See the Lombardi Trophy at the EMP’s new Seahawks Exhibit

Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll helped cut the ribbon on the EMP’s brand new “We Are 12” Seahawks exhibit this morning.

“You get a little bit of an inside look,” Coach Carroll says. “They’ll take you inside of the history, of course. Up close you’ll get to hear and see some things that you wouldn’t get to see otherwise. So I hope you’ll feel like this is your place.”

A place you can see some things that actually belong to Pete Carroll.

“Pete Carroll loaned us a manila folder of his notes, when he was thinking about what he wanted to say to the team the night before the 2013 NFC Championship,” says EMP’s director of curational affairs, Jasen Emmons.

Jason reveals the museum’s prized possession: the Lombardi Trophy.

“At the stadium they have a few things on display, and they’ve shown the Lombardi trophy around, but this is the only place you’ll actually be able to come and see most of this stuff on a regular basis. That felt really critical to me that we had that because I knew that this is one thing, that if nothing else, people would flock to see.”

This morning’s unveiling was for the media, and a group of VIP fans, including Mr Seahawk, who says he and his wife got up at three in the morning do their Seahawk-themed hair and makeup. When I asked him what he thought of the exhibit, his eyes welled up with tears.

“All these years we’ve worked so hard for this. It’s really exciting, it truly is, to be recognized as the Super Bowl champions. We got married on the 50 yard line so this is really important to us.”

So how did a sports exhibit find it’s way into a music museum?

“We’ve pretty much evolved from being a music museum to a pop culture museum and fandom has always been a big part of what we do,” Jasen says. “So whether you’re a Trekkie or a Deadhead or you’re a Jimi Hendrix fan, we’ve always been fascinated by fans. So for us, when we hosted the Super Bowl parade here, and all the players were here. And seeing how powerful that reaction was in the community, to win something like this. So for us, we started thinking, would it be possible to do something on the Seahawks?”

The idea is for the exhibit to appeal to everyone, even sports skeptics. And they did that by making it interactive.

“This is how big Russell Wilson’s hand is, ten and a half inches, which is enormous,” says Jasen. “So we did a a tracing of his hand so visitors can come up and put their hand against it.”

And you can see what it’s like to play football in the deafening loud Century Link Field.

“Essentially you get to be an opposing quarterback and a wide receiver. So you go in one room, you’re the quarterback, we give you two random plays. You choose one of them and then we bring up the crowd noise from Century Link. And then you have to yell the play over the crowd noise. We take it up to 90 decibels, we don’t want to kill our visitors.”

This new exhibit opens today and will be updated with new artifacts after every home game from now through 2016.