Throughout its chequered history snooker has had more than its fair share of heroes & villains champions & chumps rascals & 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 & abuse of power. In Black Farce & Cue Ball Wizards" Clive Everton recounts the glory & despair the dreams & disillusion & the treachery & 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 & unexpurgated tale of snookers transformation into a television success story second only to football & exposes how its potential has been shamefully squandered."