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  • Published: 2 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9781780573991
  • Imprint: Mainstream Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 496
Categories:

Black Farce and Cue Ball Wizards

The Inside Story of the Snooker World



The controversial inside story of the ups and downs of snooker by expert Clive Everton, who has edited Snooker Scene magazine since 1971

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.

  • Published: 2 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9781780573991
  • Imprint: Mainstream Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 496
Categories:

About the author

Clive Everton

Clive Everton commented on snooker for the BBC for 30 years. As the sport's leading journalist, he has published and edited Snooker Scene magazine since 1971 and was snooker correspondent of The Guardian from 1976–2011. He lives near Birmingham.

Praise for Black Farce and Cue Ball Wizards

A terrific memoir-cum-history of the game . . . great matches are writ large but there is so much else. Fraud. Theft. Violence. In fighting. Back biting. Madness.

Nick Harris, The Independent

An extraordinary tale of intrigue and perilous financial survival

Donald Trelford, Daily Telegraph

My own surprise of the year: reading, spellbound, at one sitting an unputdownable 400-page revelation - on snooker

Frank Keating, The Guardian

Revelatory stuff, masterfully written (Book of the Week)

Independent on Sunday

The use of Clive Everton to present this insider's look at snooker's underbelly should ensure this is first choice of any snooker fan

The Bookseller

This exposé of the game's development and its somewhat Machiavellian underbelly is written with authority by esteemed commentator Clive Everton

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