Rumor New Professional Tour in the works with TV sponsors?
- Thread starter TxBullDog
- Start date
Maybe all pros add a dollar for an amateur event too.
Theres plenty of amateur things but no way for pros to make a steady living.....
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Well said. I think the pros are no more inclined to contribute to amateur events than the amateurs are to pro events. Sad but true. I always have a chuckle when anyone suggests that amateur pool players, as a group, should be financing pro pool.
And why is that...let's take this thought all the way?
Because like guitar, pool is not a viable career choice for the vast majority of folks who play it.
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We've touched on the need for pros to give back.
Wasn't deschaine on the apa payroll years back? I would have liked to see that asset pushed a bit hareder, as in nationally: public appearances, lectures, group lessons, etc...
Granted, the world is different today, but I look at the earl/ cuetec agreement that was in effect for an amazingly long time and see it as evidence a pool player can be an asset. A pro player can have a loyalty like that and the apa missed an opportunity, imo.
Then again, mosconi and Brunswick rode each other's coat tails and mosconi seems to have despised pool in his later life anyway. work is a 4 letter word.
I think this interview with Emily Frazer of Matchroom is a "must read" on this topic:
- AZBILLIARDS.COM
www.azbilliards.com
I don't see anyone inventing a meaningful tour from scratch. Matchroom is acquiring the cornerstone events for a tour and could then build around them. She talks about building out a schedule that makes sense for travel, for avoiding other major sporting events, and so on. But of particular note is the concern that the players have a long way to go professionalize themselves, to present themselves as something other than gamblers, to build followings that are of interest to potential sponsors. She notes that many top pros don't even have Instagram pages, and only have friends as followers on Facebook, so how can you tell a sponsor about reach and a global presence for the players and the sport when the players aren't even leveraging obvious platforms to help with that?
This was a great article. A potential outside of pool sponsor will want to see their return on investment. If they feel they won't get good exposure from this, they won't invest. If barley anyone outside of pool knows who you are, you need to market yourself better.
DieselPete
Active member
And to that point...
If you browse to the Cuetec website, surely we will find that they are leveraging the endorsement of top pros to help move their products, right? I mean, I have to see the faces of top professionals, holding lovingly onto their Curtect cues with a quote about they couldn't win without it, or some such presentation of the pro/cue intersection, right?
Nope.
Cuetec
Cuetec continuously creates cues and accessories of the highest quality by incorporating the latest in technology and innovation.
www.cuetec.com
If you are paying an athlete to use your equipment, particularly in a niche sport, you'd think that you would build your marketing around them or at least feature them somewhat front and center on the website.
Predator does a better job with this, featuring an athlete front and center (today it is Kristina Tkach) with a quote about the attributes of the shaft, and a place on the top menu to see the "Pro Team." Cuetec, conversely, only has a link to a page about SvB on the "About" drop down.
Click on the axis gloves, there's a pic of SVB and Gorst as well... I digress...And to that point...
If you browse to the Cuetec website, surely we will find that they are leveraging the endorsement of top pros to help move their products, right? I mean, I have to see the faces of top professionals, holding lovingly onto their Curtect cues with a quote about they couldn't win without it, or some such presentation of the pro/cue intersection, right?
Nope.
Cuetec
Cuetec continuously creates cues and accessories of the highest quality by incorporating the latest in technology and innovation.
If you are paying an athlete to use your equipment, particularly in a niche sport, you'd think that you would build your marketing around them or at least feature them somewhat front and center on the website.
Predator does a better job with this, featuring an athlete front and center (today it is Kristina Tkach) with a quote about the attributes of the shaft, and a place on the top menu to see the "Pro Team." Cuetec, conversely, only has a link to a page about SvB on the "About" drop down.
Good points though.
I disagree. It’s not thriving like the old ESPN days. But it gets points for...
- Having a singular governing body
- Having a website
- Having a list of registered professional women
- Having a calendar of events (regional tour)
- Having a ranking system
- Having sponsors
- Promoting its players
Also I’ve attended one of their pro events hosted at an amateur event. I think for where we are at today, it’s a smart model.
There is a common theme among sports that thrive on live TV, and pool will never be one of those sports. Live sports are those where 1) they are athletic events and athletes evolve over time to the point that there is some "survival of the fittest", and 2) the sport evolves over time to limit the number of athletes who can master it as they evolve. The best golfers in the world (even Nicklaus and Palmer) would have no chance today unless they evolved. They survived, rather thrived, on skill alone, and the game has evolved beyond the skill they had in their prime. As Tiger ushered in the age of fitness in golf, courses changed and rules changed to make the game harder. As equipment evolved, again rules changed (driver head size, groove limitations) to limit the advantages brought forth by those changes. Football, basketball, even baseball are team sports, but even they have undergone evolution to make it harder to dominate and less boring to watch, which makes domination in today's game even that more impressive. Pool will never be an "athletic event".
Can pool thrive as a recorded event? I don't think so, unless the game can evolve past being able to run out a set. It has to get harder to dominate and win, or the best it can hope to achieve is bowling. No little kid ever has aspirations of becoming a professional bowler. Technology has evolved, but the game has not. Poker survives because it contains a huge element of luck, which prevents domination and leads to huge fields and payouts. The huge fields are important because it gives the editors more material from which to choose interesting hands. Still, it has evolved to make even edited content watchable (hole cam, time bank chips). Pool has to evolve like that. Either the game itself has to get much harder or much more luck has to be introduced. Both would serve to prevent domination.
Can pool thrive as a recorded event? I don't think so, unless the game can evolve past being able to run out a set. It has to get harder to dominate and win, or the best it can hope to achieve is bowling. No little kid ever has aspirations of becoming a professional bowler. Technology has evolved, but the game has not. Poker survives because it contains a huge element of luck, which prevents domination and leads to huge fields and payouts. The huge fields are important because it gives the editors more material from which to choose interesting hands. Still, it has evolved to make even edited content watchable (hole cam, time bank chips). Pool has to evolve like that. Either the game itself has to get much harder or much more luck has to be introduced. Both would serve to prevent domination.
Yeah, sure...you can pay mine, and every other league player's dollar out there. That idea sinks like a lead balloon.
APA does NOT require it's members to "donate" to pro pool. There may be an occasional APA LO who does something locally to raise funds for some pros to show up, but there is no such notion happening on a national basis or scale.
Scott Lee ~ former APA LO
2019 PBIA Instructor of the Year
Director, SPF National Pool School Tour
Yes it is true the WPBA had a great run as a cohesive organization, (and probably still are cohesive to some extent even today)....
Men's tours never lasted more than a couple years in comparison. So yes, the WPBA had a cohesive tour, a cohesive product to sell, a cohesive product to broadcast on tv, etc.
But, if you look at the total number of major events, and money available for winning in those events, I think the men's events dwarfed the women's, even though they were all rogue events and not part of a cohesive organization.
Fast forward to about 2008 when the economy was in the tanks, and both the WPBA and the men's random events dwindled considerably. But a few years later when the economy was beginning to rebound, until now, the mens's events pretty much all came back. But the women's have not in the slightest.
Do did the women being well organized via the WPBA really matter in the end? If the end is the past 10 years, they are way worse as a group than the men.
Assuming the amateurs and pros are in the same organization I think this could be made to work. The thing is it would have to be a two way street. The membership agreement of the pro's would commit them to giving maybe forty hours of exhibitions and group lessons for free to association members each year. The pro would receive expenses only, and this would come from the association, the same place pro purses are coming from. The money fed up to the pro tour has to get something in return, not just pool pro's are God's gift to the world and they should be getting something just for breathing.
Forget the huge purses that are unsustainable so are one and done or a few and done. A tightly ran organization and a sustainable business model needs to be put together then you have something to offer to outside sponsors. In business, it is a lot easier to build an all new business than to turn around a failing business. Men's pro pool is a failing or failed business, a handful of times over. Going to have to change the pattern, and yes probably kiss some rears, to get anyone to give it a second look now. It is going to have to appeal to a demographic that advertisers want to market to, even better one they are struggling to reach now.
By the players being members of an association the association can control things like video and broadcast rights to avoid past issues. Anybody trying to put this together needs to take a long look at past failures, see why they failed. A big part of it, I believe, is a false sense of entitlement from the players. They seem to think everyone else involved with putting on an event or tour should be doing it for free with all monies going to the players. It doesn't work like this for any other sport or game. The competitors get money because they are making money for the other people involved.
It is really a pretty simple concept and at the core of most issues in pool. To receive monies you have to give value in return. Great play doesn't mean a thing unless it draws watchers. That means people that will pay to watch or go out and buy products they see ad's for. It would probably take five to ten years to grow a marketable pool tour. Unfortunately pro players can't survive that long on thin air. Got to have that double breasted operation with a viable amateur side paying a pro side that gives something in return. There can be other connections between the pro side and amateur side too, details would have to be worked out.
There are dozens of multi-million dollar a year sponsors out there. What would the Coca-Cola Men's Pro Tour be like? We can't go to Coke or any other major marketer with just pipe dreams though. Got to walk before we can fly and the pro's can't afford tp walk for years. The men were five to ten years away from a viable tour fifty years ago. FIfty years later there have been a few blips along the way but men's pro pool is still five to ten years away from being successful. We may need something to market to other than US sponsors, but we will need something special to offer them.
Hu
Regarding attracting sponsors outside of pool; I have a friend who was once very high up in a "hip" eyewear company (ends in "ley"). I approached him years ago with an idea of a company sponsored pool team available to play any challengers. The company sponsored team would have, of course, made up of the ~12 best players around the world. This team could have traveled the world promoting their products since pool require laser eyes and should be protected by the evils of UV.
Well, to make a long story short... he laughed at the proposal and said something to the effect of pool is played indoors.
Well, to make a long story short... he laughed at the proposal and said something to the effect of pool is played indoors.
Take a deep bow, Hu, for a well-judged and well presented post. You have framed the challenge of these times well.
Actually that's not entirely how it went down. KT may have been a crook, but I doubt it, he didn't make any money off the IPT. His real business model was to get it on tv, sell it to online poker billionaires and let them incur the real risk. It could've worked had the Govt not made online poker illegal in the US right as he was trying to make the sale. We'll never know.
Jaden
p.s. It's easy for people to say it was "doomed from the start" when those same people were saying "it was doomed" from the start. We can't know because of circumstances that happened that were unknowable when those people at the start were saying "it was doomed".
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No one knows if that was really his business model though. I recall he claimed that story and that he was in talks with the billionaire Ho. Someone reached out to Ho from what I recall snd Ho said he never heard of KT.
The moral of the story is I don’t think we can take anything about the IPT at face value, especially if it came from KT’s mouth.
I didn't call him a crook. On the contrary, I called him a good businessman, and further argued that a good businessman pulls the plug on a losing venture quickly. If his business model, as some believe, was to sell his operation to gambling giants, great, but once he found himself unable to do so, his business model was unsustainable and he pulled the plug. I'm not sure you and I are saying different things here.
It will be the glue that finally holds together the pool world!