Will You Come to My Pro Bowl Party, Will You Come?

Virtually everyone who follows the NFL regards the Pro Bowl as a joke. This is not just a prevailing sentiment, it is a monolithic one, as though Communist Party-type snitches lurked on every street corner ready to drop a dime on anyone with a dissenting view. I can’t recall a single line in defense of the Pro Bowl ever being written or uttered by a football writer, player, coach, talking head, or fan. Richard O’Hagan’s lead for a 2011 article in Bleacher Report speaks for millions: “Is there a more meaningless contest in professional sport than the Pro Bowl?” he writes. “As an exercise in utter pointlessness, it appears to be without equal.”

I don’t intend to challenge this take on the Pro Bowl and its cultural irrelevance. But I’ll admit that I’ve always been drawn to the game, or at least to its potential to be something exciting and fun. I still have a vague but deep-rooted memory of turning on the TV as a child and watching my first Pro Bowl, sometime in the early or mid-1970s. I was first of all delighted and surprised that there was more football to be seen that season after the Super Bowl. Since then, I’ve come to regard the Pro Bowl as a metaphor: it’s like methadone for a heroin addict who’s going off the stuff but still needs a fix, no matter how ersatz. (For this reason, and because Super Bowl players are now precluded from playing, I think it’s a bad idea to move the Pro Bowl to the week before the Super Bowl, as the NFL did a few years ago.)

When I was a kid I also thought it was fascinating that the NFL—a paragon of regimentation even in the long-haired, rough-and-tumble seventies—would condone players from the same team wearing helmets with different designs. The different-helmet-same-team thing is inexplicably cool to a football-card-collecting boy in elementary school. I still feel vestiges of excitement when I see all those variously colored and logoed helmets in the Pro Bowl. (Pro Bowl jerseys are, unfortunately and for no good reason, always ugly.) Finally, it was somehow life-affirming to see division rivals putting aside tribal hatreds in Hawaii to win one for their conference or for each other or for the winner’s bonus or for the love of the game.

At some point a decade or more ago, I began thinking about throwing a Pro Bowl party. I thought it might be fun in part because I find the very term “Pro Bowl party” borderline hilarious—so close and yet so very far from the ubiquitous “Super Bowl party.” I also thought a Pro Bowl party might have some real advantages over a Super Bowl party. Super Bowl parties tend to be fractured. Devoted football fans are on one side, irritated by all the distractions caused by the non-fans chit-chatting and strolling in front of the TV at critical moments. Non-football fans are on the other side, bored by the game and paying attention only to the newly unveiled commercials or to the bloated halftime show or to their own conversations.

At a Pro Bowl party, I reasoned, no one would care about the game and no one would feel compelled to watch, creating a more agreeable party atmosphere. Everyone could feel free to wear leis and the jerseys of their favorite teams, or to ignore the game altogether. And since virtually all teams are represented at the Pro Bowl—even teams like my currently dismal Washington Redskins—all fans could in some small way feel like they’re cheering on their respective squads in a post-season matchup. Furthermore, Pro Bowl games have the potential to generate more jokes than a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie. Guests could even stockpile material beforehand, like: “Quiet down, everyone! This is an important series for the NFC!” or “It’s close to halftime of the Pro Bowl, when dozens of toilets all across America will be flushing simultaneously!” or “Where were you during Pro Bowl XXII, when a young Ken O’Brien of the Jets brashly predicted victory?”

Not surprisingly, most of my friends expressed only mild amusement at the idea of a Pro Bowl party. So I sat on it for years. Then, late last football season, I saw an opening. My wife—who hasn’t watched a football game from beginning to end in her entire life—joined a fantasy football league with some of her coworkers, almost all of whom were younger women with a similar lack of interest in and knowledge of the game. After last year’s fantasy season, I suggested that this bevy of good-natured women and their significant others might be the perfect group to invite to America’s First Ever Pro Bowl Party. My wife, who is a good sort on a party, agreed and sent out a completely non-ironic evite to her coworkers. Almost everyone accepted, and there was only one perplexed comment. “Wait,” it read. “Are you sure you mean the Pro Bowl and not the Super Bowl?”

Despite the initial confusion, the party went off reasonably well. We had fifteen or so guests, all of whom were endearingly game for the rather odd affair. They arrived with smiles and treats: craft beers, bourbon, wine, desserts. One woman wore a sarong, or kikepa, another a Tom Brady jersey. Either my wife or I (I can’t remember who) wore an old Darrell Green jersey of mine. She made coleslaw and macaroni and cheese among other dishes, and I smoked a ten-pound Boston Butt in sub-freezing Boston weather so we could serve pulled-pork sandwiches. All of the good food, drink, and company pretty much rendered the Pro Bowl broadcast that evening even more irrelevant than it might have been otherwise, even in my house.

When the game finally did kick off, just over half the partygoers continued to sit in the dining room or mill about in the kitchen, talking and eating and drinking and doing what hundreds of millions of other Americans were doing at that time: ignoring the Pro Bowl. The rest of us actually sat down to watch. After my wife’s bare-bones electronic invitation, I tried to gently reassure my fellow viewers that I understood no one actually cared about the Pro Bowl, that I wasn’t just off the boat from Estonia or wherever and confused about what TV broadcasts were appropriate to invite fellow Americans over to watch, that I wasn’t off my rocker. Things loosened up after a few jokes, and soon all felt comfortable joining in the mirth. It was a long game, though, and its grip over the people in my living room was needless to say loose from the start and never tightened. Witty banter in such situations is hard to sustain, especially when those gathered together aren’t old friends and/or completely sloshed. Most guests left before the game ended. It was after all a Sunday night, and it was only the Pro Bowl. Everyone assured my wife and me that they’d had a good time and wanted do it again next year, but I sensed they were mostly being polite.

The game was predictably unmemorable even for the host of America’s First Ever Pro Bowl Party. Still, I’d like to close by saying something about the 2011 game and something more about the Pro Bowl in general. First, it was heartening to see Redskins linebacker London Fletcher make his second appearance as a Pro Bowler in 2011. (He’ll get another chance in this year’s game.) He played hard and often with a smile. Being a fan of his, I actually expressed some mild excitement after one of his tackles. Expressing anything but contempt over anything related to the Pro Bowl is pretty much the acme of uncool, and I thought I sensed some of the guests stiffen at my unsophisticated reaction. After all, even Hall of Famers want nothing to do with the Pro Bowl. In a broadcast a week before last year’s game, Troy Aikman gave advice to first-time Pro Bowlers. Don’t go into the locker room before the final gun, he laughingly said, because the commissioner doesn’t like that. After the game, AFC coach Bill Belichick said dismissively of the Pro Bowl, “It is what it is.”

While I don’t feel much warmth towards the taciturn Belichick or his erstwhile boss with the Giants, Bill Parcells, the latter once said something about one of his former players that has always stuck in my mind as fantastic. Parcells talked about how Lawrence Taylor—maybe the best defensive player I’ve ever seen—was a “parking lot guy,” meaning someone who would play football in the parking lot after a game without anyone watching, just because he loved playing. I don’t vividly recall Taylor’s play in any Pro Bowls, but I’ll bet he played hard and had fun, a lot like 13-year veteran London Fletcher did last year. Another Redskin—the late Sean Taylor—was also a parking lot guy. His hit on an AFC punter trying to run for a first down in the 2007 game is maybe the only Pro Bowl highlight that has ever attracted a significant number of viewers on YouTube. It certainly attracted genuine applause at the game itself, as the video attests. Even the blown-up punter pops off the deck to congratulate Taylor.

I submit that the NFL should insert a Parking Lot Guy clause into its Pro Bowl player contracts. Give each player the right to opt out of playing. Tell him, in essence, that you had a great year, you’re going to get this Pro Bowl Selection honor and you’re going to get the money that comes with it. HOWEVER, the NFL is not going to fly you and your family to Hawaii and put you up in a hotel unless you actually want to play in the game. If you do not want to play in the game, then thank you for your honesty and please stay home and accept the check (less any winner’s bonus) with our compliments. We will move down the list of players at your position based on Pro Bowl votes until we find someone who does want to play in a game with the other best players in the world, someone who will play for free plus any winner’s bonus, someone who will leave the game early only because he’s been taken out by the coach and wants to go play pick-up in the parking lot.

If the NFL did that, then throwing a Pro Bowl party might not be such a laughable idea. 

POSTSCRIPT: Last year’s First Ever Pro Bowl Party may have been more of a success than I realized. As I was proofreading this post, I received an email from my wife, who is now at a sales conference in Florida with most of the attendees from last year’s soiree. Her email reads, in part: “Everyone is asking about the pro bowl party. Do you want to draft the invite?”