Conor McKeown

And it's really interesting because I remember one of the chapters of Shane Ryan's book, Slaying the Tiger, was about Hideki Matsuyama.

And he was talking about Y.E.

Yang, the Korean who won the 2009 PGA.

And he says it kind of poses a problem for like what is essentially a very American centric audience when you have this personality who doesn't kind of communicate with what is the biggest part of the audience.

And I was watching out for that in this year's world championship as well.

You know, the world championship is in Sheffield.

It's a very Anglo speaking centric sport, generally speaking, but clearly there's a new kind of strength and base.

And I can only assume that the kind of viewership in China is going to kind of reflect that.

But what you don't always expect is that the kind of the crowd who are there, the hardcourt snooker fans who are mostly English, are going to get behind the Chinese player in the final.

But I remember, I know this is only kind of sort of peripherally related, but I was talking to an American golf journalist recently enough about Nellie Carter, and he was talking about how important she was kind of for the TV audience of women's golf in the States, because that's where the majority of the commercial revenue is still coming.

And there was a period there in the 2010s when it looked like golf was going to become completely...

women's golf completely to preserve of Korean golfers.

They were clean and up majors.

And it was great for the growth of the game in that direction.

But what was happening was the American TV audiences were falling off at the same time as sponsors were being pushed to match the men's kind of prize money.

So you have to have a kind of a balance there.

But it is remarkable.

I think this is one of the more memorable moments

world snooker championships of the last sort of decade or so and for it to finish with a Chinese winner at the end of it maybe just shows that we're all kind of going to morph with the changing face of you know elite snooker yeah my dad always told me that there was a house near where he grew up the night of that 18 million watching Taylor Davis final and the patriarch of the family died

I mean, listen.