This Sport Is Rich in Tradition

It was Will Rogers’ favorite sport. Winston Churchill’s. It was an ancient Persian sport revived by the British Raj in India and played by subalterns in pith helmets and monocles on horses little better than range broncos.

It used to be more popular in this country than pro football. Hockey on horseback.

It was the “in” sport in Hollywood long before golf or tennis. Darryl Zanuck rode No. 1 and insisted his studio underlings take up the sport if they wanted to stay under contract. He went everywhere with a sawed-off mallet.

Tommy Hitchcock was once as famous in this country as Red Grange or Bobby Jones. Almost as famous as Babe Ruth.

It got a reputation as a sport for the over-privileged, but it was kept alive in this part of the world by the U.S. Cavalry--buck privates in saddles. The best players in the world come from south of the border--Mexico and Argentina. The greatest player who ever lived was an Argentine you never heard of--Juan Carlos Harriot, who was the toast of South America long before Pele was. A gaucho in knee boots, a trick rider with a bamboo stick and a swing any golfer would envy.

It’s the real Sport of Kings. Horse racing is a pretender. The British royal family always has a member in it.

People who play it, love it. They have to. There’s no money in it. When an athlete in another sport says, “I’d play this game for nothing,” he is usually making $3 million per year. When an athlete in this sport says he’d play for nothing, he usually is. Unlike baseball players or tennis players or hockey players, polo players have to keep their day jobs.

Still, it’s not for everybody. Polo is not a playground sport. A parade-ground sport is more like it.

First of all, you don’t merely need a mitt or a racket or even a set of clubs. You need a set of horses.

Polo horses (they are called “ponies” although some of them can be 17 years old) are a special breed. They are thoroughbreds, culled from a racetrack after a (usually) disappointing career. They are not chosen for speed, they are chosen for heart. Like football players, they have to like contact. They have to be part pugilist and part Man o’ War. Like linebackers, they have to like to hit. And not mind being hit. Four-legged Dick Butkuses.

Joe Henderson is not Tommy Hitchcock or some gaucho from the Pampas. He is from South Africa, actually. There are no crowned heads in his background. But he’s the polo equivalent of the league-leading .300 hitter. He’s the cleanup hitter on his polo teams. In any other sport, he might be selling shoes on television. As a poloist, he gets to not only ride the horses but, occasionally, to truck them from place to place.

Being a “10-goal” player is the summit of the polo profession. Only a comparative handful have ever achieved it.

Polo is not statistic-barnacled like baseball. A 10-goaler is dubbed, not in honor of his goals-per-game average, his assists or saves (polo has neither) but from a study of his game by an arbitrary panel of experts. It’s part-horsemanship, part-sticksmanship.

Henderson is a 10-goaler at the arena version of the game, an offshoot of the alfresco game in which the field is smaller, the ball is bigger, the turns sharper and the action more condensed. A lion fight in a closet.

Outdoor polo is frequently played on a pitch only slightly smaller than Rhode Island, but arena polo is on a gridiron not unlike Notre Dame Stadium, even down to yard-line markers.

The son and grandson of polo players in the Transvaal, Joe Henderson came to this country not as a recruited star but as a groom, rubbing horses, walking hots and wrapping hocks. But when he got on a horse, he was Geronimo, the most feared thing you would want to see riding toward you this side of the James gang.

He came to California hauling strings of ponies in U-Hauls before he settled around the polo grounds in Palm Springs and San Diego to become to polo what countryman Gary Player was to golf, a superstar.

The first thing any poloist needs is a compatible mount. And, at 6 feet 3 and 198 pounds, Joe cannot trust himself to anything that tends to buckle under weight or pressure. Joe is Jose Canseco, a long-ball hitter, a home run threat. And he has the peripheral vision of the field of a John Unitas.

Arena polo is three-to-a-side (outdoors is four), which makes for more long-range scoring and fewer crowd scenes at the goal. Polo was first played in America as an arena game in 1876 but gave way largely to the outdoor version.

It comes to the Los Angeles Equestrian Center on Saturday night, when Henderson will lead one team in the Polo America Legends Cup, which will pit the two highest-goal teams (27) in the history of the sport against each other. A celebrity pregame featuring actor Bill Devane and former NHL standout Larry Robinson will open the show.

It is a high-goal heavyweight championship matchup in a sport that was once as important to the sports pages as Dempsey-Firpo or Notre Dame-Army. The promoters say if it was good enough for Zanuck and the Warner Bros. and the kings of England and Clive of India, it ought at least to rate a sellout. A Kentucky Derby with sticks. The best swordsmen on the best cavalry. Custer should have had it so good.