The Notebook, Pro Bowl

Didn't watch it.

Who won? Did anyone really?

I posed to myself the annual question: to watch the Pro Bowl or not? Who knows, it might be a fine game this year. Maybe some of the 4th quarter electricity from the Super Bowl could carry across the Great Plains and Pacific Ocean currents to Hawaii.

But like every year, I opted to return a week early to my life, my life outside of football that is. Sunday was a fine day on the East Coast. The Spurs traveled to Boston to face the Celtics. It seemed a shame not to take a long walk and spend some time on other projects postponed during the height of football’s frenzied playoffs.

What I did realize, though, during this year’s internal debate, I can’t remember ever watching a single Pro Bowl during the course of my life.

Even as a football obsessed young boy, when my blind allegiance to the NFL and pro game crested at its height, I couldn’t muster the requisite intrigue in the league’s low key semi-spectacle. I who used to pray to a God I only truly believed in when the outcome of a Packers game was at stake, I would pray mid-Summer for Fall’s haste, despite the coming of school and the loss of Summer’s freedom.

Even that football-crazed child would choose burrowing tunnels through the excessive snow of the freezing Wisconsin Winter rather than peer into a lesser football paradise just one last time.

If my 10 year old self couldn’t bring himself to watch the Pro Bowl, certainly the same edition two decades on in experience and cynicism had no chance.

I've read that the game is for the players, not the fans. Indeed, those guys deserve a trip to Hawaii and a little extra bonus for a good season, especially the guys on rookie contracts. But I'd rather watch what happens when Larry Fitzgerald, Peyton Manning, and Jay Ratliff go to a beachside bar to play a game of Scrabble. That's pro players do right? Play boardgames?

I don't want to bitch and moan about it. It would be nice if the league could rectify this problem. The regular season is good, the playoff system is good. But baseball and basketball both knock the pants off of football in their all-star games. In all, the looming labor crisis is a much more important focus for the league and the players.

And the general fan isn't really complaining with the send-off the NFL gave us this year with one Super Bowl final quarter for the vault. Because when it comes down to it, no one will remember the outcome of this Pro Bowl unlike, say, last year's MLB All-Star game... and that might be comment enough on it.