As a pundit during a snooker match at the Masters 2017, six-times world champion Steve Davis, one of the game’s most successful ever players, said something interesting:
“It’s absolute rubbish that Ronnie O’Sullivan says the rest of them [the lower-ranked players] shouldn’t be professionals. You’ve got aspirations as a young player coming through. OK, you might not be good enough at the moment, but you practice hard, do like Mark Selby has done, like Stuart Bingham has done, and all of a sudden you improve your standard, you could be one of the players who gets through and makes the money.
“You can’t say the player who’s ranked 120th is wasting his time, because the player ranked 120th is NOT wasting his time: he’s got a dream. Ronnie O’Sullivan doesn’t have any dreams any more, he prefers to do other things; his dream is not snooker.
“But all the young kids coming through, even if there’s not a pot of gold at the end of their personal rainbow, doesn’t mean it’s not worth achieving and worth chasing.”
Emphasis is mine. BBC Television, 15th January 2017.
If it weren’t for all the people who aren’t in the top ten regularly turning up for any kind of tournament, whether it be snooker or the Olympics or a game of football, the game would become not merely boring but untenable. You need the people who routinely never win anything, because without them you’ve got no game. Being a professional loser doesn’t have to be a bad thing; out of the many thousands of people who play, only one can be the absolute best, and only a handful can be his immediate runners-up; the rest know they will never achieve that level of excellence, but every sport or game needs its losers. Call them cannon fodder if you want to be cruel, but they’re the backbone of the industry.