The Rajahs' Game Falls On Hard Times

An old English adage goes as follows: "Fox hunting, Punch and polo are alike in one respect. They are not what they used to be." Right on the nose, at least certainly in the last category, where polo, the game of dukes and rajahs, has come down off its high horse in recent years to cavort spryly around on bicycle wheels. The fast-developing sport is called bicycle polo. It has caught on at 100 clubs in England, and over the Fourth of July in Southampton, Long Island a curious and fashionable public turned out to stare at itself, and from time to time to glance at the novel pastime, as four men's and two girls' teams competed in the R Bennet Forbes Memorial Cup tournament

The sun-drenched afternoon had a strong international flavor. Flags of the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Italy, Cuba, Argentina and the United States—designating the nationalities of the participants—rippled from the goalpost crossbars on the Nyack Preparatory School football grounds. The four-man teams, sporting numbers and distinctive uniforms, represented a strange geographical amalgam of clubs: Southampton, Buenos Aires, Central Park and Wysteria, a team whose quarters are the famed polo haunts around Old Westbury, Long Island. The girls, almost all of them Americans who summer in the Hamptons, had provided themselves with roller derby team names: the Knockouts and the Bombers.

As for the crowd, it also reflected in fashion and manner the international set—greetings called out in foreign tongues, the open-air kiss alongside the cheek—as it strolled the field. The younger spectators lolled on the grass in front of cars parked along the sidelines. Some perched on the hoods, turning in their hands tall glasses that had been plenished from wicker hampers and ice coolers back in the car trunks. The trunk lids were up all along the line. Two girls under a pair of parasols sat in a convertible whose California license plate read STONED. The girl-watchers had a field day. Steve Schlesinger, the son of the historian, announced: "I must say I have not been watching the polo games very closely."

The tournament started at 4 in the afternoon. As the combined polo teams stood in a line at midfield astride their bicycles, their mallets raised at attention, the national anthem played over a loudspeaker system. The first match of the tournament's draw threw the blue-jerseyed Southampton team (composed of a Cuban, an Englishman, an American and a Dutchman) against the red jerseys of Buenos Aires (two Argentineans and two Americans). During the first three seconds of play a dog, a corgi, ran out on the field, snapping at the bicycle tires, and the game was halted. In the sixth second of play a policeman behind the sidelines blew his whistle to wave off a car; the Southampton team, believing the whistle was the referee's, pulled up their bicycles and then, startled, watched a Buenos Aires player (the American Austen Gray), pumping hard, score a goal unmolested. Buenos Aires went on to rout Southampton 8-2 and reach the final. Nick Simunek, the Englishman playing for the losers, described his own disappointing play as being "too tense. Besides," he added, "I had a monumental hangover."

Next, Central Park (three Americans and one Italian) took the field against the Wysteria team, an all-American squad favored to win the tournament since it included the Corey brothers, Russell and Alan III, who are from a renowned polo family and have international reputations. The P.A. system announced them. The official at the microphone was having a difficult time, stumbling and referring a number of times to the U.S. "Polio" Association. And he balked at a German-sounding name on the Central Park team. "We can't pronounce this German fellow," he declared plaintively, his voice booming over the manicured lawns. "So we'll just have to do without it."

The game began. A bicycle went down. Its rider sprawled. The number on his back, according to the program, identified him as James Hochschwender, presumably the name the announcer had given up on. Hochschwender looked at his bike in dismay and let loose an involuntary kick at its frame. It just lay there. The sprocket chain dangled grotesquely. "The bike's done for," someone on the sidelines said in studied languor. "What's he going to do with it? Shoot it?"

The spectator next to him grinned and said that at least one of the advantages of bicycle polo was that the unhorsed player could pick up his bicycle, and as long as it had not been warped or bent out of shape, he could continue on it. Or, if it were damaged, he could wheel it to the side and hop on another one. On the other hand, an unhorsed player in real polo had to chase his horse, which could frisk around endlessly, with no time-out being called by the referee unless the loose pony interfered with the game.

In fact, the rules of regular and bicycle polo are basically the same—four bicycles to a side, and the purpose of the game, of course, is to drive the ball, a regulation polo ball, through goal posts set 12 feet apart. The field dimensions are set at 110 by 80 yards maximum, which means the game can be followed easily from the sidelines, a refreshing departure from regular polo, which is played on a field three times as large and has often been described in England as "a game played by Peers on the far side of the ground."

Essentially, the only differences in rules between regular and bicycle polo are 1) that a bicycle polo player is limited to striking the ball three times in a row and 2) that contact is not allowed. A player cannot "ride off" an opponent—a feature of regular polo that allows a participant to barge his pony into the other fellow to separate him from the immediate vicinity of the ball. "Bicycles get busted up, and they cost too much," says Carlos Concheso, who reestablished the U.S. Bicycle Polo Association in 1970 and is chairman of its finance committee. Indeed, as one of the accounts of bicycle polo points out, the pony is somewhat "resilient" and can "bounce," whereas a bicycle is an "uncompromising animal which will tangle itself with whatever it can lay its pedals on." Some of the bicycle polo players rather regret the no-riding-off rule, particularly those who have played regular polo. John Sullivan, who is a member of the Wysteria team and sports a ferocious crop of red hair and love beads, decidedly prefers riding off. "I like the contact," he says.

Bicycle polo is not as new a sport as one might expect. In 1897 there was a Bicycle Polo Club flourishing in Milton, Mass. England has had bicycle polo competitions since the turn of the century. Perhaps the font of American bicycle polo is the Aiken Preparatory School in South Carolina, an exclusive playpen for the very rich where the sons of such polo greats as the Bostwicks, the Knoxes and the Coreys serve their apprenticeships on cycles, wheeling about on long, lovely lawns in the evening, learning tactics and shotmaking so that when they graduate from pedals to stirrups they are endowed with a fundamental feel of the game. Paradoxically, many of the players, because of the enormous expense of keeping a string of ponies (Laddie Sanford once paid $22,000 for a pony named Jupiter), or because of violent turns in their own personal fortunes, are now back where they started—a bicycle seat under them, jiggling over the rough stretches of the grounds, the wheels squeaking shrilly, knowing that compared to the glamorous tableau of man and horse they present an incongruous sight as they pump downfield, helmeted and hunched over the handlebars of their tiny bicycles.