Amateur and Pro

Sydney Sportsman, 15 August 1906

(By “Tattler”)

By almost every mail we have disappointing accounts of the failure of our Australasian champion sprinter, Nigel Barker, and all sorts of excuses are advanced as to the cause of his not scoring a win in England or elsewhere. I can see nothing whatever to cause me to deviate from what I have written all along since Nigel took his departure; it is, that he would have to establish all these times he had been credited with to catch the judge’s eyes in front of any of the crack English sprinters, and mentioned the names of Jupp Morton, who beat Duffy more than once. The pity of it is that Barker’s leg is still troubling him, and that he has not yet struck climatic form at home.

I notice in our contemporary the ‘Referee’ that Harry Hutchins, the English crack professional ped., has been pitching tall tales to ‘Simple Simon Snooker’ of that paper. In an interview Hutchins is credited with having pumped the following guff into ‘Snooker’s’ sound-snarer:—

They reckoned out in Australia that T. M. Malone could do 14 1/2 for 150yds. I gave him four yards and “paddled” in. He picked his station next to a fence, and 40yds from the start there was a bend, and I heard that he meant to cut me out there. But I said to him, “If you try to cut me out at the corner you’ll be over that fence.” I was at him at once, and it was a case of “backwash” for Malone nearly all the way.”

With the exception of the Words, “that Malone had been credited with running 150yds in 14 1/2sec,” the remaining, lines are a tissue of falsehood, and nobody should know better than “Simple Simon Snooker.” Malone met Hutchins only in two events, 150yds and 220yds, at Botany, on level terms. Never did he concede Malone a start of four yards. Perhaps Hutchins is thinking of his crook race on the Carrington with Jack Malone (4yds), Hutchins winning. T. M. Malone’s challenge in the ‘Referee’ to Hutchins, Samuels, and Meyers, when he had got over sciatica and the effects of a badly-strained tendon, is still fresh in the minds of old-time followers of pedestrianism. T.M.M. will no doubt have something to say in reply, and slash up “Snooker” like a colonial turkey in the Cafe Kent.