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November-December 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 Intercollegiate polo—30 American colleges field teams, according to the United States Polo Association (USPA)—takes place in indoor arenas less than one-tenth the size of outdoor polo fields, which are 300 yards long by 180 or 200 yards wide, about 10 times the size of a football gridiron. In the far smaller indoor space, teams have only three players per side (versus four outdoors) and use an inflated, mini-volleyball-sized ball—larger than the hard, roughly baseball-sized plastic ball (once made of willow root) used outdoors. Arena games are higher-scoring affairs, with winning sides sometimes tallying 20 goals or more, about twice what outdoor matches typically see. An indoor match lasts only four chukkers; it also tends, with less space to maneuver, to see horses and mallets colliding more often. Nick Snow compares polo to “ice hockey on horses”—but, played at a gallop, it’s even faster. The University of Virginia, amid horse country, boasts the country’s largest polo program, but Cornell (where it is a varsity sport with a roster of 30 to 40) and Yale also maintain stables and arenas. At college matches, the home team provides the horses for both sides. “Splitting strings” ensures that there is no mount advantage in the college game—unlike outdoor polo, where players bring their own thoroughbreds. “In an arena, a good player can get along even with a bad horse,” Crocker Snow explains, “but outdoors, at the top levels, horses matter.” Though it doesn’t apply to college polo, the sport’s handicap system provides another measure of parity. Based on their performances, the sport rates players in “goals” from -2 to +10. It’s a rough estimate of how many goals that player might contribute to a team’s score. A “20-goal” match means that the sum of the players’ ratings on each team cannot exceed 20 goals. Few players rank above +3; even Nick Snow, a lifelong player and one of the strongest riders in college polo, has only a three-goal rating. Four-goal players are mostly pros. USPA numbers show that 87 percent of players are rated at one goal or less, and there are only about a dozen 10-goal players in the world: currently, they all hail from Argentina, the country that breeds the best ponies and produces the most top players. (As many as 30,000 or 40,000 spectators turn out at Palermo Polo Grounds in downtown Buenos Aires for the finals of the Argentine Open, the world’s top tournament, which normally sees several 40-goal teams entered.) For Harvard’s polo club, the more mundane challenge is housing ponies. “It would be quite possible to get a bunch of veteran horses donated, along with a truck and trailer,” says Crocker Snow. “But there’s no natural place to keep them, along with a facility to practice and play.” As a result, the team plays only “away” matches, riding mounts provided by their opponents. And although there are foot mallets, for practicing the strokes while dismounted, and even occasional instances of bicycle polo, there’s no getting around the equine factor. A strong male player can whack a polo ball 150 yards because he borrows so much momentum from his mount. The ponies are also what make the game so dangerous—if a galloping horse falls on a rider, the consequences can be severe. Though riders need to be in top condition, “Players think that the ponies are the best athletes out there,” Snow says. “And riding them weeds out the Ralph Lauren glamour factor pretty quickly. You’ve got to love horses to do this.” ~Craig Lambert  
 
 
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