Tin Hares Suggest All Machine Sports

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 103, 22 July 1927, Page 7

Tin Hares Suggest All Machine Sports

METAL OR HUMANS? SPORT IN BOLTS AND VOLTS Coursing with tin hares has proved such a huge success that all sport in future may be a matter of bolts and volts (says a “Sydney Guardian” writer), operated by somebody above suspicion, and designed by somebody else who is capable of obtaining a perfection undreamt of by the old-time trainer. The tin hare has proved his worth; it is only a matter of time before the greyhound has been supplanted. The tin dog will probably prove just as superior to the ordinary meat dog as the tin hare is to the oldtime one. Such a dog will always be trained to a hair, always ready to do his stunt at the touching of a button. TIN RACEHORSES After the tin dog will be his natural corollary, the tin racehorse. The Melbourne Cup of the future will need the muse of an Adam Lindsay Gordon to do it justice—the owners and trainers at the top of the straight giving a final touch to the ignition of the favourite, or an infinitesimal loosening of the bolt on the outsider’s fetlock. We already have the ivory punter. The tin hare and the tin dog, and the steel horse, must be followed by the ferroconcrete “pug” and the bronze wrestler. No longer will there be any reason for enforcing the rules of that great humanitarian, the Marquis of Queensburv. The ferro-concrete lads will fight all in. Nobody will ever be fouled out. IRON FOOTBALLERS Then the iron footballers will follow 13 doughty South Sydneyites turned out at Eveleigh workshops against the pride of Balmain, designed and fabricated at Clyde. Barrackers will yell themselves hoarse as they work out, by logarithms, the prospects of their favoured team. Wide popularity awaits an Australian eleven which can be forwarded as freight, and exact no bonus; a tennis player of universal joints and steel springs, which could never be tempted to relax on its amateur status; and a golfer of wood, which would wear plus fours more gracefully than the modern variety. And probably nobody would ever notice the difference!