Book description
Throughout its chequered history, snooker has had more than its fair
share of heroes and villains, champions and chumps, rascals and
rip-off artists. In the last 20 years, every sleazy scandal imaginable
has attached itself to this raffish sport: corruption, match fixing,
bribery, sex, recreational drugs, performance-enhancing drugs, ballot
rigging, fraud, theft, domestic violence, common-or-garden violence,
paranoid politicking, dirty tricks - all against a background of inept
petty tsars fixated on the pursuit, retention and abuse of power.
In Black Farce and Cue Ball Wizards, Clive Everton recounts
the glory and despair, the dreams and disillusion, and the treachery
and greed that have characterised the game since it was invented as an
innocent diversion by British Army officers in India in the nineteenth
century. He tells the true and unexpurgated tale of snooker's
transformation into a television success story second only to football
and exposes how its potential has been shamefully squandered.
Clive Everton is the BBC's senior snooker commentator. As the sport's
leading journalist, he has published and edited
Snooker Scene
magazine since 1971 and has been snooker correspondent for
The Guardian
since 1976. He lives in Birmingham.
