Derek Jeter couldn’t do it Tuesday.
Neither could LeBron James while teaming up with Carmelo Anthony and Kyrie Irving in March.
Nobody the NHL has put on the ice in years has even come close.
Remarkably, Jeter’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game swan song, won by the American League, 5-3, wasn’t enough to displace the NFL’s Pro Bowl as the reigning viewership king of all-star sports events.
The NFL’s annual all-star event is the pinata everybody loves to take a whack at — and for good reasons. It is too contrived, to easy-going and, basically, just too irrelevant.
Yet, for all of that it still produces viewership numbers, including averaging 11.4 million for the last one in January. Over the past five years it has drawn larger audiences than any other pro all-star event.
The Pro Bowl’s numbers are down and its standing looked to be vulnerable this year as Jeter took his farewell lap. Still, the MLB’s midsummer event, despite its highest viewership in four years (11.3 million), couldn’t displace the Pro Bowl.
The Home Run Derby attracted just 3.4 million Monday. And the NBA All-Star Game did a measly 7.5 million.
And that’s noteworthy considering the Pro Bowl went up against the Grammys for its audience. The MLB All-Star Game faced a weaker lineup, including "Celebrity Wife Swap" and "Extreme Weight Loss."
As much as people love to take shots at the Pro Bowl, plenty of viewers are apparently compelled to tune in and watch the thing. Never mind that is probably more attributable to needing a football fix in an otherwise pre-Super Bowl dead week than anything else the Pro Bowl offers. But it has the most lucrative brand in sports, the NFL, and, for the moment, it still works.
Consider that the Pro Bowl brought in a larger audience than the Ohio State-Michigan football game (9.5 million) or game six of the American League Championship Series (9.0).
Which explains why the Hawaii Tourism Authority has been willing to cough up $4 million, plus $152,000 in operational expenses, to have the state host an event that has, so far, been here every year but once (2010) since 1980.
It is also why it will ante up $5 million, plus $152,000 million for a shot at the next available one in 2016 and, you suspect, write a bigger one, if it has to in order to secure the 2017 game.
The 2015 Pro Bowl will be played in Glendale, Ariz., in conjunction with the Super Bowl while the 2017 game may be a toss-up between Hawaii and Houston, the ’17 Super Bowl site.
We can wonder about the veracity of the estimated $71.9 million in "direct visitor spending in the state" and other spinoff numbers credited to the Pro Bowl by state officials. But the salient facts here are that the game drives arrivals in an otherwise slow period and it reaches an audience.
And even a nice fat pitch from Adam Wainwright Tuesday couldn’t take the All-Star Game deep enough to beat the Pro Bowl.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
