I grew up in the ’90s, so I’m probably the exact demographic that is going to be way more sentimental about the Pro Bowl going away than any normal adult should be.
But I loved the Pro Bowl.
Actually, I loved All-Star games in general. Baseball’s All-Star Game. The NBA All-Star Game. The NHL All-Star Game. I loved seeing all the stars in one place, wearing uniforms you only saw once a year. But the Pro Bowl was always different for me.
It was bittersweet.
The Super Bowl was over. Football season was really over. There was no game next week. No Bills game to look forward to. No NFL Sunday. You were staring directly into that giant black hole known as the NFL offseason where the combine or OTAs weren’t a thing. It was when football truly had a break.
But we got one last football game.
And everybody was there.
Growing up as a Bills fan in the early ’90s, the Pro Bowl was almost an extension of the season because half the damn team seemed to be in Hawaii. Jim Kelly. Thurman Thomas. Bruce Smith. Andre Reed. Cornelius Bennett. Steve Tasker. Kent Hull. Will Wolford. Howard Ballard.
You’d watch just to count the Bills.
And back then, being named a Pro Bowler mattered.
As a kid, I knew who made the Pro Bowl. You’d argue about how many Pro Bowlers your team had. It was one of the ways you determined who the best players were. If somebody told you a guy was a “six-time Pro Bowler,” that meant something.
And then there were those uniforms.
Those beautiful, completely unnecessary AFC and NFC jerseys. Red versus blue. Giant stars. AFC and NFC helmets. It looked like football had been turned into a cartoon for one afternoon.
I loved every second of it.
And apparently I still have a soft spot for those jerseys.
A couple of Christmases ago, I was looking for a gift for my brother-in-law and came across an autographed Andre Reed Pro Bowl jersey.
The second I saw it, I thought, Oh, he’s going to love this.
Not just because it was Andre Reed. It was the Pro Bowl jersey.
It looked so vintage. So completely ’90s. My brother-in-law was a ’90s kid too, and seeing that jersey immediately took me back.
Now, my brother-in-law is a pretty quiet guy. He loves the Bills, but he doesn’t spend nearly as much time talking about them as I do. Then again, most functioning adults don’t. He’s got kids. He’s got responsibilities. He doesn’t need to turn every Bills thought that pops into his head into 2,000 words on the internet like this moron.
But I’ll never forget giving him that jersey.
The Mrs was able to frame it and then we wrapped this gigantic thing and brought to his house.
He opened it.
And I swear I had never seen this guy that excited in my life. He went wowwwwwwwwwwwwwww and his eyes went out of his head.
That’s when I found out something I somehow never knew:
Andre Reed was his favorite player growing up.
I had absolutely no idea. I just thought I had found a really cool autographed Bills Pro Bowl jersey that perfectly captured the era we both grew up watching.
Instead, completely by accident, I had apparently found the perfect gift. And maybe that’s the best explanation for why this stuff still matters to people our age.
It wasn’t just Andre Reed’s autograph that made him light up.
It was Andre Reed wearing that jersey.
Thirty years later, a framed Pro Bowl jersey could make a grown man with kids and responsibilities turn back into a 12-year-old Bills fan on Christmas morning.
One of the bigger talking points around the Pro Bowl was always who got snubbed, and there might not have been a bigger example for the Bills than Darryl Talley.
If you’ve ever watched NFL Network’s America’s Game: The Missing Rings documentary about the 1990 Bills, Talley talks about how much those snubs bothered him. Through his first seven NFL seasons, he had never made a Pro Bowl despite becoming one of the heart-and-soul players of that Bills defense. He even joked that he was basically Rodney Dangerfield because he couldn’t get any respect.
Then came 1990. Talley led the Bills with 123 tackles, had four sacks and two interceptions, and somehow still didn’t initially get voted into the Pro Bowl. After the Bills destroyed the Raiders 51-3 in the AFC Championship Game, AFC coach Art Shell finally selected Talley as what they called a “need player.”
And you can tell how much that meant to him. This wasn’t some guy sneaking into the Pro Bowl because he had one good season. Talley had been doing the dirty work for years while playing on a defense filled with bigger names like Bruce Smith, Cornelius Bennett and Shane Conlan. He probably needed to be there years earlier, but after seven seasons of being overlooked, he finally got that invitation.
That’s another reason the Pro Bowl mattered back then. The players cared.
The Pro Bowl memory permanently burned into my brain is the 1992 game.
For whatever reason, I recorded it.
This wasn’t DVR. There wasn’t a YouTube clip waiting for me whenever I wanted it. This was a VHS tape that I apparently decided needed to become part of my summer viewing rotation next to Terminator 2, Dream On (Don’t tell my parents) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the movie.
And I watched the shit out of that tape.
Over and over.
Steve Tasker won MVP, which obviously made it even better for a Bills fan, but there was something about the entire broadcast that I loved.
Chris Berman was calling the game.
That felt like a huge deal because Berman wasn’t normally doing play-by-play. He was the guy doing NFL Primetime. He was “WHOOP!” and “He. Could. Go. All. The. Way.” So hearing his voice actually calling an NFL game felt like some special event.
And everywhere you looked there was another Bills player. And the thing is, I actually remember the plays. That’s how many times I watched this stupid VHS.
While blocking a FG that was returned for a TD is the play I think gets remembered the most…
I can still see Steve Tasker running down the sideline, getting absolutely killed, somehow getting back up and then making another huge play by popping the ball out of the returner’s hands and forcing a fumble. That was the Pro Bowl!
People probably forget Henry Jones was damn near the MVP of that game, too. He had an interception and then made a huge stop at the goal line on fourth-and-goal. And then Nate Odomes picked off a pass in overtime that helped set up the AFC win.
Why do I remember all of this? Because I watched that VHS approximately 9,000 times as a kid. I have no idea why watching that game repeatedly somehow got me ready for the next football season.
But it did.
Maybe it was because in 1992 there wasn’t NFL Network. There wasn’t RedZone. There weren’t 9,000 football podcasts. You couldn’t pull up every Bills game from 1991 on your phone while taking a shit.
When football disappeared, football disappeared.
So I had my Pro Bowl tape.
And I wore that thing out.
That’s probably why the slow death of the Pro Bowl has always bothered me even though I completely understand why it happened.
Players stopped wanting to play.
The money became too big. The risk became too great. Nobody wanted to tear an ACL in an exhibition game in Hawaii. Guys started dropping out. Then the replacements started dropping out. Eventually you’d look at a Pro Bowl roster and wonder if there were 147 Pro Bowlers that season.
And honestly, can you blame them?
Even if the old Pro Bowl still existed for another decade, are we ever seeing Josh Allen actually play in one?
Probably not.
He’s either going to be playing in the Super Bowl, banged up from an NFL season, golfing at Pebble Beach, changing diapers or doing literally anything other than flying somewhere to play a meaningless football game where he’s not allowed to get hit.
And once the players stopped caring, eventually the fans stopped caring too.
The game became unwatchable.
It wasn’t football anymore.
So the NFL tried to save it.
Then they changed it to I think a flag football game which I’ve never watched. People would hate watch or complain about people watching it on social media. We’d then have a debate show the next day talk about how they’re save it.
Then they basically admitted what everybody already knew.
The Pro Bowl we grew up with was never coming back.
I’m sad because for people my age, the Pro Bowl represented something that sports doesn’t really have anymore.
One last goodbye.
The season ended. The Super Bowl happened. And before football disappeared for six months, everybody went to Hawaii and screwed around for an afternoon.
Then you said goodbye.
I think that’s why that 1992 VHS tape mattered so much to me. I wasn’t really watching Steve Tasker win the Pro Bowl MVP for the 47th time.
I was keeping football around.
Because when you’re a kid, six months feels like six years.
Now I’m an adult. Football never actually goes away. The draft starts five minutes after the Super Bowl. Free agency. OTAs. Minicamp. Training camp. Fantasy football. Podcasts. Twitter. YouTube. There is NFL content every second of every day.
We gained all of that.
But somewhere along the way, we lost that weird little Sunday in Hawaii.
The Pro Bowl had to die. I get it.
But every once in a while, I’ll think about that VHS tape. Or I’ll think about my brother-in-law opening that framed Andre Reed jersey and, for about 30 seconds, looking like a kid again.
AFC Baxter!!!! Also, loved this. I remember that image of all the Bills in Hawaii at the ProBowl. Thanks for posting.