McCormack feels for both NFC teams

SEATTLE – Mike McCormack opened the conversation by admitting he always thought he would have mixed emotions if the Carolina Panthers and Seattle Seahawks played each other.

“But when I was sitting in the stadium in Seattle with (Panthers owner) Jerry Richardson (in 2004) watching them play, all those feelings crystallized,” said McCormack. “I was pulling for the Panthers.”

That’s how McCormack will feel again Sunday – when the franchises he helped mold come together at Qwest Field in the NFC Championship game.

McCormack was the Panthers’ original president and general manager. He was hired by Richardson in 1989 as a consultant, the main focus of his job to help bring an NFL franchise to Charlotte, N.C. He came to the Panthers after being fired in Seattle, where, as president and general manager, he had taken the previously dreadful Seahawks to the 1983 season AFC Championship game.

“It’s something I’m very proud of,” said McCormack of his roles with the Panthers and Seahawks.

Retired since 1997, McCormack, 75, spoke on the phone Tuesday from his winter home in Palm Desert, Calif. In the warmer-weather months, he still lives in the Seattle area, on a lake southeast of town in Black Diamond, Wash.

“The biggest challenge I had in Charlotte was obviously getting the franchise there,” said McCormack. “It made me understand what the term ‘lobbying’ means, because I spent so much time in hotel lobbies at owners’ meetings or big games, waiting to talk to the right people.

“But it was like birthing a baby. Putting it all together like that just makes the Panthers very, very special to me.”

McCormack was also responsible for building a Seahawks team that got within one game of the Super Bowl, when they lost to the Los Angeles Raiders in the 1983 season AFC title game.

“Things had gotten pretty bad in Seattle,” said McCormack, who also is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame from his days as an offensive tackle with the Cleveland Browns. “Season ticket sales were way down, to about 40,000. But we had a good ownership group and were able to turn it around.”

McCormack looks at both of his former franchises with pride.

“They’re both very well run,” he said. “They’ve got good football people running the football side of things. They’re both great cities, good basic places with not a lot of glitter. Just a lot of really great people.”

McCormack said he won’t attend Sunday’s game, worrying that he’s bad luck for the Panthers. He said he’s 0-4 watching them in person since he retired – the day he was inducted into the Panthers’ Hall of Honor in 1997 (a loss to Kansas City), that one occasion in Seattle in 2004 and twice in losses at San Francisco.

The weather in Palm Desert, at least this week, is superior to Seattle’s, where it has rained nearly every day for a month.

“I talked to a neighbor up there,” he said. “And he said my dock is under water. So I think I’ll stay here.”