Pete Carroll: Seahawks owner Paul Allen was ‘bigger than life’

Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll reflected on the life of late Seahawks owner Paul Allen Tuesday morning, calling the Microsoft co-founder “a competitor who wanted to do great things.”

“He was bigger than life,” Carroll told Brock Huard and Mike Salk during his interview with 710 ESPN Seattle. “There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do.”

The sports world pays tribute to Paul Allen

Allen died Monday at the age of 65 due to complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The Seahawks and Portland Trailblazers owner, who had previously battled non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2009, announced on Oct. 1 that the disease had returned.

“It’s a shock of enormous proportion,” Carroll said. “We knew that Paul was sick, but he has always battled and been so gritty about getting back. His attitude when I last talked to him was, you know, ‘Here we go, we’re gonna go after it again…’ and just the same spirit he always had about moving forward.”

Though Carroll’s weekly interviews with Huard and Salk are typically a time to recap a Seahawks game, Seattle’s head coach spent the bulk of the morning remembering Allen.

“We had a really good relationship,” Carroll said of Allen, whose decision to purchase the Seahawks in 1996 kept the team from being relocated to Anaheim.

Allen was relatively hands-off as an owner, which Carroll said he appreciated, though he didn’t hesitate to challenge Seattle’s front office when it came to growth and improvement.

“He was a hands-off guy in a sense, in the classic way you would (compare) to owners who are involved. But he was tuned in and he loved to know what was going on. He loved the information. He was a problem solver. He said it one time to John (Schneider), ‘I’m a solutions guy, I need problems to solve.’ So he would look for ways, he would look to try to find the things that maybe he hadn’t seen yet, and so he would challenge us with it. But he was always supportive… He was not here in the building, he was very shy and wasn’t really comfortable being around the team so much. He just liked to win. He wanted to win and win big, and if you weren’t, well how could you get there? He was a  wonderful owner to work with because of how he allowed us to do our job. That’s why I came here, and he never backed off that. He never ever influenced another thought other than he was in full support of what we were doing.”

Carroll’s tenure in Seattle has featured a number of outspoken and distinct players like Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman – and Carroll said that open-minded culture started at the top.

“He had a sense for openness and a liberal way of looking at things that supported where I was trying to go,” Carroll said of Allen.

“It made it so fun to be able to create a mentality that was connected to him. And we were connected. He never had any trouble with the flare-ups or the issues and all. I don’t know that he chuckled about it, but he knew that there was space in the world for people to be unique and different.”

What Paul Allen meant to the Seahawks franchise