NickawampusPoloClub

Here, dear reader and member of the Nickawampus Polo Club, is the complete Polo kit, two world-class horses and a Bentley. While the Bentley was easy enough to drive, neither horse, the bay gelding descended from Czar, a pre-eminent line of French race horses, featured in these pages in “Mutt’s Big Race,” nor the white mare, a granddaughter of Alfred Vanderbilt’s great Native Dancer, was really rideable, not in the stop and go of a polo chukker. A previous owner had applied so much pressure that both were given to explosive bursts of speed, often when unasked for. So, chalk one up to experience. Alas, we loved them, and donated them to the Polo program at Oregon State, where the arena format somewhat contained them and the young, daring college kids had a great time on such amazing mounts.

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!

As famed New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel once said, “It don’t always work.” He was referring to the unprecedented, never-to-be repeated success of the 1950s Yankees. Have the most impressive line up of sluggers in history, add a pitching staff that still lives in the imagination of fans, throw in an esprit de corps and a tight, victory-oriented organization, which makes every other team see their games with you as the final of the World Series, and you win a lot of ball games, penants, and championships. But as Casey reminds us, you lose some.

It’s the same with horses. You love them, care for them, devote your best efforts to their maintenance and upkeep, trying to give them the fulfillment that we all want and need. Still you make mistakes which could end in tragedy, remember, they’re flight animals, and yet some end on an unexpected, triumphal note, like this one, Mutt’s Big Race. Read on.

It’s hard to imagine activities more different that polo and fly fishing: in the one, you’re hustling, energetic, effortful, way out there in every sense of the word, in the other you’re at one with nature, in a quiet spot, focusing your energy on a lily pad or a ripple on the water, in a world of your own.

But there are deep similarities: both are all encompassing, and devotees of each find them to be metaphors for everything else they’re trying to do in life.

Here is a marvelous story written by a dear friend who got his first job, even his career, by focusing on his love of fly-fishing. Remember that members of the Nickawampus Polo Club are good at all sports, because the principles are the same for hitting good shots and dropping that little fly right where you want it on a quiet stream. And the rewards are the same.

Here’s the book:

Rather than serialize Conquistador, like Charles Dickens, I’m going to post the Amazon order form so you can buy it. It costs $9.99 for paperback, $15.99 for hardcover, Kindle is $4.99.

Even though authors are supposed to refrain from reviewing their own work, I’m going to offer a few responses from readers so far, as a sort of review, so you’ll know what your getting for your hard-earned $15.99, $9.99, or $4.99.

First off, it’s only nominally about polo. It’s really about evaluating your own work product and not being overly optimistic or pessimistic about it. In other words, to be objective. Sal, the book’s hero, realizes that the years he’s put in, the goals he had, the living he’s earned, which formed the basis for his mis-evaluation, count less in his attempt to be objective than comparing how well he’s done with how well he hoped to do.

Furthermore, when he has to downgrade his assessment, he begins to wonder how he might have done better. This is the core of the book, which you will read nowhere else. While polo, or anything else that receives large amounts of attention, is hard enough to play well, there’s a much greater difficulty, in arranging circumstances so that you can do enough of it to start making progress. To do this, you’ll have to be resourceful, determined, and tough as hell. The world doesn’t intend for you to be good at polo, or anything else. If it did, you’d already be a ten-goaler. You’ll have to wrest your success away from its indifference, if not downright hostility. Sal “wins,” if you will, by coming up with a radically different practice regimen, one that really works, and his long-sought, elusive success comes in the certainty that he knows what he’s doing.

One last point: if you do get circumstances to align so that you can do a lot of it, play polo, sail, speak Spanish, or whatever it is, and you start improving, there will come a moment when you get it. It’s like going through a door, you’re inside now. Don’t overlook this moment. It’s what you’ve been working toward and hoping for. Enjoy it.

Here’s the book: