No Love for Pool

Boy pool is definitely not mainstream like golf, tennis or basketball, is it?

Because pool is not on TV it's very easy for even pros to walk into a pool room or bar or even a league event and gamble with not many people recognizing them.

This could never happen with basketball players or golfers or even tennis stars.

Last year one of my friends, a pro, who actually played on the Mosconi Cup, was able to walk into an APA event in Vegas and gamble because not many people recognized him and knew who he was.  A couple of times some people would walk by and say, "hey, hi xxxxx!"  Even with players hearing his first name and seeing people be excited, they still didn't realize or recognize who they were playing or who they were watching.

Pool is very popular in Asia and Europe.   It's on TV more there and the players are even written up in local gossip magazines if they do something crazy or whatever, but here in the US the idea that pros can walk into a venue without anyone knowing or recognizing who they are and be able to gamble is really kind of sad.

I'm sure this happens with golfers on small courses or with semi- famous tennis players on some remote tennis court, but because this can happen with pro pool players at a national league event, really tells the state of the sport, imo.

I wonder if in my lifetime pool will be mainstream. I don't know if many of you know that pool used to be on ABC Wide World of Sports pretty regularly. I would love to be able to talk to someone at ABC and ask them why did y'all stop covering pool?  I'd be very interested to see what the reason was.