COURSING.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume VII, Issue 361, 24 June 1897, Page 9

COURSING.

[By

Dicken.]

1 had a chat with Jim Pratt, the old New South Wales slipper, the other day, and he waxed eloquent on the subject of coursing in the old days in Victoria and New South Wales, and he recalled the pleasant memory of Sir W. J. Clarke giving him a cheque for fifteen guineas for slipping at a one day’s meeting, but he sighed when he remarked that very different men crept in to the game and intrigued I o take one another down. That, said Pratt, ruined the sport in Australia for the time, because the good men went out of it. When coursing got to a low ebb in Australia Pratt came to New Zealand, but here found that the sport was beginning to languish from very much the same cause that had temporarily crushed it in Australia. This was particularly observable in the South, and during the late Challenge Stakes meeting at Avondale it was quite apparent that there were bad influences at work. Pratt speaks in terms of praise of Avondale as a well-furnished plumpton, while he had never seen better hares, and for all this he thought coursing men were very much indebted to the Avondale slipper, Jim Ferguson.