The Seattle Seahawks Want to Trademark the Number 12, Let's Laugh at Them

If you were to write a parodic, Onion-esque article about the bleak corporate cynicism of professional sports, you could do a lot worse than the actual, no-we're-not-shitting-you story of the Seattle Seahawks attempting to trademark the number 12. Let's not pause to unpack what precisely has wrought the backwards, all-is-fair-in-love-and-brand-building environment that has led the Seahawks to assume trying to claim ownership of a widely-used concept invented in ancient Sumeria might be a sound business strategy. (And, even more aggravatingly, to perhaps be right about that.) We would be here all day. Let's instead make fun of them for it.

There is apparently someone in the Seahawks front office who bills the company for hours spent identifying all the common words and phrases the team could possibly lay legitimate claim to. He sits in a meeting, silent and with his fingers steepled, maintaining maximum Quiet Guy Gravitas until the boss turns to him and he blows everyone's mind with a one-sentence pitch: "Gentlemen, what if we tried to trademark the word 'boom?'" The boardroom murmurs for 15 seconds, and then a man who owns five large houses says something like "Johnson, you're a goddamn genius." Everyone declares the meeting a success and gets business-drunk.

That's only sort of a joke. The Seahawks have indeed tried to trademark the word "boom," which would seem to ignore the word's rich legacy as a sound little kids make, as well as "Go Hawks!" which would seem to ignore the existence of the Atlanta Hawks and Chicago Blackhawks. The Seahawks are not especially predatory or blinkered. Lots of teams invest significant manpower and money into trying to claim anything and everything they might be able to monetize. The Seahawks currently pay Texas A&M $5,000 per year for the right to use the term "12th man" in some of their marketing. (Crucially, they're not allowed to sell anything with "12th man" on it.) You can bet they regret not getting to that term before the Aggies did.

The thing about sociopaths is that they are hilarious if you can set aside the fact they have disembodied heads in their freezer. Corporations are sociopathic by definition, and so they seek out competitive advantages even when they must look ridiculous in order to do so. In trying to gain legal dominion over a number and an onomatopoeic expression, the Seahawks are carrying out one of those overly complicated 80s movie heists where a man has to dress up like a woman, a demolitions expert is snuck into a bank vault via a large rolled-up rug, and a horn-rimmed nerd in a fake exterminator van supervises the entire operation. Anything for a buck means anything, but anything also means an audience in amused disbelief at your willingness to do whatever it takes.

It is important to laugh at corporate absurdism, in part because it's one of the only things we can do—Globochem Godzilla goes on demolishing skyscrapers, with or without your consent—but also because we need to remember what we are, and what a machine designed to discretionlessly inhale assets cannot be. We are not sociopathic, and we understand how business interests left unchecked by the distinctly human instinct for what is gross or corny leads to farce pretty quickly. If we can't stop the capitalists from buying up everything, we can recognize how silly it is, and mock them for it. What we lack in power we make up for in taste and sanity. We grasp that something like the concept of 12 does not belong on a certificate that says such-and-such entity now has exclusive rights to put it on their banners and merchandise. Perhaps that is how the system works, but it's definitely not how it should.

Say this to yourself, slowly if you have to: I am a human being, and I try my best not to make an ass of myself. This is something no company can ever acquire. Its value is immeasurable.