Some historical perspective may be important here. The Mirage, the host hotel of the event, was quite new and wanted to be "the new Caesars Palace," and one aspect in which this had to happen was in hosting sporting events. Another was sports betting.
In 1990, James Buster Douglas, to the amazement of all, knocked out Mike Tyson to win the heavyweight championship. The Mirage's first big roll of the dice was to purchase the rights to Douglas' next two fights. Pool was another beneficiary of the spending binge of The Mirage, as the Challenge of Champions was to be staged at the then state-of-the-art hotel. The Mirage made the event bettable in its own sports book, making the event more visible to its customers.
The dump, however, cost pool its shot to be on the permanent slate at a thriving new hotel in Vegas and to become one of the bettable events at one of the nation's most prominent sports books.
The image of pool and of those who play it professionally took a big hit that day and when a giant of the sports betting industry took a financial hit, the word got out pretty quickly.
In the world of finance, what happened at the 1991 Challenge of Champions is called insider trading, and those who willfully participated in the dump disgraced the game.