As stressful as it was, I knew we could win. Our quarterback, Russell Wilson, was such a big part of that feeling. Russ was having a terrible game. Just terrible. He may have been concussed early on by Packers linebacker Clay Matthews. But while I cared about his health, I wasn’t concerned about his stats. I believe that if you give Russell Wilson enough time, he can win any game. He’s proven it enough that I never have doubts. After playing the worst game of his life, Russ snapped back in the fourth quarter and overtime. It took a successful onside kick by my man Hauschka and some more heroics, but we got through it in overtime, 28–22.
After the game, celebrating on the field, I was deliriously happy, knowing we were going back to the Super Bowl. I jumped on a policeman’s bike and just started riding around the stadium. It was beautiful. I said later, “This is the only time a Black man can take a bike from a policeman and not get killed.” It was one of those moments where I acted on my instinct to enjoy life to its fullest and just basked in the moment. I felt eleven years old. It was heaven.
The challenge of that game was in waiting for Russ to snap back, rather than being worried about Aaron Rodgers. For all his greatness, and Aaron Rodgers is a beast, we knew we could win if our offense started to click.
This would be as good a time as any to say that the best quarterback I’ve ever faced is Tom Brady. I know a lot of people say that, but I hope you know coming from me that it’s no bullshit, and it sucks to admit. I don’t want to concede that any quarterback is good, other than my own. But if you play on the defensive front seven, you know: Peyton Manning is not even in the same discussion as Tom Brady. They call Peyton cerebral, but Brady is right there with him, without all the performance art on the line. He’s also as tough as a quarterback can be, maybe too tough. That’s why his wife, Gisele, is worried about the number of concussions he’s had. She gets it. He talks about his special “TB12” training regimen, and she goes public, like, “I don’t give a fuck about this TB12 method shit, motherfucker. We’ve got three kids, your ass needs to make sure your brain works!”
Tom Brady was waiting for us in Super Bowl XLIX. People ask me about that game all the time, one of the best and most controversial in sports history. It’s hard to talk about, but not because we lost in the final moments. That entire day is a little foggy for me. Just around that time, my wife’s grandmother had passed away, and my best friend Rio’s dad, Mark Alexander, had also recently passed. Mark was one of my best friends, too. I wore a cowboy hat on media day, and people thought I was messing around. But it was Mark’s hat, and I wore it to honor him. Every time they showed that hat on television it made his family smile, and that’s the only reason I wore it. There was so much pain on that day among the people I love most that the game seemed small, in the scheme of things. I never really dwelled on the fact that we lost. All that Super Bowl reminds me of is death and the fog I was in. Somehow I played well—knocking Brady down four times—but it’s a faded memory in my mind, like a movie I barely remember.
What people always bring up is the last play of our offense. It was 28–24, New England, and we were one yard away from a touchdown with twenty-six seconds to play. One yard to a Super Bowl victory, and we threw an interception: the only interception thrown from the one-yard line that entire season. Watching that throw by Russell was gut-wrenching. Do I believe we should have run the ball? I think everybody believes that when you have a back like Marshawn Lynch, you run the ball. I was shocked, just like everyone watching at home. I thought we’d just hand it to Marshawn and pop the corks and call it a night. Shit happens. We were damn close. It’s not like we blew a 28–3 lead or anything.
But when we look back and wring our hands over that play call, way too often we forget to mention that this dude on the Patriots—Malcolm Butler—made an amazing interception to win them that Super Bowl. More than any damn game plans, football comes down to the instincts of great players. Everybody blames the throw, but Butler jumped that route out of nowhere, so you tip your cap. If he doesn’t make that play, we win.
What bothers me are articles that say “the wound never healed” in the Seahawks locker room and, as they tell it, one game, three years ago, has led to current divisions on the team, as if one loss could be as severe as the wound on my stomach that wouldn’t heal when I was a kid. It’s bullshit. Nobody on our team is still seething about the damn Super Bowl from three years ago. We’re so past that it’s ridiculous. But it’s the media’s job to plant a seed and create a narrative so the male fans can have their soap opera, especially in the
