Black Farce and Cue Ball Wizards: The Inside Story of the Snooker World

by Clive Everton

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 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.

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction

535 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 25, 2007

About the author

Clive Harold Everton was a Welsh sports commentator, journalist, author and professional snooker and English billiards player. He founded Snooker Scene magazine, which was first published (as World Snooker) in 1971, and continued as editor until September 2022. He authored over twenty books about cue sports since 1972.

Reviews

[Kevin Burke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating account of the history of snooker - or more accurately, Clive Everton's life in snooker, which is very close to being the same thing given how long he's been involved. The early stages are the most interesting, as is often the way with histories, with a number of curious accounts of players trying desperately to make a living out of the game - dodgy tables and blinding sun shining in through curtains during tournaments; touring the country to effectively hustle outside tournaments, with one player being asked if he had brought his table with him. The World Championship drops so low in profile that Joe Davis, having won the first 15 editions, figured it was worth more to him to not play in it but instead to challenge the winner for a real title match. Billiards is relatively common in the early years too, including one match where a player racks up a 5-figure break over a number of days, including one session where he mocks his opponent, who leaves early.

The move to the Crucible, with BBC TV coverage and big sponsorship from Embassy, changes everything. Players, mostly from poor backgrounds, go pro - Terry Griffiths leaves the mines; Kirk Stevens and Cliff Thorburn leave the world of hustling and drugs - and the game, always popular at club level to begin with, takes on a huge national profile peaking at the famous 1985 final. And it's here that Everton's story goes away from the baize and into the boardroom, where the amateur governing body simply can't cope with the game's new-found popularity. Everton documents the various wrangles and amazing number of court cases lost over the next 15-20 years, with himself to the fore in many cases, and winning a number of libel actions in simply trying to document what was happening. It's a bit dry and not what I had expected the book to be about, but it's a complete eye-opener nonetheless, with the professional tour shrinking as small as six tournaments in a season and the governing body in danger of going completely bankrupt. The sections on match-fixing are interesting for the insight into a pro player's mindset at the table they give.

A 2012 update - the original edition was published in 2012 - covers the culmination of the disputes, including his own dismissal from the BBC (which clearly still rankles) and Barry Hearn's takeover and the professional circuit's subsequent revival, meaning the story ends back at the table, and the new stars - Trump, Carter, Robertson, Ding, along with, of course, the evergreen Williams, Higgins and O'Sullivan.

Overall, it's not entirely light reading, but definitely worthwhile for any snooker fans.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very well researched and written insight into the development of snooker. It charts it's origins as a amateur pastime to the global sport it is today from someone who has played, written and commentated on the sport for many decades. In parts it can be quite tedious particularly the inner conflicts and court cases from the 1990's but this is more down to my disinterest in this part of it's history rather than the fault of the author.

[Ernie Wide · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best book on snooker I've read, and I've read them all!

[Malcolm · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is far too much assumed here about how much a reader might know about the murky world of snooker: alas, I felt like I wasted my time.