A first-round pick out of UCLA in 1981, Easley quickly established himself as a dominant force in Seattle’s secondary, and he helped the Seahawks reach new heights, reaching the postseason for the first time in 1983, then following that up with a 12-4 1984 campaign that saw the Seahawks force 63 turnovers, a post-merger NFL record.
In that memorable 1984 season, Easley led the league with 10 interceptions, two of which he returned for touchdowns, and became the first player in franchise history to win Defensive Player of the Year honors. Easley was a three-time first-team All-Pro and five-time Pro-Bowler in seven seasons, earning him a spot on the 1980s All-Decade Team, but his career came to a premature end thanks to kidney disease. For the next 15 years, Easley stayed away from football and from the Seahawks, feeling wronged by the franchise for how his career ended. There was a lawsuit involving his kidney disease that was eventually settled in the 1990s, and for 15 years, Easley was, as he put, “wallowing in my own anger.”
But then his wife, Gail, asked him a simple question, which Easley relayed in 2017: “How long can you hold a grudge? They’ve got a different owner, different doctors and trainers. All those people you believe injured you, they’re gone.”
In 2002, Gary Wright, then the team’s VP of communications, reached out to Easley seeing if he would be willing to come to Seattle to be enshrined in the team’s Ring of Honor.
“It was good that the reconciliation happened,” Easley said in 2017. “To be honest, I never gave it much thought, because I was wallowing in my own anger. I thought I was done unfairly, it didn’t have to happen what happened to me, and it took me a while to get over that. For 15 years, I didn’t watch a football game. I never saw Cortez Kennedy play a single game, because from 1987 to 2002, the night that I went into the Ring of Honor, I had not seen an NFL football game in that entire time. In fact, any kind of football, because I had to divorce myself from it completely.”
Finally recognized by Seahawks, Easley still had to wait another 15 years to get the call from the Hall of Fame. Among the many who pushed hard for his candidacy over the years was fellow 1981 first-round pick and safety Ronnie Lott, widely considered one of the best safeties of all time. Those two built a friendship based on competition as Lott, at USC, and Easley, at UCLA, pushed to one-up each other. That continued in the NFL, then after their playing days, Lott became one of Easley’s biggest advocates.
“I can tell you many moments of watching Kenny Easley, because that’s what I used to spend my time doing, watching Kenny Easley,” Lott said in a video congratulating Easley on his enshrinement. “The reason why? There was no one that got me excited about playing the game of football than when I watched him… There’s no one more deserving.”
