Maine’s most exotic sport

The game of kings takes place in Cumberland, Maine. You don’t have to be as rich as a king to play polo, but you need to love horses and enjoy some risk.

By Lance Tapley

AVOIDING THE CHECK: polo can get rough and tumble.

What is Maine’s most exotic sport?

Well, it’s certainly exotic to see a group of horsemen fighting each other as they gallop across a field in a cloud of dust in suburban Cumberland. This vision is accompanied by the primitive sound of horses’ hooves literally shaking the ground. It like a scene from a movie about Genghis Khan and his terrifying Mongolian hordes.

When you get closer to the action, however, it becomes another, but equally strange, scene. Here is the fabulous rich man’s sport of polo, “the game of kings,” being played on the unpretentious locale of the Cumberland Fairground racetrack.

Adding to the strangeness, there are hardly any spectators of this match on a beautiful, blue-sky July afternoon. A dozen people — friends and relatives of the players — are on hand to watch the Down East Polo Club play on its home turf against the Byfield Polo Club of Massachusetts.

Why so few spectators? When the thundering herd is close to you, it is exciting to watch. The players charge around at up to 35 miles an hour on magnificent, half-ton animals. The teamwork is dramatic. However, when the action shifts to the other end of the 300-yard field, it is hard to see what’s going on. Binoculars would be useful. Maybe this is discouraging to potential fans. But probably the big reason Maine polo has so few spectators is that few people know it is played here.

When you can see the action, the match is not hard to follow. The men or women on the horses try with a mallet to knock a white ball inside goal posts at either end of the field. There are six “chukkers” or periods of seven minutes each. In the fancy polo leagues — say, in Palm Beach, Florida — a player uses a different horse for each chukker. Hence the phrase “a string of polo ponies” in some millionaires’ wills. In the Down East Polo Club, though, the players make do with, on the average, two or three horses, resting them between chukkers.

There are four players on a team. They are conveniently numbered on their polo shirts 1 through 4. Position 1 is on offense, and 4 is on defense. Positions 2 and 3 are pivots who change from offense to defense as possession of the ball changes, which it frequently does, much like hockey. The Down East club normally rotates six to eight players through the positions during a match. There is an individual handicapping system for formal matches and tournaments.

Men and women usually play together. Men have historically dominated the sport and make up about three-quarters of the players nationally, even though among young people women riders vastly outnumber men. “It’s how girls learn to dominate someone bigger than themselves,” says Nina Fuller, explaining this preponderance. A horsewoman and the Phoenix’s photographer for this article, she travels the world photographing and writing about riding. She also serves as the author’s consultant.

Although there are striped-shirt referees on horses, polo can get quite rough because “checking” is legal. This is when a player bumps another out of the way, an action which can extend into a “ride-off,” when a player and horse at full gallop push another player and horse down the field and away from the ball. And the mallet can be used to block another mallet. Players really need their knee guards and helmets with facemasks. It is a hot-blooded, sweaty sport.

One of the spectators is in a wheelchair. “Probably an ex-polo player,” Fuller observes.

“It is strenuous,” says Hugh Johnston, the Down East Polo Club’s president. He is 65 and has a red face at the end of each chukker to contrast with his white mustache and hair. He speaks of polo’s effects on both humans and horses. For the humans, good hand-eye coordination counts, but “almost anybody can hit the ball after a couple of months,” he says. “The riding is harder than hitting the ball.”

The horses have to be of athletic build — not bulky, agile, able to turn quickly — and need to be conditioned for endurance through training which might include six or eight miles of cantering or galloping daily. “They tend to be like long-distance runners,” Johnston says. “They’re not heavyweights.”

They are mostly very beautiful, high-spirited thoroughbreds. In the fanciest leagues, they are specially bred and trained for polo and can cost $20,000 or more each. Some of the horses Johnston owns were racehorses. Most of the Maine club’s horses cost in the $1,500 to $3,000 range. To this reporter, it looks like polo horses tend to be short, the better to put the player closer to the ball, but short horses are favored, Johnston says, because “long, tall horses have trouble negotiating turns.”

HUGH JOHNSTON: “Almost anybody can hit the ball after a couple of months.”

The Down East club, Maine’s only, has been in existence since 1978. Johnston was one of the founders. Although Maine has not seen much interest in polo playing, the sport is growing nationally. The United States Polo Association (www.uspolo.org) claims 225 clubs with over 3,000 members.

As one travels south, the clubs become more numerous. Florida, particularly the exclusive Palm Beach area, is the country’s polo mecca. “Down in West Palm Beach the players are very rich,” said Johnston. “They have hired pros.” The professionals tend to be from Argentina, the pre-eminent polo-playing country. Pros and amateurs play together. Possibly the oldest team sport (predating Genghis Khan), it is played all over the world.

It’s a long way from West Palm Beach to the Down East Polo Club, whose members conduct their sport in a relaxed manner. When asked, few players know the score of the match. It seems a friendly group. After every game, it is a different player’s job to provide the dinner picnic for both teams.

The club’s ten members include schoolteachers, a lawyer, a student at Cornell, and a neurosurgeon. Johnston runs a small pharmaceutical company. Frank De Peters, captain of the Byfield club, is a veggie-burger salesman who keeps four horses on his farm. He calls his club “working class polo.” The national association says polo has “the richest social brew of any sport,” but, adding in all those Palm Beach millionaires, the association’s average member has a net worth of about $1 million.

The norm for these northern New England team members, however, is, not so much wealth, but devotion to horses. “It’s about the horse,” Fuller said, trying to get to the nub of the sport. Some people have several snowmobiles or motorcycles. These people have several horses.

A prime example of a Maine polo player who doesn’t winter in a mansion in Florida is Gary Sturtevant, 47, a rugged, mustachioed cameraman for Channel 6 television who lives in Falmouth. He is an example also of how vigorous polo can get.

“I’ve been in intensive care,” he relates, describing the time he broke five ribs and punctured a lung when he brought a horse into a game too fast and it threw him. Sturtevant likes sports with risk. He gave up racecar driving for polo. While he was in intensive care, he planned his comeback by buying two horses.

He has owned a total of 25 polo ponies (as these horses are called). At the present, he has four. He buys $2,500 horses; trains them for polo or, if that doesn’t work out, for other forms of riding; and then sells them at a profit. “It pays for my habit,” he says. He likes polo’s competitiveness. He especially likes it when the team competes against a professional, as happened the previous weekend in Vermont.

The Down East Polo Club welcomes new members. “We have beginner horses. We can let people try a match right off if they have a riding background,” Sturtevant says. “We’d love to see two good teams in Maine.”

Nina Fuller takes another stab at summing up this exotic sport in its Down East version: “It’s a group of friends that get together every week and ride their horses around hitting a ball from one end of the field to the other,” she says.

Simple — but, still, definitely exotic. Plus, you’ve got to really love horses and enjoy a little risk.

See for yourself The Down East Polo Club plays all its home matches at the Cumberland Fairground, which is in West Cumberland on Bruce Hill Road off Route 26/100, about 10 miles from downtown Portland. It can be reached by Exits 10 or 11 off the Maine Turnpike. The club also has matches scheduled until the end of September in New Hampshire and Vermont. A game usually lasts less than two hours. For playing times and in case of bad weather, call Hugh Johnston at (207) 772-2129 (days). Johnston also can arrange for you to see a practice at his New Gloucester farm. Here are this season’s remaining home matches: August 4 — against Byfield (Mass.) Polo Club August 25 — Quechee (Vt.) Polo Club August 26 — Quechee Polo Club September 2 — Byfield Polo Club September 8 — Sugarbush (Vt.) Polo Club September 9 — Sugarbush Polo Club September 15 — Byfield Polo Club —LT

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.