The point I was making is that you first have to have a sell-able product on the screen. If you have that, then you can attract advertising dollars, which is where the money is.
The reason the big national sports can afford to pay their players tens of millions of dollars is because of TV advertising. No one gets paid $200 million/6 years without the billions of advertising dollars the sport gets from TV.
And to get that TV money, you need a sell-able TV product; an event that the average beer-drinking, pizza-eating, football-watching American will be compelled to turn on and watch, otherwise TV sponsors will never get on board, no matter how good your players are. Once you have a great TV show, sponsors will fall over themselves finding products they can advertise during your game/event.
And that starts with interesting players. Does anyone remember Vivian Villarreal, the "Texas Tornado"? I remember when I was a marketing manager about twenty years ago watching her play a few times on TV and thinking "this chick would be easy to sponsor. She's really identifiable." She was a loud, passionate personality, and on the table she was a risk-taker, which made her games more dramatic, in spite of the fact that she rarely seemed to make it into the final round.
But from the POV of a marketing director, I could easily see throwing more money at her than say, Karen Corr, because the casual fan would be more easily drawn to her. And if she won, well there's your "underdog" story, which would mean more revenue generated.
Bottom line, American pool has a perception problem. Without the personalities/characters/drama TV sponsors aren't going to throw money at it.
There's a much better way of promoting this sport as well as many, many other sports that require NO advertisers, and will produce mlions, but I'm not going into that right now.