By Larry Stone
The Seattle Times
Pete Carroll said on his weekly radio show Tuesday morning on 710 ESPN that he never would have come to the Seahawks in 2010 without his belief in Paul Allen. He also lauded Allen, the Seahawks’ owner who died on Monday, as the ideal NFL owner, both supportive and challenging.
“We had a really good relationship,” Carroll said on the “Brock and Salk Show.” “It was kind of John (Schneider) and I and Paul who had a way we communicated and functioned that was extremely facilitative of what we were after. He’s a competitor and he wanted to do great things. He was always challenging us to figure out where we could go, what could we do to do things better. Always with his support.
“That’s why I got here. I would never have left USC in a million years but it was because of his spirit and what he wanted to create and how he wanted to go about it that made it so obvious. He only impressed me more as we went through the years in doing this. He had such great resolve for what he wanted and how he wanted to do great things, and he wanted to give so much back to everybody around here. We needed to come through for everyone.
“All these amazing choices he stood for, and all the accomplishments, the challenges, the discoveries, the science, everything he went after, just showed his spirit, his extraordinary spirit to do great things. He realized his situation, realized where he was in this place in time, and he went for it. He always demonstrated that to us and always gave us that feeling, and we were always trying to do everything we could to do it better than anyone’s ever done it.”
Carroll called Allen’s death “a shock of enormous proportions” but indicated that there were “some indications” recently that his illness was worsening.
“He was battling,” Carroll said. “I sensed he was going into a battle again and I was really worried about it, just because he looked ill and he was feeling down and he was having trouble doing the normal things he likes to do. He was competing to try to stay with us and yet he couldn’t. There was some indication it was dire.”
In describing Allen’s management style, Carroll said: “He was a hands-off guy in a sense, in the classic way you would think of owners that were involved. But he was tuned in. He loved to know what was going on. He loved the information. He was a problem solver. He said it one time to John —’I’m a solutions guy. I need problems to solve.’ He would look for ways, try to find things maybe we hadn’t seen yet, so he would challenge us with it, but he was always supportive.”
