PIGSKIN PARTIES PAU!

"Hawaii is is the home of the Pro Bowl. Over time the game has become a tradition and our residents should not grow accustomed to seeing it played away from Aloha Stadium." Lt. Gov. James "Duke" Aiona - January 27, 2010

While America’s football fans ignore, or sleep through, the 2010 Pro Bowl, to be contested this year in Miami, most NFL players are even less enthusiastic about the move of this annual all-star game to—Florida?

Who dropped the ball? Was it the National Football League, PR purveyors of the “National Pastime,” they who operate the most sophisticated and pervasive hype machine in the history of media? Or, was it the Hawai’i officials who somehow fumbled this tradition, letting it slip away? Or, at this point, does throwing the flag even matter?

The fact is, that somehow, something awful has happened, in reverse. Like moving the Statue of Liberty to Manana Island. The Saint Louis arch to MacDonalds in Makakilo. Or the Golden Gate bridge over Kipapa Gulch? From global glamour to bush league demotion—and for what?

Players selected to this year’s Pro Bowl who happen to play for the Miami Dolphins will be honored for their achievements by traveling all the way—to work. The biggest stars have protested the move of their all-star game away from paradise. All season, announcers said things like, “Great play by #74! That might earn him a trip to Hawah ... uh, er, Miami this year.”

Since 1980, the Pro Bowl had been as synonymous with the 50^th state as are Diamond Head, hula-hula girls, lava flows, rainbows, the whole ten yards. Of more importance, the wondrous video views of Hawai’i featured during the four-hour Pro Bowl telecast were seen by millions of deprived football fans going cold turkey, some buried in snow or other freezing climes. Those 15-second bumper shots of “natives” blowing conch shells, riding the wild surf or jumping from cliffs, cost “nothing.”

Well, maybe not so if one is a bean counter. But, if the state paid “too much” for the privilege of hosting the Pro Bowl, all the “money spent by visitors attending the game” has to be many times more than what we taxpayers shelled out to bring the event here all those years. It was a feast in a state starved for a national professional franchise. Now, the game is a pupu preceding pigskin’s premier performance.

If the Pro Bowl annually “broke even,” by any calculation, in today’s Global Village how many positive “impressions” were made by the game while telecast from here with all its pursuant hype? It will be missed, in more ways than one. The NFL has its own network. Add up how much time this week is devoted on-air there, plus other sports channels and all other media. I have been to Miami. I have worked in Miami. It, to paraphrase a politician, “Is no Hawai’i.”

I also attended the 1971 Pro Bowl played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The score was East 36, West 7. Jimmy Brown starred for the winners; Vince Lombardi coached the losers. The alleged crowd of 60,124 looked small in that vast arena built for the 1932 Olympics, which seated 101,574 people. It resembled a high school game played in Aloha Stadium. And attendance further shrank, until Hawai'i called. Driving to and from that boring Pro Bowl meant maneuvering through South Central L.A. onto multiple freeways. You think the H-1 is bad?

In 1969 I was in Miami when the Jets won Super Bowl III in the seedy Orange Bowl. Believe me, the palm trees, the sunshine and most of all the ocean there, can’t hold a Kindle to a Postcard from Paradise. Super Bowl XLIV will be, if nothing else, cost-effective; the Big Game will also be played a mere 160 hours later in Sun Life Stadium. It is located in on Dan Marino Boulevard in beautiful, downtown Opa-Locka, the population of which is 15,287, smaller than crowds at University of Hawai’i football games.

Will the businessmen, bureaucrats, ballplayers and broadcasters come to their senses and bring the Pro Bowl back home to Halawa—and stop this unexplainable madness? Or, alas, will some people never see the lehua for the ohia.

Sunday, since you will not be in Aloha Stadium, or maybe not watching the “big game” on TV, contemplate why the NFL, hopefully for just one year, insists on this reversal of fortune. And please let me know.