How about those devastating comments on this year’s Pro Bowl by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who said he would just as soon put the event out of its misery.
“I really didn’t think that was the kind of football that we want to be demonstrating for our fans,” Goodell said. “And you heard it from the fans. The fans were actively booing in the stands. They didn’t like what they were seeing.”
Goodell said something has to change.
“We’re either going to have to improve the quality of what we’re doing in the Pro Bowl or consider other changes or even considering eliminating the game if that’s the kind of quality game we’re going to provide,” Goodell said.
Booing from the stands?
I don’t recall that described as a possibility in all the silly Pro Bowl pre-game hype.
Looking back, I did see Ferd Lewis’ column in the Star-Advertiser after the game that described “the intensity and frequency of the boos” as “remarkable.” Again, the column in another behind the S-A pay wall. I would quote more of it here, but once again the S-A security isn’t letting me log back in to that back issue. I hate their software set-up! It fails, and rejects this subscriber, far more often than any other publication out there.
In any case, I noticed a column in Yahoo!Sports also picked up on the idea of killing off the game, as I’m sure others did.
At this point, killing the Pro Bowl is the right thing to do. There’s nothing wrong with just accepting that some sports aren’t conducive to entertaining, meaningful all-star games. The NFL is one of them.
Players might complain if the Pro Bowl gets the axe, but they’ll be the same complaints we heard when they moved the Pro Bowl out of Hawaii. Guys just want their all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii. Myself, I’m not going to lose sleep over where Brandon Marshall gets to vacation and who pays for it. I may have some sympathy for the Hawaii department of tourism, but for the players themselves? I can muster none.
You can probably tell that I don’t follow football. But I did follow the flap over Governor Abercrombie’s off-the-cuff comments that the $4 million in state funds spent on the Pro Bowl could find a better use in fiscally-challenging times. The gov ended up having to eat crow, as he likes to put it. Perhaps that’s not the end of the story.
I don’t have the stomach to go back over the advance hype for the Pro Bowl to see whether criticism of the nature of this game, and the skepticism over whether it can be fixed, were substantially reported amidst the “isn’t it just great!” hometown glee. Certainly the Star-Advertiser’s lineup of good sports reporters were well aware of it all. But did it manage to slip into the reporting on the Pro Bowl issue? I hope so.
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I think this discussion begs the following question: where would HTA “invest” this money in an effort to replicate the results (inflated or otherwise) generated by the Pro Bowl?
Sports tourism is important. With something like the Honolulu Marathon, not only are the athletes and their staff and the news crews and spectators from abroad spending money in Hawaii, but the global publicity is priceless.
But what are the most popular sports in the world?
http://www.mostpopularsports.net/
Soccer, cricket, field hockey, tennis and volleyball are the top five, and American ‘gridiron’ football is number 10 on this particular website. However, on the following website, American football is not even among the top ten.
http://knol.google.com/k/ten-most-popular-sports-in-the-world#
There does not seem to me to be too much effort to bring other sporting events to Hawaii aside from the ProBowl and football. It could be that tourism in Hawaii is Japan- and mainland-centered, and so global sporting events are out of sight and out of mind in Hawaii. If so, that could be a terrible mistake.
But there is probably another reason. People who talk about the importance of football for tourism do not really care about tourism in their hearts. In their conscious minds they sincerely believe that the ProBowl is good for Hawaii, and they make up all sorts of elaborate rationales for it. But in their deeper hearts they are really just addicted to football. Sports is escapism, and football in particular attracts a certain kind of personality. In Hawaii, these people might vote Democratic and read your blog, but they vote for the right-wing of the local Democratic Party. I have not heard of one person promoting the telecast of international soccer competitions in Hawaii although soccer is the world’s most popular game. Backing the ProBowl in Hawaii would therefore seem to be not about economics, but about the entertainment of a certain rather strident demographic.
Sports can destroy a country the way opium once destroyed China. Sports has taken over the American university. It’s not like that in any other country in the world (especially China, where there are no sports at all in universities). The world is obsessed with soccer, and the highest paid athletes in the world are not in America, but are rather soccer players from all over the world. But these are professional soccer teams, not collegiate.
There is a controversy over Clint Eastwood’s Superbowl car commercial “It’s halftime in America”, some critics saying that it is pro-Obama. My interpretation is that in the 1970s it was half-time in America, when the middle class started to shrink. There was a social and economic crisis, and a chance to address it and to re-industrialize in the fashion of Germany, but Americans seemed to take the path of escapism. I think President Ford’s pardon of Nixon was a hallmark of sweeping problems under the rug. Americans turned toward cocaine, sports and the Hollywood blockbusters that started with “Jaws”. Worst of all, Americans voted for Ronald Reagan — twice.
At this point, the name of the game now is “controlled decline”. We need international sport competitions in Hawaii for diversification of tourism, but in so many other ways we are simply living beyond our means and pretending that it is an investment, the way buying a McMansion was ten years ago.
“Goodell has it nailed: Fix it it or throw it away. (Of course, he is a part of the problem by rescheduling it before the Super Bowl.)”
The Pro Bowl was a nice coda to the football season. Putting it before the Super Bowl was dumb.