A Hot Game Of Bike Polo Was A Cool Way To Shed Youth And Gain Status

Like mumps or measles, bike polo was a fever that rushed through our neighborhood and infected every bike-owning male of high school age. It hit those of us about to enter high school the hardest. The symptoms were dramatic: You hopped on your solid old Schwinn or J.C. Higgins two-wheeler, the one with tires that wide, pedaled over to the Washington Elementary School playground and proceeded to annihilate your own beloved bike as well as those of your friends.

Flint, Mich., summer of 1958. I'm positive about the year because in just one short month Jim Stephens, Ron Kuberski, Charlie Johnson, Don Harris, John Zillich and Norm Sullivan—the whole bunch of us—would be attending Flint's Central High instead of Whittier Junior High, along with the 2,900 other students already enrolled in the high school.

This would be our first year at Central, and we knew there were certain things that were just "uncool." For example, it was uncool to wear penny loafers. No, wearing penny loafers was worse than uncool, it was unthinkable. You had to wear black, pointy-toed, four-eyelet shoes with taps on each heel that you scuffed along the halls as you walked. You had to wear denim Levi's with the cuffs turned up ever so slightly, to about the width of the obligatory pencil-thin belt. A wide belt like the one your father wore wasn't unthinkable, but it was definitely uncool. Even the notebook carried between classes had to be of a certain kind—a blue-gray, clothbound cardboard model that contained two-hole notebook paper.

And every one of us knew it was going to be uncool to be seen riding a bike to high school—or anywhere else, for that matter. We were only a year away from being old enough to have our own cars, and being seen pedaling a Schwinn around town somehow disassociated you from this approaching milestone. If you were lucky, you knew a junior or a senior who already owned a car and you could ride to school with him. If you were really lucky, the car was a stripped-down '55 or '56 Chevy with a flat black primer paint job and gaudy chrome hubcaps. Underneath, it would have a glasspack—a muffler lined with fiber glass—which would pop and sputter when you downshifted the standard transmission, advertising to everyone that this car was truly special. That was cool.

In the summer of '58 we looked at our Schwinns with very uncool, jaundiced eyes. Imagine one of the high school cheerleaders seeing you riding that thing. It could set a guy back a year, maybe two. You wouldn't have any more chance of dating a cheerleader than the guys who wore regular slacks, carried briefcases to school and had clip-on plastic penholders in their shirt pockets. And dating a cheerleader was, of course, the pinnacle of coolness.

So maybe we sacrificed our bikes for the cheerleaders. Maybe bike polo was a postpubescent, pre-adult ritual in which we not only left a childhood thing behind, we also destroyed it so that going back would be impossible. The site that we chose for this event (I hesitate to call it a game) now seems meaningful. We chose our old elementary school playground, which we had also outgrown. The Softball field had been set up among the dirt, weeds and gravel so that the leftfield fence was only 150 feet down the line from home plate. By sixth grade, some of us could easily knock a softball over this fence and into the flower gardens or off the front porches of the houses across the street. And that, according to the people who lived there, was very uncool. We hadn't played softball there for two or three years, and bike polo was our last hurrah on that playground.

I have absolutely no recollection of how it all got started. Suffice it to say that one of us experienced a moment of pure creative genius. Recruitment of players willing to sacrifice their bikes was aided by that stalwart ally of conformity—peer pressure. If someone hesitated to enter his bicycle into the fracas, you had only to ask, "Well, what are you going to do with it now, ride it to school?" Those who didn't take readily to the idea of bike polo were shamed into it and dared not change their minds.

I also cannot remember who provided the croquet set. Perhaps it is he who should be credited with the conception of bike polo.

We chose sides, put a wooden croquet ball just beyond second base and lined up—one team along the third-base line, the other team somewhere in the depths of rightfield. I can still picture it: six riders on a side, each with a wooden mallet; a lone croquet ball in the middle of the field; tin cans placed about 10 feet apart for goals; 12 young men on their bikes poised with one foot on the ground for the pushoff.

Go!