It’s a Cavalry Charge for Gentlemen

Winston Churchill played it. So did the Bengal lancers. So does the Prince of Wales.

It was Will Rogers’ favorite sport. Darryl Zanuck got the movie moguls to play it in the ‘30’s.

It’s the last stand of the aristocracy in this century. It’s not for the masses. It’ll never replace bowling--or even tennis.

Listen, you heard of Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, even Gertrude Ederle, right?

OK, how about Tommy Hitchcock Jr., Stewart Iglehart, Foxhall Keene, Harry Payne Whitney, Winston Guest, Laddie Sanford, Devereux Milburn, Eric Pedley?

Draw a blank, do you? Well, in the Roaring Twenties, the Golden Age of Sport, these were also household names of sport. They kept up with the Joneses, all right. They were as famous as Super Bowl football players today. Averell Harriman got his name in the papers the first time with them.

Their sport was polo. Now, the formula for success in polo is “First, you take 10 horses . . . .” That alone rules out most of the civilized world. It’s not a blacktop sport. You need more than an empty lot or a pair of cleats or a basket. What you need, really, is your own bank or oil field--or country. It’s the sport of princes.

It’s hockey on horseback--one of the most tremendously exciting sports in the world. Particularly, if you’re a horse.

It was invented by the Persians some time in the dawn of the last millennium but it migrated to India where the British Raj discovered it about 1860 in the province of Punjab. The British mounted troops and the tea planters were equally thrilled by the horsemanship of the Assamese heathens, particularly by their ability to strike a moving ball from a moving horse at a fixed target.

The British being British, they soon devised a set of rules to go with the game, put a goal in and put up an inscribed tray for victors. They wanted to give the young subalterns something to do on the days when the Khyber Pass was silent and the wogs were in their tents.

It was a dashing game played in pith helmet and knee boots and was a splendid diversion of the far pavilions of Empire. If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the Charge of the Light Brigade was probably lost because polo didn’t come along in time.

It was the 10th Hussars, no less, who brought the game back to Blighty and formed the Hurlingham Club, which, to this day, is the Vatican of polo.

James Gordon Bennett, the newspaper tycoon, brought it to America, where it was played on the site of what was to become the home park of the baseball New York Giants. It’s a point of some chagrin to purists of polo that the term “Polo Grounds” came to refer to a baseball stadium and not the noble purpose for which it was first used.

The game even had its fashion impact. The “polo” shirt is with us today as the leisure shirt, not greatly changed from the days when Hitchcock first showed up in one on horseback.

The game took the North Shore of Long Island by storm. Like golf and tennis, it was resolutely amateur in those days. Like everything else, it became too competitive for the dilettante weekend athlete, and gradually, professionals such as the great Cecil Smith of Texas and Bob Skene of Australia came to dominate it.

The game suffered a decline in the postwar era when the remount posts of the U.S. Cavalry were given over to tanks. Before that, the light-horse generals were only too happy to include polo in their exercises as excellent combat training.

The charm of polo is that, like golf, it can be handicapped. Players are graded according to their abilities. A scratch player is designated as a 10-goal player (there are usually only a handful of them in the world), and a team whose handicaps aggregate less than their competitors are allowed the number of goals between their total and the number of the other team’s.

There are four players on a team. There is no goaltender although the “No. 4” back is generally considered to have the goal as his major responsibility.

The No. 1 is generally regarded as the attacker, the playmaker, the point guard of polo. Eric Pedley was universally considered the best No. 1 in the game in his day. Pedley once scored 12 goals in an international match against England and nine in another. Strangely enough, he was never a 10-goal player--eight was as high as he rated. But in another sport, his nickname would have been Magic .

The No. 3 position is generally considered the cleanup hitter, the Babe Ruth in the lineup. The mounts are as important as the players and are usually identified as “ponies.” This is because they used to be, by law, no more than 14 hands high (a “hand” is four inches) and they seldom weighed more than 600 pounds. This is no longer true. Polo ponies today are full-sized thoroughbreds indistinguishable from their race-track brethren.

A polo pony has to have a lot of Jake LaMotta in him. Or Lyle Alzado. He has to like to brawl. He is asked to charge into other horses, to “ride them off” while a mallet is ricochetting off his face or a ball is smacking him in the ribs. They used to strive for this combativeness by breeding polo horses to range mustangs but again they have found that thoroughbreds have a wellspring of love of battle that can be programmed.

Polo was made for Santa Barbara. And, on July 13 on the oceanside greensward there, the Assistance League of Southern California Day Nursery Auxiliary will present an event called the third annual Golden Mallet Invitational polo tournament. It is actually the kickoff day of the weeklong high-goal America Cup tournaments featuring some of the best poloists in the world.

To show you that polo hasn’t changed that much, the Maharajah of Jaipur will be in attendance.

A polo tournament is not likely to knock drug scandals or even a baseball player trade off the front of the sports pages, but the cause--day care for the children of low-income working families--is 10-goal. And polo can be one of the most beautiful and exciting sports to watch in the whole fabric.

This is the best cavalry the country has seen since the James Gang--or Jeb Stuart. Custer should have had these horsemen. And, just remember, when they refer to the “Four Horsemen” in this game, it’s not sports page hyperbole--it’s the real thing.