These Horses, Riders Are Well-Bred

Polo used to be big in this country. Not quite Yale-Harvard, Army-Navy, Dempsey-Tunney big. And poloists were never on bubble gum cards or had lineups known as Murderers’ Row.

But Tommy Hitchcock was as big a hero as the country produced, this side of Babe Ruth or Jack Dempsey or Red Grange. He didn’t outrank Bobby Jones, but he could take his place alongside. He was head and shoulders above anybody who played college football, save for the Four Horsemen.

Sports were not for the proletariat in the earliest days. Baseball was the great leveler, with franchises full of farm boys and shoeless illiterates, but football was played by the sons of the rich at highly private institutions that were harder to get into than the Stock Exchange. Basketball was just something they played before they cleared the floor for a dance.

A “10-goal” polo player was like a .400 hitter, a cannonball server, a Mr. Touchdown. He didn’t average 10 goals a game, it was just a rating the polo association put on his skills. Polo, like golf, had a handicapping system. If a 12-goal team played a 10-goal team, it started the game minus two.

Tommy Hitchcock was our most famous 10-goal player, but he was not even the first one in his own family. His father, Tommy (really, Thomas, in that more formal day) Hitchcock Sr., was a 10-goaler at the turn of the century, along with the legendary Foxhall Keene and John Cowdin.

Polo was played in Westbury on Long Island, Newport, R.I., and Lake Forest, Ill., so the chauffeurs wouldn’t have far to transport the players. It had been invented on the frontier of Britain’s Empire in India during the rule of the Raj, and Winston Churchill, no less, was an avid, if artless, player.

The Americans wrested the game from their British cousins as they had most games both people play. The Brits rode a kind of sit-straight, short-stroke game, and the Yanks pioneered a game not unlike the fast break of today’s professional basketball.

You had to be rich to play polo because you needed a string of ponies--originally polo mounts were under 14 hands but today most are a thoroughbred strain, much bigger than a pure pony, but the designation survives. The U.S. Cavalry kept the sport alive between wars, much as the Bengal Lancers had in the outposts of India.

Polo ponies, like Spanish bulls, are bred to fight. They have to be as unafraid to crash into things as a Chicago Bear fullback, and they are drafted as carefully. They have to get used to wooden mallets being swung over their heads, they have to stop and swerve like Marcus Allen in an open field, they have to be combative and durable. You can always tell an old polo pony by his lumps, like an old prizefighter.

The men, too, reach their peak late. The great Eric Pedley rode No. 1 till he was well into his 60s. Experience and horsemanship count most. There are no Billy the Kids on horseback in this sport.

The names pretty much tell the story. Polo rosters have more hyphens than the House of Lords. The men are as well bred as the horses, for a change. Harry Payne Whitney, no less, wasa 10-goal player. So was Stewart Iglehart.

In England, members of the royal family ride. Fergie (Sarah Ferguson), the Duchess of York, is the daughter of the polo-playing Major Ronald Ferguson, manager of the polo club that gave the royal consort, Prince Philip, his start as well as his son, Prince Charles, the future King of England.

Hollywood went through a brief polo craze in the ‘30s. Darryl Zanuck, who had learned to ride in the cavalry, used to outfit and equip his directors and producers, and he carried a sawed-off polo mallet with him wherever he went. Zanuck played with a huge stogie in his mouth and never got better than two goals.

Will Rogers was a devoted fan and built a polo field by his house, which still stands in Pacific Palisades. Walt Disney played.

It’s an exciting sport to watch. Horses collide at a closing speed of 50 m.p.h. So do riders. Zanuck used to sport a more or less perpetual shiner from being hit by mallets during his sessions on horseback. He was a more reckless player than his skills warranted.

A good high-goal polo match combines the best aspects of a hockey game and Custer’s Last Stand. The horses have to be acrobatic, and so do the men.

The best polo in the world is played in Argentina. The game all but died out in the U.S. when the cavalry became mechanized. Polo by tank was not very sporting.

But, polo, like golf, has become an important contributor to charity. Polo is a money raiser for the American Lung Assn., the National Kidney Foundation, performing arts centers, juvenilediabetes organizations and such.

In keeping with this, the sixth annual Golden Mallet Invitational tournament will be held at the Santa Barbara Polo and Racquet Club on July 13 to benefit the day nursery auxiliary of the Assistance League of Southern California.

Santa Barbara is one of the last bastions of high-goal polo in this country. The polo pony,to say nothing of the polo player, is becoming as an endangered a species as the plains bison.

Polo was once an Olympic sport. But Santa Barbara is one of the few places you can still see a sport that was once a sports page staple along with Yankee baseball, Dempsey fights and Notre Dame football.

It lost its place to Super Bowls, Final Fours, tennis opens and World Cups. It used to be you had to have a million dollars to get into sport. Now, you can make millions out of it.