history.
My most important learning is that promoters exaggerate the forecast of a local economic boom, while skeptics dismiss hosting's virtues as trifles unworthy of civic treasure and effort.
A good case can be made that in the mid-1990s, the three best players in Major League Baseball were Mariners. Randy Johnson won the 1995 Cy Young Award as the American League's best pitcher.
Pity that Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald doesn't put a premium on ebullience as an asset in drafting players, something that his predecessor, Pete Carroll, seemed to relish. The Seattle...
Done right, by Pete Carroll and Mike Macdonald, the defense-led teams leave a mark. Here's a great through-point between Seattle's best teams, both led by defenses, the Legion of Boom and its new iteration, The Dark Side.