Click image to view full PDF
The modern sport of polo—as you will see it played at the Bridgehampton Polo Club in the summer of 2009—was invented early in the twentieth century here on Long Island. Until then polo was a gentler, slower, cantering game, typically British. Harry Payne Whitney and his team at the Meadow Brook Club in Westbury changed it into a power game, fast, hard, aggressive, dangerous—more typically American traits. It spelled the end of laconic afternoons with deferential applause on an English green, turning it into an exciting spectator sport. The Long Island Railroad ran special trains to Meadow Brook in the 1920s and as many as 40,000 fans would attend the matches.
That’s remarkable considering that polo is not an easy sport to follow. The field is too massive—the size of nine football fields—and you can’t really see that 3-¼ inch ball much the time. You sometimes feel that the game is played not for the audience as in other spectator sports, but for the players. Few people know the rules of the game. Yet, somehow, polo draws us in.
Peter Brant, along with fellow player Neil Hirsch, established the Bridgehampton Polo Club in 1996, after playing with his White Birch team in leagues in Greenwich, Saratoga Springs and Palm Beach. Teams vary over the years, but matches are still played in the original location at David and Jane Walentas’ Two Trees Farm, and Mercedes Benz is still the title sponsor.
A match at Bridgehampton Polo is a snapshot of a summer afternoon in the Hamptons. After the beach, before dinner and evening activities, we all relax under a tent, conversation skims along on the light subjects of summer, and we look out at a field of competitors bathed in the extraordinary golden light of the Hamptons.
We return over those six Saturdays in July and August because there’s something hypnotic about the game of polo—the more you see, the more interesting it becomes. It’s dazzling and it’s dangerous. The horses are amazingly fast. They stop, turn, and maneuver— at a breathtaking pace. The players do what other athletes do—except they do it full speed on a horse, and they have no protective gear outside of a helmet. Rules permit slamming into your opponent in certain ways, at certain angles. Collisions occur. Horses fall, riders tumble. You clench your fists. This is bold, high-risk activity. It engages your fears, your hopes, your imagination, the way perilous games do. When you start watching, it’s hard to stop. The bottom line is that Bridgehampton Polo is a good sporting event. And even if we came for the party, we stay for the sport.
[sidebar]
The polo field is 300 yards long and 160 yards wide, 12.4 acres of dense green grass.
The game consists of six chukkers lasting 7 ½ minutes each (excluding time outs). In the event of a tie, a seventh, sudden-death chukker will be played, the victory going to the first team to score.
The polo ball, weighing only 4 ounces, can be driven to speeds approaching 100 miles an hour by a mallet that weighs only 7 ounces. It all has to do with the swing. A good polo horse takes only 3 seconds to accelerate to 35 miles per hour.
Individual players are rated by points, also called goals. The top rating is ten.
The polo mount is a full-sized horse—the term polo pony refers back eighty years ago before restrictions on size were abandoned.