Real polo not for cowboys
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
Hanging up in my tack room is my father's old polo mallet — oops, his old polo stick. I learned a couple of weeks ago one plays croquet with a mallet and polo with a stick. Dad and Uncle Marshall, along with a bunch of the other young bucks around Cassoday, used to ride out to the Watkins ranch east of town every Sunday to ride broncs and play polo. Among the many things I wish I had asked him but never did was for details of how they played. Did they know and play by the rules of real polo, or did they play pasture polo with their own set of rules?
Based on the two matches between a Cassoday team made up of Jewel Million and Fisk, Glen, and Ward Watkins and a team from Wichita in 1923 to celebrate the coming of the railroad, I would guess that Dad and the other Cassoday players probably adhered fairly closely to regulations, because I doubt the Wichita team would have put up with anything as chaotic as the cowboy polo my son and some of his friends occasionally play using a soccer ball and modified broomsticks.
I speak now with some authority about matters of polo, having recently participated in an actual game and this in Argentina, a country that takes its polo seriously. A couple of years ago we took a two-week trip to Argentina, covering 4,000 miles of Patagonia and the Pampas in a rented car. We saw lots of beautiful country and numerous colorful gauchos out in the countryside, but wanted to go back and spend some extended time on an Argentine ranch.
So over spring break in late March (early autumn down there) we departed for a working ranch that takes in guests, the Los Potreros Estancia in the province of Cordoba, 200 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. Los Potreros, which means the stud-horse pens, is located in the Sierra Chicas mountains, a low-lying range that is similar to the Flint Hills (tall grass, six acres for a cow/calf pair) but much higher, steeper, more rugged, and covered with granite rock instead of limestone and flint. I'll tell more about the estancia in future columns, but for now to the polo.
Our host likes polo and he likes to introduce visitors to the sport. While we were there the guests included a couple and a young woman from England and another couple from the Camargue region of France, an area well known for its horsemen and its fighting bulls. The English couple didn't take part, but the rest of us did, along with two gap-year students (who were taking a year off from university to work on the ranch) and the resident gaucho horse-breaker. The students had played some polo and the gaucho was skilled, but the rest of us were rank novices.
I learned our milling around the soccer ball in cowboy polo is totally wrong, that players should be constantly moving, if you miss the ball you pull away to the left so one of your teammates following you can take over, you can ride alongside a player and reach over your horse with your stick in order to hook his stick as he is striking the ball but not to reach under your horse's neck with your stick, it is legal to bump an opposing player from the left, but not legal to cross the line of play from the right. And the worst thing you can do is to hit a horse, accidentally or otherwise, with a stick. I didn't hit any horses, but I was probably guilty of almost every other infraction.
Oh yes, unlike the cowboy polo we play here, we rode regulation short-stirruped polo saddles with no swells and very little cantle. I must admit I was a little apprehensive about going full tilt in what my father used to call a postage-stamp saddle, but in my enthusiasm for the game I forgot all about what I was sitting in and had no problem whatever with staying aboard, although I did blow one of those flat iron stirrups every once in a while.
The play was ragged, as could be expected with all us amateurs out there, but the gaucho held back enough to make the game competitive, with our side (he was on the other) holding an early lead but finally losing by one goal.
At the barbecued chicken picnic following the game, relaxing in the shade of a grove of trees at one end of the field, the owner good humoredly told me: "You ride like a cowboy." I took it as a compliment. It wasn't meant as one.
