Awards

• Short-listed for British Sports Book Awards: Biography 2008
• Shortlisted for British Sports Book Awards: Biography 2008.

Overview

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.

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9781845961992

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Reviews

Revelatory stuff, masterfully written (Book of the Week) Independent on Sunday 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 This expose of the game's development and its somewhat Machiavellian underbelly is written with authority by esteemed commentator Clive Everton Publishing News

Author Information

Clive Everton is the BBC's senior snooker commentator. As the sport's leading journalist, he publishes and edits Snooker Scene magazine and writes on the game for The Guardian. He lives in Birmingham.

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