New Polo Club Aims to Put Sport Back on S.D. Map

When Michael Jenks started playing polo about 18 months ago, he quickly discovered that it’s more than a game: It’s an obsession.

“You never realized that a little three-inch ball could rule your life, but it does,” said Jenks, 24, a clothing manufacturer and one of the founding members of San Diego’s only outdoor polo club.

Jenks and seven others had a practice match Wednesday to test the playing field at the newly opened Rancho Santa Fe Polo Club at Fairbanks Ranch. The club will officially open Sunday with a benefit match for the San Diego Chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Club organizers hope that the benefit match will mark the return of “serious polo” to the San Diego area. The sport first came to San Diego in the early 1920s, when Navy officers and local residents played on Coronado Island.

$1-Million Investment

Since then, San Diego’s relationship with polo has been erratic as clubs have come and gone. But the Rancho Santa Fe Polo Club, with its five fields and stabling for 400 horses, could put San Diego polo on the map.

Its 30 or so founding members invested a total of about $1 million to lease the land from the county and build stalls for the horses. Eventually, through club fees, the members expect to recoup their investment, said Susan Stovall, who helps manage the club.

Founding members pay $2,500 per season, while non-founding members pay $3,000 per season. In addition, there is a seasonal “stick and ball” fee of $500, a stall rental of $250, and a tack room rental of $300. The season beginning Sunday runs through October; there is no winter season.

“This is going to be quite a club someday. I think it will be the next Palm Springs,” which is the West’s main polo center, said Bob Kuzman, the head instructor of an indoor polo club--the only one in San Diego--across the street from the Rancho Santa Fe club. Indoor clubs costs less and have a smaller playing field.

Jenks’ wife, Vanessa, also plays polo, but she can’t play right now because she is seven months pregnant. Even so, she says she can’t shake her obsession with the sport, and she can hardly wait to get back on a horse.

“It completely takes over. It is the finest sport anyone’s ever thought of,” she said.

Polo is often perceived as an elitist sport, played only by the very rich. But while members of the Rancho Santa Fe club acknowledge that the cost of playing polo can be prohibitive, they also say that polo in America is not as “aristocratic” as the game in England, where its popularity with the royal family gives it an upper-class tone.

Horse Determines the Game

The cheapest polo horse can be bought for about $3,500, but they can also cost as much as $25,000. Serious polo players need to have at least six horses, one for each 7-minute chukker. There are six chukkers in a match, and the horses get so tired after one chukker that a serious player would not reuse one.

Polo players say that the horse is 80% of the game, because no matter how good a player is, he can’t do much good if he can’t get to the ball. One polo lover was quoted as saying, “Shoot the rider, but save the horse.”

The object of the game is to knock the ball into the goal--”sort of a cross between soccer and basketball,” Stovall said.

But Vanessa Jenks bristles when she recalls that someone once said that polo is basically “ice hockey on horses.”

“It’s more like chess on horses. There’s so much more to it, so much finesse,” she said.

Sunday’s benefit match is open to the public. Tickets cost $25 if bought in advance at the Multiple Sclerosis Society office, or $35 if bought at the gate, which opens at 3:30 p.m. The club is about two miles east of Interstate 5 on Via de la Valle.