Allen bought Seahawks for love of Seattle
Billionaire who died Oct. 15 had a range of eclectic interests.
About 24 hours SEATTLE — before kickoff in Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, Paul Allen, the owner of the Seattle Seahawks, emerged from a large van parked inside University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., and walked to the sideline at the 50-yard line.
Having changed into slacks, a dress shirt and a ski jacket with a Seahawks logo in response to the evening chill, Allen, who did not often speak to reporters, sat on a bench on the sideline and answered questions about his team’s quest for a second consecutive championship. Asked how he had coped with the thrilling finish to the NFC Championship game two weeks earlier, Allen, who founded Microsoft along with Bill Gates, said he had calculated the mathematical probability of his team winning.
“I’m always doing that; it’s just the way my mind works,” he said. (The Seahawks went on to lose in the Super Bowl to the New England Patriots, 28-24.)
Allen, who died Oct. 15 at 65, had a mind that worked in a lot of ways. Team owners often try to convince reporters that they are passionate fans and like to show off their knowledge of sports. Unlike other owners, Allen, who also owned the Portland Trail Blazers and part of the Seattle Sounders, could segue effortlessly from sports to his love of Jimi Hendrix to his interests in biochemistry of the brain and fighting the Ebola virus.
An avid guitarist, Allen jammed with Dan Aykroyd — one of the Blues Brothers — at a team party after the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl in 2006. He also ordered a custom-built amplifier with volume controls that go to 12, a homage to the team’s fans, who are known as the 12th Man.
“You can’t use it all the time, just on important occasions,” Allen said.
It’s unclear what his death means for the ownership of his teams. There are scenarios in which one or more of the stakes are sold, though a statement from Vulcan Sports and Entertainment, the umbrella company for the teams, said, “There are no changes imminent for Vulcan, the teams, the research institutes or museums.”
Allen, a self-described basketball fanatic, purchased the Trail Blazers in 1988. He was known to immerse himself in team operations and pore over details in the team’s war room on draft day. In 2009, he purchased a minority stake in the Sounders, an expansion team at the time.
Yet when it came to football, in some ways Allen was an accidental owner. He liked football, but did not need a football team to achieve legitimacy or fame. Rather, he bought the Seahawks to ensure they remained in Seattle, which he did care about deeply. When the team’s previous owner, Ken Behring, threatened to move the team to Los Angeles, Allen agreed to buy the team if the public would support construction of a new stadium, which they did, to replace the dilapidated Kingdome.
Shahid Khan, owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, said Allen’s biggest contribution to the league was not necessarily his devotion to football, but his many world-changing interests and innovations that have allowed the world “to connect and understand one another in ways that were once unimaginable.” In some cases, those eclectic interests merged.
Aware of the dangers of football, he looked for ways to reduce and treat concussions by developing different helmet designs to minimize impacts on the brain. His vision was far larger, though. He built the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, where researchers are trying to map the genetics of the brain and tackle the fundamental science of how the brain works.
“All of these are decadal innovations,” he said in 2015. “They are not things that will be ready in five years, but if they make a difference in 10, 20 years from now, that’s what you hope for.”
Allen rarely attended NFL owners’ meetings, often sending deputies to represent him. But his vision and his wealth — he was considered the richest owner in the NFL, worth an estimated $20 billion — meant that when he did show up, other owners listened.
In 2011, when the NFL was in protracted labor negotiations with the players’ union, Allen played a big role in getting owners and players to agree to a new collective bargaining agreement. Allen also came to an owners meeting in Houston in 2016 to vote on whether to allow one or two teams to move to Los Angeles.
Several influential owners favored letting the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers build a stadium together in Carson, south of Los Angeles. It was a practical, though bland, proposal. Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys owner, favored an alternate bid by the St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke, who hoped to build a more ambitious stadium in Inglewood, Calif. Allen sided with Jones, helping turn the tables in Kroenke’s favor (the Chargers will share the stadium, scheduled to open in 2020, while the Raiders are moving to Las Vegas in the 2020 season).
“His voice was very powerful at that meeting,” said Marc Ganis, an adviser to several league owners. “What he said carried a lot of weight because he spoke so infrequently, and also because of his success and wealth.”