The Polo Match

This past weekend I traveled home, driving down through the western and mountainous part of past the Shenandoah’s and down through Eastern Tennessee to Chattanooga. It’s a long drive, but scenic, and while the drive down was mostly rain, the ride back up yesterday was perfect. And with the exception of Friday, the weather this weekend was brisk and fall-like, reminding me of my boyhood days running around in the autumn in the backyard with my Nerf football pretending to be an Auburn football star and scoring the winning touchdown every time I threw the ball up in the air to myself.

My team didn’t do so well this weekend, and losing twice in a row to teams we should have stomped bloody into the ground was not what I would call a performance worth mentioning. Had it been me on the field in my boyhood days I would have spun left and right and ran my backside off right down the field and scored touchdown after touchdown, spiking the ball and doing a dance and generally showing off. I never really did catch so much with anyone because all too often I was tied up in my own fantasies for too long to ever think of throwing the ball to anyone.

But this past weekend, with the excellent weather and the breeze, the fire cooked steaks and bratwursts on Saturday night done by yours truly and then sitting outside with my mom and Janie on Saturday night with a small fire on her patio, telling stories and talking reminded me so much of the old days when I was young and would join the adults and actually talk to them. I was that kind of kid: to me, hanging out with the adults was the pinnacle of cool, the absolute bleeding edge of hardcore that couldn’t have matched anything else to me. They would talk about such sophisticated topics like music and books and television and their lives and I dreamed of the days when I would be older and wiser and would have books and music and my own TV and my own life.

And now that I have all of those things, I really still don’t feel like an adult. And there are other things now that I’m to this adult point that I have to worry about: electric bills and water bills and cable bills and having a place to sleep and eating and sometimes all of it is just too much to handle. Sometimes I almost wish that I’d not grown up, that I didn’t have bills and books and that I was that mesmerized kid who watched the adults and dreamed of bigger and better things.

Now that I’m sort of an adult since I am no longer the age of a child yet sometimes do childish things, I find myself doing things that sometimes would normally not have been done when I was a child. Things that I would not have appreciated before, like for instance going to watch a Polo match.

Sunday my Mom and Danny got into Danny’s Jeep and his son Ty and I got into his car, which is in my opinion too nice of a vehicle for a 16-year-old to drive, and made our way to Bendabout Farms.

Nestled on 1,600 acres of pristine farmland outside of Cleveland, Tennessee, Bendabout Farms is owned by the prestigious Chattanooga Johnston family, the same family who owns a large stake in the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. The farm was purchased by the Johnstons in the early part of the 20th century and a house was built in the 1920s, and ever since the family has been into polo.

Now, one must understand something before I get too deep into the conversation of Polo: it is a sport that involves lots of money, time and training. This isn’t the sort of thing someone gets into by buying a pony and wearing the shirts with the same name, also sometimes referred to as “golf shirts.” Nay, this is the sort of sport exclusively tied to those with deep pockets and patience, because this is surely one hell of a sport to try and enter competitively nowadays. You could easily spend enough money to pay an NFL quarterback for the Cleveland Browns on the costs of keeping a 4 person team going. And this is a team sport that requires a lot of horses.

Because the Johnston family loves polo, and wants to share this love of the sport with anyone willing to drive out to their farm, they hold Polo matches one weekend a year to dazzle the many who show up in support of the sport. And the people show up, everyone from the rich to the not-so-rich with picnic lunches and fold out chairs in SUVs or expensive Mercedes Benz’s. And the best part is that the matches are free and so is the Coca-Cola. I’ve decided that this event needs food: funnel cakes and turkey legs if they can get it. Or someone should get a local restaurant to set up a tent and make some money off of the abundance of good food available from places like the Bluewater Grill downtown or the Big River Grill, if the owners were so inclined to allow such a thing.

The sport itself is much like soccer, only after every point the goals in which a team scores changes. In fact, the only real difference I can see between Polo and soccer is the equipment, because otherwise things are just as fast-paced and full of energy. There’s nothing like watching someone hit a small white ball 60 yards after charging full speed on a horse with a six foot mallet. That’s polo in a nutshell.

When we arrived, I looked at the polo field with some amazement. It was huge, stretched out like a large meadow with perfectly cut grass, turf even, that was soft when I stepped onto it. And the horses were perfectly manicured, with their tails bounded up so the soft horsehair wouldn’t fly all over the place and get tangled.

While we waited for the match to begin in our folding chairs underneath the shade of the trees that lined the side of the field, listening to an unenthused announcer over the PA system telling jokes and eventually, once he got a roster, told us about the players. I didn’t really have much of a clue as to what he was talking about, but found that his description of the “beautiful horses” to be a bit much.

“Oh, that’s a nice looking pony,” he said.

“Oh, you’re so lame I could almost cry,” is what I replied to that, well out of his earshot and under my breath.
The match went fast, and the home team won. I can’t even describe how powerful it is to watch these horses going full speed with each other, their fast and fluid movements almost too quick to follow. The people were courteous and clapped every time one team scored a point, and after an hour and a half of Polo, it was all over.

I’m not sure exactly how I feel about the sport. On the one hand, it is exhilarating watching the horse and rider charge towards a small ball, but at the same time I almost find the sport to be pretentious. How can one like a sport that takes up so much time and money that in the grand scheme of things saw its heyday long ago when the robber barons ran this country. It feels like a sport that was designed to help the rich in this country practice their cavalry skills that would be used during a war in the 19th century, and now because of the long legacy of aristocrats who play the sport survives. I could be entirely wrong about this assumption, of course, but I like to think that I’m not. When was the last time you saw a great polo match on ESPN? Or highlights on the local news of the high school practicing their riding on proud, tall horses?
While I have nothing technically against the sport, I feel as if it is outdated and in need of an update. For instance, instead of using horses to play, why not gas powered golf carts? And instead of hitting balls with mallets, why not try something that packs more of a punch. Like a sledge hammer.

As I was quietly writing these observations on the brochure that was provided to explain Polo to the uncouth of society like myself, my mother pointed out to me before half time that a good friend of ours, Maria Cardillo, was sitting not too far from us on the ground with her husband and children. And my mother, being who she is, went over to talk to her. I kept my seat, not wanting to miss any of the action.

At half time, I went over to see Maria. I heard my full name being said like my mother would do whenever I was in trouble as a child and immediately my smile lit up like a Christmas tree. This is how, even from the youngest age that I can remember, Maria has greeted me.

She quizzed me on what I was up to, asking me the pertinent questions of what I’m doing for work and how my life is going, and I answered and smiled and thought of the time that I went to her house for lunch one afternoon for lasagna. I’ve been to her house since (they have a truly awesome kitchen) but the only thing I remembered was the lasagna. Probably because I didn’t eat a single bite of it at the time, stubbornly holding onto my childish belief that anything that looked like that would surely kill me if I ate it.

I’ve never been one to eat healthy, and I blame this mostly on my own biases and need for normalcy in my life. I figured that if I continued to eat the things I normally ate when I was a child, like ham sandwiches and hot dogs and chicken fingers and whatnot that I’d be fine, that the things that I ate would do no harm. Lately however this has not been the case, and the food I’ve normally been able to eat has done more harm than good and now I’m at a crucial point in my life where, if I don’t start eating healthy now I’m doomed to be plagued by health problems that only a pill from Pfizer or any of the many other pill makers will help my problem, if not make it worse with side effects. My mother is obviously concerned about my well being, and in a way she has every right to be. But on the other hand, I find myself timid and in need of care in what I choose to eat, because certain things have never quite agreed with me, like spicy foods.

I could go on and on about how I’m going to start eating healthy and the reasons why behind it, but instead I’d rather say that as far as food goes, Polo is a sport desperately in need of some sort of food and alcohol. Without those vital ingredients, Polo just isn’t that interesting of a sport. Those who fund and play Polo should recognize that, with the right amount of booze and funnel cakes, you could get anyone into a sport like Polo. Heck, if it can work for Nascar, why can’t it work for Polo?

After the match ended everyone packed up their picnics and chairs and headed back home, I looked back onto the polo grounds and wondered to myself silently if the sport would ever die. I still wonder if there is enough interest, money and time, not to mention screaming members of PETA, to keep the sport going. It would be a shame to lose such an institution to the sands of time, even if it is outdated.