Steve Raible belongs in the Ring of Honor.
Author’s note: This is the thirteenth installment of my weekly column, Barely Relevant.
I bought a Steve Raible jersey. If you’re a Seattle Seahawks fan, you’ve got to get yourself one of these. When I stretch into the vast deserts of my mind, I can’t think of another player who was ever more committed to a team. Did you know that Steve Raible has been with the Seahawks organization for every single season they’ve been a team? Maybe you did. I think I knew that. But there’s a bunch of other stuff about Steve Raible I didn’t know.
Steve played wide receiver for Georgia Tech. Well, he was a 6’2” tight end who switched to wide receiver. He was actually in on the famous “Rudy” play, which was later commemorated into a book and then a movie. In the previous play, you can hear Steve Raible’s name called as he swats the ball away from a Notre Dame defender (at 1:18 in the video below). On the very next play, Rudy Ruettiger sacks Georgia Tech quarterback Rudy Allen and is carried off the field. It happened, and Steve Raible was there.
Raible was fast. He ran a 4.35 40 and was drafted in the second round of the 1976 NFL draft by the Seattle Seahawks, a new expansion team from the Pacific Northwest. He was their first wide receiver. After the draft, the Seahawks obtained another wide receiver named Steve, but he wasn’t as fast. Thanks to his superior route running and otherworldly hands, the other Steve… Largent quickly became THE Steve. And even though Steve Raible had a few big plays, he mostly faded out of the spotlight for the Seahawks as a player.
Raible ended up playing six seasons for the expansion Seahawks. In those days, most NFL players had to get second jobs during the offseason (Raible made $27,000 his first year as a Seahawk). Steve worked construction and tended bar in Kirkland. Actually, one place he worked construction AND tended bar was at famed Hector’s Restaurant in downtown Kirkland. Raible lived in Kirkland in the late seventies, as it was close to where the Seahawks practiced at Carillon Point. He used to jog from Carillon Point to Juanita and back and then bring his teammates into Hector’s for food.
“A lot of us used to eat breakfast at Hector’s all the time, and I got to know the owner and his name was Vern Conrad,” Raible told Feliks Banel for MyNorthwest in 2019. “Vern and Betty Conrad owned that place, and they could not have been nicer folks, and they loved having us guys down there … not so much during the season, but on our night off, you’d go down there, maybe have dinner and grab a couple of beers or something. So, I got to know those guys really well.”
Hector’s has since been torn down, but I can’t help but wonder where the old bar that Raible built ended up? I’d like to put it in my basement.
Sometime in the early eighties, Raible decided that a long football career wasn’t exactly going to be available to him. And there was always this other guy named Steve ahead of him. Largent aside, the Seahawks weren’t very good in the early years, and there wasn’t much to say about them. Raible was great with the media and always gave the writers a printable quote. So, he made friends with them. Wayne Cody and Pete Gross were his earliest mentors. He started co-hosting in the offseason, and then Cody went on vacation and offered Raible the full hosting gig for the week he was gone. He took control and loved it.
Raible suffered a couple of injuries in his sixth season (a collapsed lung in the preseason and torn ligaments in his ankle during the regular season) and received a well-timed job offer from Pete Gross at KIRO. It was a tough decision, but Raible – as he so frequently has since – made the right call.
Steve Raible retired from the Seahawks in 1982 and immediately joined Gross on the Seahawks radio crew as a color commentator. He hasn’t missed a single season. Since hopping on with KIRO, he’s gone from radio to TV Sports Guy, Anchor, and, finally, the voice of the Seahawks.
He has been there for every Seahawks moment: their first draft, first game, first win, first playoff win, Largent getting revenge on Harden in 1988, first Super Bowl, the Beast Quake, the Legion of Boom… our first Super Bowl win. I mean, holy catfish, I don’t even know that I’ve experienced a Seahawks moment until I hear Raible scream about it.
I can’t think of another figure in sports who has been so immersed and committed to a team – on multiple levels – since day one. As Raible told NFL Films in 2018, “I’d like to think that I could do play-by-play in a neutral sort of situation. But it would be tough because I want those guys to win. I’m a Seahawk. I’ve been a Seahawk my whole life.”
It’s true. Largent moved back to Oklahoma, Zorn went to the Packers, and then coached the Redskins for a while. He brought Shaun Alexander over. Kenny Easley hated the Seahawks for a long time. Sherman went to San Francisco, Lynch played for the Raiders, and Russ… well, he’s in Pittsburgh now. But Steve Raible is still here.
How Steve Raible is not in the Ring of Honor right now is beyond me.
It’s not his birthday. He’s doing fine. There’s no real reason for this post other than a flex. I bought a Steve Raible number 83 jersey, and if you’re a fan of the Seattle Seahawks, I can’t think of any other jersey that deserves to be hanging in your closet more than this one. Because all of those other guys with their names on the backs of your jerseys? They’ll come and go. They always do. All except one.