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Pacific Northwesterners will always tell you three things: The weather isn’t nearly as bad as you’ve heard; carrying an umbrella is a sign of fragile composition; and don’t ever get your hopes up about the sports teams.
Among the four major men’s sports, success has been few and far between in the PNW, in a manner that mirrors the downbeat music the region has long been associated with. The Portland Trail Blazers—the only upper-left NBA team still standing—cling to their lone championship trophy from 1977, while the Seattle Mariners and Vancouver Canucks are still wandering the region’s vast, verdant wilderness in search of their first rings. (The same is true of the Seattle Kraken, but they just got here.)
The only team that’s broken through is the Seattle Seahawks. This Sunday, the franchise will make its fourth Super Bowl appearance in the last 20 years, something that’s still a bit dizzying for longtime fans like Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings. The 51-year-old trivia whiz was born in the Seattle area two years before the Seahawks arrived in 1976. After Jennings moved to Asia with his family in the first grade, he spent his childhood watching from afar as the franchise stumbled through the early days. Jennings points to the 1980s—an era when the Seahawks played very mid football while wearing very sick uniforms—as the time in his life when he watched the most games and bought the most merch.
Happily, Jennings’ rise to fame in 2004 coincided with the Seahawks finally starting to figure it out. His record-breaking 74 straight wins on Jeopardy! came during a fruitful period when the Hawks made five consecutive playoff appearances. Though he says his truest, most emotionally fraught Seattle sports allegiance lies with the Mariners, the Seahawks are a beloved part of the family for Jennings now, literally and figuratively. With a young son who schools him on all things modern sports, he’s staying current on all the secondary and tertiary storylines surrounding the team, reveling in the fact that going to a game no longer means hunkering down in an ugly concrete bubble, and trying to parlay his game-show host status into a spot in an iconic pregame ritual.
Also, for all the nightly Jeopardy! watchers who have been clamoring for an official Ken Jennings Super Bowl prediction, he confidently told me, “The Seahawks will lead at the half. Seahawks go on to win.”
Ken Jennings: Well, I’m from Seattle, started elementary school there, but then we moved overseas. It’s funny, all of my Seahawks game watching was pretty much on armed forces television in South Korea, just looking at the schedule to try to figure out when the Seahawks might be on Monday Night Football, or whichever game the Pentagon decided to show us. They were always at weird times. I think that if the games were live, they would’ve been at 3 a.m. Everything was tape delayed, but you couldn’t look up the score. So for 17 hours, we were in the dark.
Yeah, you’re getting a very unusual Seahawks fan perspective here, because it really would be in the Stars and Stripes newspaper. I would be poring over the box scores. Then, in the bookstore on the base, you could get NFL and NBA magazines, a ton of sports stuff for the troops. I was always just getting whatever football magazines, season yearbooks, almanacs, whatever the Pentagon would supply us. We’d go home in the summer, so I could see a couple preseason games, but then we’d head back to school and I’d miss the whole season.
I would say the exact same—really shameful skepticism. At the beginning of the season, I thought maybe they weren’t a playoff team, honestly, because of the division they play in. I was like, oh, the Seahawks are getting better, but who knew about Sam Darnold? Who knew? Big question mark. And of course, to grow up in Seattle sports is to become accustomed to disappointment.
Growing up as a Mariners fan, it’s not even, “If they don’t win, it’s a shame.” It’s like, “If they don't win, they’re the Mariners.” You’re surprised by joy whenever something good happens to a Seattle sports team. Honestly, I think it’s made me a better person.
I have friends who are diehard Seahawks fans, living and dying emotionally on every week, and their kids do too. I just want to show them a graph, like, do you realize how much more unhappiness this might bring into your life? How often does your team win the pennant and/or the biggest game? You don’t want to tie your emotions too closely to a sports team. Yet now with the Seahawks in the Super Bowl…flying high.
Yeah. That Game 7 against the Blue Jays, I think that’s my equivalent of the Seahawks-Patriots Super Bowl [in 2015] for everybody else. I was at a Super Bowl party with a bunch of friends and their kids, really just watching kids weep at the Malcolm Butler interception. It’s a different perspective on sports when you see kids who don’t know if they’ll ever be happy again.
I felt a little bit that way after the Blue Jays game, but I have a lot of Mariners love and hope as well.
That was actually a great metaphor for the Seahawks pulling us out a little bit, providing hope and uplift for a city that needed them.
I’m a Mina Kimes believer as well. She’s obviously a great celebrity Jeopardy! player. She’s kind of a friend of the show.
In my case, it was actually my 22-year-old son. My attempts to get him into Seattle sports when he was a kid didn’t actually work that well. But in college, he really got dialed into the Mariners in particular. He’s always telling me about which AAA prospects I should be keeping an eye on and has these outlandish theories about launch angle and BABIP [batting average on balls in play].
I remember him coming to me after Week 5 or so and saying, “Are you watching this?” I honestly said, “I’m actually not.” He said, “You need to start watching this. They’re for real. This looks different.” I thought, I’m the host of Jeopardy!, but this 22-year-old kid is smarter than me, Seahawks-wise, so I’m going to watch.
It really is how you would line it up in a John Wick movie. They’ve got to beat this guy, then have to beat this guy, but then they have to beat the Patriots. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, it would be a nice arc. Those three Rams games alone are each classic in a way. It’s been fun to watch.
I was on an airplane. We were taping Jeopardy! the next day and there was no game time [announced] when I booked the flight. In fact, we didn’t even know they were going to be in the game when I booked the flight. I missed a bunch of the first half. Then I got to LA and I had seven Jeopardy! scripts. There were a lot of words to go over, and I am just not on the page where I should be. My eyes are flipping back and forth to the TV because I’m so distracted by that game.
That’s exactly what I was going to say. They’re like the LA Colossus.
Yeah. My problem is, being even older than you, I still think of the Broncos and the Raiders as the Seahawks’ enemies from when they were in the AFC. I had a big Dave Krieg poster on my wall as a kid. Because it was framed for some reason, it got saved. Now my son has it up in his college apartment, with the bright royal blue, which is a Seahawks look I still like actually.
I can’t even tell if it’s pleasant nostalgia or if they’re objectively better. But at my age, I’ll settle for pleasant nostalgia.
They’re not going to age well. All the Color Rush jerseys are going to age terribly. We’re going to watch those games and it’ll be like watching all that teal and pink Miami Vice sports from the late ’80s.
I never know if that’s on-the-field superstition. I assume it’s more like people crunching numbers. Oh no, fans are going to want to buy the jerseys we won in. Plus, [with the Seahawks’ old jerseys], it was the Kingdome. You had that weird AstroTurf green on your TV. It’s a totally different aesthetic than even the Hasselbeck era.
The vibes were terrible. But my dad worked downtown, and occasionally we would go down and meet up with him after work and go to a Sounders game. We’d go to Mariners games in the summer, or a boat show. I never went to a Seahawks game until Lumen Field, but I went to the Kingdome a ton.
As a kid for a boat show, you’re like, “This is the biggest room I've ever been in by a factor of 10,000. It’s way bigger than grandma’s living room!” But for baseball, it was just so sad. What a terrible park for the Mariners. It looked like a parking garage. I don’t miss it. I never heard a loud Kingdome in my life.
I don’t have good hipster answers. I have to say Curt Warner. I mean, [Steve] Largent. That streak was something that had never…Something that good had never happened in Seattle sports history, apart from the Sonics in ’79. [Note: The Seattle SuperSonics won the NBA championship in 1979. In 1986, Largent set an NFL record by catching a pass in his 128th consecutive game.] There was no national story like Largent’s reception streak. We were very proud of that. That was all we had!
I don’t think he understands that. I believe his first Seahawks game, through a weird stroke of luck, was Super Bowl XLVIII. How are you going to ever beat that? I think I’d been to one Seahawks game before that. He was little, so I was like, “Well, I’m not taking this kid to a bunch of noisy games.” But weirdly, through a friend of a friend at the last minute, I had gotten, like, a Microsoft corporate ticket to go see the [2013] NFC Championship Game against the 49ers.
I didn’t really know anybody up in the Microsoft box, but I wound up sitting next to Dan Savage, the sex columnist, who I had known a little online or around town. But we’d never hung out. He was doing an “I don’t get sports” kind of thing. He’s Dan Savage, so it’s also like, “Boy, these uniforms look great. Why do they throw the little yellow thing sometimes?”
People liked it and Microsoft thought it was funny. The next day, they were like, “We're going to give you and Dan Super Bowl tickets. You guys can go do it again.” Then Dan couldn’t go, but it was too late, they’d already given me two Super Bowl tickets. I brought my son and flew out to MetLife. That was his first game, and he was just over the moon. He did text me about an hour after the Rams game to say, “So we’re going to the Super Bowl again?” He’s not a very likable character in this story. He’s my little Jeopardy! nepo baby. I told him, “You know what? It’s a lot of money and it kind of seems like a hassle.” I think he does not remember that it’s a bit of a hassle to go to the Super Bowl. As first-world problems go, it’s a pretty good one, but I think I will be at home with snacks, not in Santa Clara.
I think that's kind of how they’re marketing it. They’re a brotherhood. Maybe that is a recognition that none of them could play the Marshawn Lynch part in Bottoms. And that’s okay!
I really am not very good because I like a good narrative with my trivia. Sports have a narrative, but often sports as trivia is numbers. The dates and the numbers are the part of trivia that’s often just a C for me. If it’s Dock Ellis throwing a no-hitter on LSD, there’s your story. But that’s why sports trivia is not really in my wheelhouse as much as it should be, I got to say.
The thing I just saw, which I’m sure you’ve seen, is that every time there’s a new Pope, the Seahawks go to the Super Bowl. That’s very good.
They wanted a video from me for the Rams game. That might’ve been the first time they’ve reached out. I haven’t been hosting Jeopardy! full-time that long. It’s kind of a new thing. The Mariners have reached out. I’ve done things for the Sounders. I think I’m actually pretty low echelon. But I was very surprised that I was the last talking head in the hype video. That seemed like pretty plum positioning. That’s good for me, because I’ve never reached out about raising the 12 flag. I think that would be fun.
I actually have a friend who’s a novelist. She wrote a book set in Seattle. It’s called Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple. In that book, there’s a fictional raising of the 12 flag, and she has me as the Seattle guy who does it. So I’ve done it once in literary fiction and never actually at Lumen. I’m available. My schedule’s wide open!
I’m really whoring myself out. I like that now they call it manifesting instead of whoring yourself out.