When asked about the future of the Pro Bowl ages ago, then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle stated firmly, it would stay in Hawaii "until they kick us out."

That was 1987, its eighth year here and the season of Rozelle’s penultimate Pro Bowl as commissioner.

Rozelle, the best commissioner the NFL — or any pro league — ever had, recognized the potential in bringing the annual all-star game here in 1980 and the wisdom in anchoring it here thereafter.

A quarter-century later another commissioner, Roger Goodell, is mulling the game’s immediate future. He is scheduled to render a decision on the annual all-star game’s fate after this season. And, if it is to continue, where.

The game’s future, the folks at 345 Park Ave. in New York have pointedly reminded the players and Hawaii, rides on this game.

An earlier generation at NFL headquarters said pretty much the same thing in 1980 when the then-30-year-old Pro Bowl was an anachronism nobody but Hawaii wanted and pretty much got by default.

Back then the game was a well-traveled and little-desired orphan with seven homes (Los Angeles, Tampa, Seattle, New Orleans, Miami, Kansas City and Irving, Texas) in as many years. The desire had been to keep the game in league cities, but selling admissions had become such a chore that it was made a part of the season-ticket package in the host city. That form of strong-arming did little to endear the event to the citizenry or earn a return engagement. 

Hawaii, without a team to call its own, welcomed the game with open arms and in decibels too loud to ignore, giving the Pro Bowl the kind of home and vitality it had long lacked.

Players who passed on playing the game in, say, Kansas City, where the average daily high temperature in January is 39 degrees, didn’t have to be asked twice to take an all-expenses-paid trip here. Or to pack their sunscreen.

Even when the NFL treated the game as an after-thought, Hawaii embraced and lifted the event.

Today the game is still an anachronism and, yes, heavens-to-Tom Brady, some players still find ways to be excused. But thanks to Hawaii, the Pro Bowl still out-performs the all-star games of the other sports in TV viewership. It exists because Hawaii, which has hosted the game for 33 of its past 34 years, has supported and nurtured it.

The one time it was hijacked to a distant shore, the 2010 game in South Florida, the players strongly professed a preference for its return to Aloha Stadium — a point not lost on headquarters, which subsequently put on hold the experiment of attaching the Pro Bowl to the Super Bowl site.

Meanwhile, it has not escaped the players that glorified two-hand touch football won’t cut it this year, that the Faux Bowl version passed off by Cam Newton and some of his contemporaries is going to end the freebie mai tais and Pro Bowl bonuses for all, not to mention the $50,000 winners checks.

Wiser, more reasoned minds like Peyton Manning have counseled respect for the game, the brand and the fans.

A second year of torrential boos would pretty much fit Rozelle’s once unimaginable scenario of getting kicked out of paradise.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.