Ruskell looks back on life, football

KIRKLAND — Long before Tim Ruskell became president of the Seahawks, his football options were more frozen mustache than frozen tundra.

The journey actually started eight years earlier, and it would take another 22 before Ruskell reached the pinnacle of his profession. But first he had to find a taxi in Saskatchewan in 1983, get to his apartment, find something warmer than the pineapple shirt he wore boarding the plane in Florida, thaw his mustache and begin life as a professional football scout.

"It might as well have been Siberia," Ruskell says. "But I loved football, and it sounded interesting to me. And I'd sure find out real quick if I liked it or not. I was going someplace I'd never been, and I had no idea how to get there."

Ruskell found his apartment. The temperature was 20 degrees below zero. This might, Ruskell thought to himself, be as good as it gets.

He never thought he would own a Super Bowl ring, that players would refer to him as Mr. Ruskell, that he would take over a football team in a Siberian-like NFL outpost and save the longest-suffering franchise in the league from two decades of longing for a playoff win.

After all, his journey to Saskatchewan was improbable enough.

It started, like so many other football dreams, in Texas. The second-youngest of six children in a military family, Ruskell discovered the sport while living there. He fell in love with Don Meredith, "Bullet" Bob Hayes and the Dallas Cowboys and drove his parents crazy reciting the statistics of the backup fullback.

Ruskell played tight end and defensive end in high school. His problem?

"I had the dreaded Ruskell quickness," he says.

He also had a destiny that manifested shortly after in a Tampa, Fla., record store. The Ruskells moved there in the mid-1970s, and he managed the store while working part-time as a jazz and rock DJ.

The original scout of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers walked in one day in 1975. John Herrera struck up a conversation with the long-haired manager behind the counter. Turns out they shared two loves — music and football.

Before he knew it, "Timmy was my old ball boy," says the old ball coach, Steve Spurrier.

Spurrier played quarterback for the expansion Buccaneers in 1976. He also played a lot of catch with Ruskell, who was the ball boy and visiting locker-room manager.

"I didn't see it developing into a career," Ruskell says. "When you're part-time, running around chasing footballs, you're not thinking you're going to be some big-time executive some day."

Herrera saw something in Ruskell — a natural, an eye for talent, a future scout. When Herrera took a general manager job in the Canadian Football League, he called the kid he met in the record store and said, "I want you to come scout for me."

"Great," Ruskell replied. "What team?"

"The Saskatchewan Roughriders," Herrera said.

Ruskell went searching for Saskatchewan. He never knew he would find his calling there.

"There is no doubt," Spurrier says, "that he started at the very bottom of pro football."

By the time Ruskell lost his job and left Canada in 1985, Spurrier was running the USFL's Tampa Bay Bandits. He hired Ruskell, then the league folded in 1986.

Faced with two dead ends in two years, Ruskell didn't know what to do. So he sent a letter to a man named Jerry Angelo, then the director of college scouting for the Buccaneers, now the general manager of the Chicago Bears.

Maybe Ruskell impressed Angelo with his chutzpah — one part of the letter read: "You're looking for scouts, why wouldn't you hire me?" — or maybe destiny intervened again. Whatever the case, Angelo asked Ruskell to come in and evaluate two players.

Ruskell still remembers who they were and what he wrote. He felt Rod Jones was susceptible to the deep ball. He liked Jerry Ball's quickness and instincts. Both ended up as those kinds of players, Ruskell says without a hint of pride.

"Maybe I was lucky," he says.

Maybe not. Angelo hired Ruskell on the spot — he spent 17 seasons in Tampa Bay and one in Atlanta before coming to Seattle — and became his mentor. But lucky? Ruskell spent four seasons scouting on the road. He lived out of a suitcase and made $15,000 a year without benefits.

"I didn't have a girlfriend, and if I did, she would have left me," Ruskell says. "I could have passed away in North Dakota, and no one would have known.

"But it was great. I loved it. I didn't think about the work. I fell in love with scouting and personnel and putting a team together."

The contacts Ruskell made on previous stops served him well with the Buccaneers. He scouted all over the country. On one stop at Duke to see Spurrier and his players, Ruskell showed again why he became a scout and not a player. Jumping off a 6-foot-high wall to get into the stadium, he stuck his knee in the ground and tore it so badly he required surgery.

To which Spurrier reminds that nothing about Ruskell's rise went gracefully. He became the Buccaneers' director of college scouting in 1992 and the director of player personnel in 2001.

Somewhere along the way, he met his wife, Linda — "sometimes you have to get lucky," Ruskell says — and they had two children, Samantha, 9, and Jack, 6. Angelo introduced them.

Also along the way, the Buccaneers built a championship team. By then, Rich McKay served as general manager, which meant three people in that front office — McKay, Angelo and Ruskell — would all run their own teams one day. But first, there was a city to be captured and a Super Bowl to be won.

Ruskell carried with him the lessons from his life. He could relate to players, once telling Chuck Darby, who played for Ruskell in Tampa Bay and plays for him in Seattle, that he also worked the long road. He could also relate to everyone in the organization, having worked nearly every rung on football's ladder.

"Timmy has learned from everyone he's been around and put it together," Spurrier says. "He knows how to develop a team chemistry. He knows that everyone has to have their role. From where he came from, he appreciates everybody. I'm sure the people who clean up and answer phones love Timmy. He makes everyone feel important."

After years of front-office bickering, the Seahawks sorely needed someone like that.

Someone who, along with Mike Reinfeldt, could ink tackle Walter Jones and quarterback Matt Hasselbeck to long-term deals. Someone who, along with his personnel department, could draft linebacker Lofa Tatupu in the second round when all of football considered that a reach. Someone who could persuade running back Shaun Alexander to sign a one-year deal in time for most of training camp.

It's what Darby calls "a gift" and coach Mike Holmgren calls "a passion." Typically, Ruskell wants full credit for none of this — same as it was in Tampa Bay, same as it always will be as long as he's in Seattle.

"I don't look at it that way," Ruskell says, when asked about his magic touch. "You can say you try to put together a team that's going to play well together and have a good locker room and good chemistry, but they have to do it. The players have to decide that. And these guys have decided that they care about each other, and they want to do something special."

Ruskell remains a scout at heart. He likens scouting to detective work, and his eyes still gleam at seeing something in someone that the whole world might otherwise have missed. Like a teacher inspires students, Ruskell says, or the way Herrera saw a scout in the manager of a record store.

So Ruskell attends practice as often as possible and promises to attend more practices next season. He scouts in person, even leaving this week for the East-West game. He watches three hours of tape at the Seahawks' facility most mornings before the phone starts ringing.

From a frozen mustache to the NFC Championship Game, Ruskell took the long road. The one thing he refuses to do at this point is look back.

"I don't dwell on it," Ruskell says. "There's too much to do. Maybe some day when I'm in a rocking chair. What I enjoy about my job is the people that I work with. Everybody pointing toward the focus of winning. Now that's fun."

The man says this and the phone rings and memory lane comes to an abrupt halt.

There is work to do, another Super Bowl to win.

Greg Bishop: 206-464-3191 or gbishop@seattletimes.com