When Paul Allen died at the age of 65 earlier this month, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said the late Seattle Seahawks owner “was the driving force behind keeping the NFL in the Pacific Northwest” and credited Allen with Seattle’s famous pregame raising of the “12th Man” flag.
Less than two weeks later, the Seahawks will pay tribute to Allen by wearing his initials, PGA, and that “12th Man” flag on their jerseys. As Brett Kolde, the team’s vice chairman, announced via Twitter on Friday, Seattle will take the field on Sunday against the Detroit Lions wearing commemorative patches, and they’ll continue to do so for the remainder of the 2018 season.
The patches have been stitched onto both the Seahawks’ home and away jerseys, and they feature Allen’s initials in front of the hoisted flag.
Allen came to prominence in 1975, when he co-founded Microsoft alongside Bill Gates, but he is best known in the sports world for his ownership in Seattle and Portland, where he oversaw the Trail Blazers starting in 1988. Under Allen’s Seahawks ownership, which began in 1997, the team made 12 playoff appearances and three trips to the Super Bowl over a 21-season span, a drastic improvement from the 20 years before his ownership, during which the Seahawks made the postseason only four times.
The founder of Vulcan Sports & Entertainment, he was valued as the richest owner in the NFL at the time of his death but was estimated to have contributed $2 billion to philanthropic causes. He passed away two weeks after announcing he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma for the third time in his life.
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