In golf, there is 150 people out there, and they are only covering, about 5guys, the ones playing well and winning, the other 145 never get on TV, who cares. They keep moving from player to player, so you dont get bored.
I have a big collection of snooker, and years of the early pot black TV series. Many of these matches, stunk, Hr 12, boring defensive contests, missed shots, poor play. And now and then, some bloke ran 112, or even a 147, and that's is what got on the tele. The good stuff, they edited out, all the bad stuff, and that is what ESPN was too lazy, too cheap and too dumb to do.
What really killed pool was ESPN, they dont pay pool millions to put it on like golf, they charge the promoter 150K to put it on, and then they use it like a filler, showing it no respect, and they stick it in at bad times. They film it like it is, and put it on as cheaply as they can. As long as we pay them to get on TV, we are dead ducks. The womans tour, was paying out 80% of what they made, to stay on TV, and they are almost dead now like the men, with like two events left, and the first one trying to pay 60 people, a total of 10 grand, meaning they all go home broke.
Kt tried to sell his tour to the big TV networks, like golf, and when they laughed in his face, he dumped the entire tour as a loser, sold it to Ho in Macau, the feds busted that deal, and he ran off fast to new and better cons.
What killed pool was the demographics, they dont lie and we are the male, blue collar, smoker, beer drinker 35 to 40 yr old. The last guy on earth you want to spend money on. There is no woman audience, no kids, no young people. The only women, are, girlie girls, who are basically men, buying jeans, drinking beer.
The corporate people spend their money, where the kids are at, or teens to early 20/s. Hook one of them on your product, and they are in your world for the next decade. They target young audiences, they avoid older ones. A 40 yr old pool bum, is bull headed, opinionated, knows it all, and wont change and buy anything new. He is set in his ways. He is a lousy sale and he does not make a lot of money. No body wants to sell to truck drivers. So Tennis and Golf has Rolex, IBM, Cadillac, and we never will.
The only corporate sponsor we really ever got, was RJR, who did a study that told them their final market was Nascar, Beer drinking Bikers and pool players. Beer sponsored the early leagues, busch, AB. Imagine in your mind, what a real pool player looks like, I see, dirty old tennis shoes, dirty jeans with a hole in them, cheap T shirt, hat with cat on it, cigarette hanging out of his lip, long neck bud in one hand, cue in the other, and that is how the fortune 500 marketing people see us as well. Show up at any tournament, look around at the players or the crowd, it looks like we emptied out the drunk tank. They all dress like bums. They see the pros as a bunch of hustlers.
The BCA blew it pushing this putting us in penguin and trying to hide what we were, gamblers. They tried to sell us as something we were not. Poker did not do that, they took bums, real bums, and sold them to TV, how, they played for millions and we played for peanuts. We could have done the same thing and been in fat city now, like they are.
The only real people we got, was the ones wanting to sell to us, what we use is a lot of, cigs and beer. When both of them went away, the game slowly died and nobody took their place.
What we have, nobody wants, that is the problem. And the industry, wont finance the growth, they long pulled out just to skim the gravy off the top. I see this, as being terminal, with no coming out of it. Short of us hooking another rich billionaire like Kt, we are all screwed.
