Bobby Bones says he and Tom Bergeron have squashed a public rift that began after Bergeron questioned Bones' 2018 Dancing With the Stars victory — yet Bones still wants one thing back: his Mirrorball trophy.
Bones, who won Season 27 in 2018 with partner Sharna Burgess, told a reporter on May 26 that he and Bergeron “talked, and we’re great again.” He also pleaded directly to anyone with the award: "It’d be nice if I could get my 'Dancing with the Stars' trophy back" and added, "I do not know where the trophy is. I like that trophy. If anybody’s watching this who has my Mirrorball trophy, please mail it back to me. I would love to have it back."
The return-to-ABC episode of this drama started in November 2025, when Bergeron told Parade he was most shocked by Bones’ Season 27 win. Bones said on Nov. 12 in a TikTok that the comment hurt him and that he mailed his Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy back to ABC in haste because he felt the show "did not want him to be a part of it." Bergeron later appeared on Bones’ podcast in March and apologized in person, and Bones described their private conversation as emotional: "He came on, and the first thing that I said was, 'Hey, man, why do you hate me now?'" Bones said. "We talked it out. He apologized, and then I apologized for making him apologize. We cried. It was really great."
Bergeron's apology on the podcast was explicit. "I felt terrible that the way I phrased my honest surprise at your win," he told Bones, adding later, "I wish I had said, 'Well, this wasn't a shock, but it was a surprise when Bobby Bones won,'" and, "I felt terrible about that." The airing of that contrition appears to have closed the personal quarrel: Bones told a reporter he felt healed enough to ask publicly for the physical symbol he returned.
Context helps explain why the line mattered. Bergeron hosted the first 14 seasons of Dancing With the Stars before exiting in 2020, and his voice carried a lot of weight for viewers and contestants. The comment in Parade mattered because it touched on the legitimacy of a celebrity win on one of television’s most visible competition stages. Bergeron also returned briefly to the franchise as a guest judge on a Nov. 11 episode and for a 20th anniversary celebration, moves that kept him in the orbit of the show and its memory of past seasons.
The tension in the story is small and specific: the relationship has been repaired, but the trophy has not. Bones has said he mailed the Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy back in reaction to Bergeron’s remark; he now says he doesn't know where it is. He has publicly asked for help recovering it, and he repeated that request on May 26: "If anybody’s watching this who has my Mirrorball trophy, please mail it back to me. I would love to have it back." That unresolved detail undercuts the reassuring arc of the apology — the human reconciliation is complete, the physical emblem of victory remains absent.
This matters today because the public stitches of celebrity disputes usually leave one of two outcomes: grudges that smolder, or clear reconciliations. Here, Bones and Bergeron picked the latter, and the apology supplied by Bergeron on the podcast turned a public spat into a private closure. What remains is practical: the whereabouts of the Mirrorball. Bones has made the ask; Bergeron has apologized; fans and the show’s custodians now hold the simple power to end the episode by returning the trophy.
The clearest answer to the headline question is this: the personal rift is over, but the trophy is not. Bones and Bergeron are, in Bones’ words, "great again." Whether the Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy will be mailed back is now out of their hands — it depends on whoever currently has it responding to Bones’ public plea.
