NickawampusPoloClub

Here is a pretty good summary of polo. You’re on your trusty steed, you’ve been chasing that little white ball, and now you slap it between the goal posts. Well done.

But here’s a forerunner to polo, well turned out gentleman, good hoss and pack of hounds, ready for the hunt. And notice the similarities with polo. Substitute that little white ball for Mr. Fox and you have parallel activities, with the one important difference that you don’t need thousands of acres of unused land for the pursuit, a field 100 x 300 yds., 10 acres, will do very well, and we’ve carried the oldest sport right into the modern world with all its constraints and space restrictions.

If we see polo as the extension of this ancient tradition, we’ll not only bask in such glory as being George Washington’s sporting grandsons. We’ll also ground all of our modern sports on a foundation much solider than merchandising and passive entertainment.

And now the umpire has given the ball back to the players and…..Tally ho, the game is afoot!

The next step, after the strokes on the Library Pony, was to see real live shots on a real live horse. Didn’t happen. It was far too difficult to hold the lead ropes, the mallet, and the camera. Also, I got scared of my horse and haven’t been riding that much, March 3,2024 being the last post. But here is some footage that may help, and reveals the main horse activity of the last 5 months or so. Hand grazing horses, tap-tap-taping with the foot mallet, all in search of the wild asparagus, i.e. the perfect, accelerating, gravity-creating contact with the ball.

So looking around the photo lib. I came across this. If you’re too scared to toget on, play on foot. Keep playing. What happens with the mallet is far the most important part of the game anyway. And being astride is not nearly as conducive to real improvement with the mallet as being on foot. So get with it.

See what I mean. None of this is easy. Onward and upward.

We have promised to get out on the field and show what it’s really like. We haven’t factored in just how hard that might be, to hold two lead ropes, a mallet and a camera. Here’s the first effort. More later.

Here we are on the back field of the Nickawampus Polo Club. And have you ever seen a more beautiful setting for a polo field? No, I didn’t think so. And the Arab mare, who goes with us, adds another lead rope to a situation already requiring three hands, for a mallet, a camera, and another lead rope, for Easy, the horse we’re riding. Never fear, dear reader, we’re working on it. Patience and perseverance made a Bishop of His Reverence. You will soon be sitting on a wonderful horse, tapping a ball with a polo mallet, on your way to a new familiarity with our great sport.

Members of the Nickawampus Polo Club may wonder what an article about cattle raising has to do with polo. This article was published in the September, 1952 edition of The Cattleman Magazine, about the McMurtry brothers, who were exemplary cowmen, but they also all, without exception, virtually lived on horseback. So read and savor this article, getting a great tutorial on cattle, but especially notice how your horsemanship and riding improve.

We’ve answered the question, “How does an article about cattle improve our polo?” Answer: it improves our riding, tremendously. But the answer brings up another question: “Why did polo not catch on in cattle country?” It certainly did in Argentina. Why not in the U.S.?

Rather than debate that topic, let’s just hope that more cowhands start to know polo better, play more, and play better.

Now that we’ve laid the groundwork for a proper stroke, it’s time to get on and hit a few. First, let’s reacquaint ourselves with our library pony. Here he is.

There are several things to notice about this sequence. It is continuous, as your play should be. And it’s simple and repeatable. Pay attention especially to how the ball pops off the mallet: that’s acceleration, produced by imparting angular momentum to the shot. This is the pearl of great price, and what your sports journey has been seeking. You need only a small effort to achieve an outsize result. This is the beginning of skillful play.

Next, the same exercise from the back of Easy, a real, live horse. This is really starting to get good!

That’s right. My name is Van, and as is particularly appropriate for the owner/manager and blogger in chief of an online polo club, I got that name from a horse. My dad’s father, Joe H. Smith, was a legendary horseman, and when he traded a span of mules for a mare and her foal from a local horse dealer in 1911, he was definitely onto something.

In those days he was ranching owned and leased land just on top of the caprock in southeast Dickens County, Texas. The land was not yet completely fenced, so he and his brother Charlie maintained a pack of staghounds and chased antelope across the grassy plains.

The paint horse that he bought as a foal came along nicely, and Grandad slowly realized that this was no ordinary horse. He seemed inexhaustible, as well as cagy and smart. He understood the hunt as well as his rider did. But there was one more thing; he was extremely adept at learning, and kept a steady, persistent head when confronted by new tasks, which his rapturous owner delighted in showing him. And he needed a bigger stage.

Here is the article written by my dad, Joe H. Smith Jr. in The Cattleman Magazine in September, 1950, with additional pictures of this remarkable horse, performing with his rider, World Champion Cowboy Leonard Stroud. I consider it a great honor to be named Van, after the paint horse, the most famous western horse in America until Tom Mix’s Tony became even more famous by starring in many of the early western movies.

I hope you enjoy this article, the manuscript and the pictures as much as I do.

If you’ve been around horses for any length of time, you’ll have noticed that much more goes on around them than actually on them. In addition to our archaic bond with them, we may also be afraid of them. Whatever the cause, advancing as a rider, certainly as a polo player, requires that you streamline the process of getting on.

Here is a sequence of photos that shows just such a streamlined process. Notice that it takes me less than ten minutes from the time I arrive at the barn to the moment I mount up and ride. Giddy Up!