Watching the Pro Bowl, Which Exists

Nine days ago, Panthers linebacker Thomas Davis broke his forearm making a tackle in the second quarter of the NFC title game. Five days from now, with a dozen screws in that arm, he intends to play in the Super Bowl. It says a great deal about the norms of the NFL that this is about as positive a story as the league could hope for in the two-week buildup to its marquee event.

A mere broken bone, along with a now-familiar hyperspeed recovery, lets people celebrate football's much-fetishized toughness with clean consciences. Everyone will be able to applaud Davis's grit this Sunday without worrying that this particular display of it will someday make him forget the point he is in the middle of making, or the way to his house, or the names of his children.

This sport, in which busted limbs pass for welcome news, made its annual awkward lunge in the direction of good clean fun this past Sunday. While all of the world's sensible souls focused their attention elsewhere, fifty or so football players ranging from "pretty solid" to "great and not otherwise indisposed" descended on Honolulu for the Pro Bowl. The game was as ineffectual as you'd expect, a montage of semi-scripted big plays and beefy, stagy forced chuckles. It was also a rare look at the limits of America's sports behemoth.

At its present zenith, the NFL is capable of turning the second and third days of its draft into a festival, putting news from the first week of training camp at the top of SportsCenter, and treating all manner of off-field villainy as relevant only insofar as it does or doesn't rearrange depth charts. But the league has gone to such great lengths to make its game synonymous with effort and endurance, with work, that when it tries to pivot toward play, it finds it really can't. For all the things the NFL is able to sell itself as being, it seems telling that it can't quite pull off "fun."

The Pro Bowl started at two o'clock local time, under bright sun and clear tropical sky. Its primary aesthetic trait, apparent immediately and sustained over most of the subsequent three hours, was the way the afternoon light interacted with the two sets of uniforms, one hubcap gray (worn by the team selected by Michael Irvin in the pre-Pro Bowl draft) and the other hotel-sheet white (worn by Jerry Rice's squad). On either side of scrimmage, before each snap, this collection of honored football players in Hawaii shone with the dull shimmer of so many sedans lined up in a used-car lot in the glare of June.

This is to say that, even on the day every year set aside for celebration, the NFL draped its employees in the markings of propriety and practicality, and they went out and had the type of timid fun one has at office parties. Like the office party, the Pro Bowl has standards to observe, the primary one being: Do not hurt anybody.

But for a fluke fourth-quarter foot injury to Bengals tight end Tyler Eifert, nobody was hurt. The game ambled safely along, all go-routes and interceptions orbiting a jumble of offensive and defensive linemen just kind of inclining in the direction one another. On the first possession of the game, Team Rice starter Eli Manning found Julio Jones in the corner of the end zone for a touchdown, and on his first attempt from scrimmage, Team Irvin starter Russell Wilson connected on a bomb to DeAndre Hopkins down the sideline. Tackles, when made, were pacts of mutual looking-out, and hand-offs were mostly matters of courtesy to the running backs who had flown all that way.

Team Irvin enjoyed the advantage of having the only quarterback of the six present to have been actually selected for the game; the other five were replacements for those who were too hurt or uninterested or Super Bowl-bound to participate. Rice's signal-callers combined to throw six picks as the game got out of hand, so in the second half some unspoken agreement was made to pursue whimsy full-bore. Richard Sherman checked in on offense and tried a disastrous end-around. Odell Beckham, Jr., played safety like a windsock. It was 49-27 at the end, by which point even its nominal participants were probably no longer watching.

All-Star games tend toward lameness, as a general rule. The NBA's features a flubbed alley-oop attempt for every one that works, usually involving a role-reversal more charming in theory than in actuality—LaMarcus Aldridge sailing a lob pass over the outstretched arms of James Harden, that sort of thing. MLB's game is undercut by the fact that baseball can't produce much designed trickery and generally has a lousy sense of humor, so what we end up with is a pretty standard game with slightly more joking around and many more substitutions than usual.

Still, there is something uniquely sad about the Pro Bowl. Maybe it comes from the extreme care the players have to take, or the knowledge that to revert to normal football, even for one play, would be to incur the risk of injury that is a defining part of their daily professional lives. Maybe it comes from the sport's ingrained order and hierarchy; there's just not much a right guard can do to liven up his work. Maybe it comes from the permanent atmosphere of duty; ESPN's Mike Tirico lauded Wilson and Manning for "setting the tone" for Pro Bowl week, as if even a trip to Hawaii is incomplete without a commitment to excellence.

The core sadness of it, though, might come from the fact that the NFL doesn't need a good time. The joy it peddles doesn't have much to do with the plain fun of playing. That joy, such as it is, comes from endurance, survival, struggle, and relief. It comes from an arm that sticks together well enough to make it through a Super Bowl. It has no use for a sunny day on an island. That's one of the most obvious and universal of human pleasures, but it's not really the NFL's thing.