The Fast Green World of Polo

A pastime going pop--like vintage champagne

It is the headiest concentration of strong legs, stout hearts, blue blood, green stuff, gray matter and handsome lineaments in the world. Its venue, appropriately, is Florida's Gold Coast. What glitters there each April is the Michelob World Cup, polo's Super Bowl and World Series. What else would bring bonnie Prince Charlie to the boonies to play in sweltering humidity and wind up in West Palm Beach's Good Samaritan Hospital, a victim of heat prostration?

Polo has traditionally been the exclusive sport of maharajahs, marquises and millionaires, and the game's stars still tend to be the rich and the royal. Polo attracts an identifiable elite: svelte, tanned women, hard-muscled men, romantics bound by gallant memory and conspicuous quixotry. However, for participants and spectators alike, it is on its way to becoming a middle-class pastime, like golf, tennis and sailing before it. Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based brewing company that sponsors the $150,000 Michelob tournament, belongs to the beerage, not the peerage. A large number of the watchers drawn by the pony-and-mallet action to the Palm Beach Polo and Country Club are consumers of Michelob rather than Moet & Chandon. Many of the players, too, are young and unrich. There is a saying among poloists that the sport need not be more expensive than owning a middle-size sailboat. And it offers at least equal excitement and cachet.

Indeed, the name of the game might well be Cachet-22. Addicted players can never have enough of it. They start as kids batting balls from bicycles. Some still active players are almost as old as the game itself.* It is one of the fastest, fiercest contests ever devised, teaming and opposing human and equine skills. Says one player: "Polo is like playing chess while bobsledding." Charging at 30 m.p.h. on 1,000-lb. horses across ten acres of greensward--about ten times the size of a football field--players are engaged in a kind of cavalry campaign of which Light-Horse Harry Lee would have approved.

Polo's new popularity is due in large degree to the efforts of Gould, Inc., a Chicago-based manufacturer of electrical and mechanical products. The company by 1978 had acquired 10,200 acres in Wellington, 15 miles west of Palm Beach. Under William T. Ylvisaker, 56, a top-rated polo player who has been chairman of the company since 1972, Gould bought the land for $10.5 million (around $1,000 an acre).

One reason why the property went for far less than market value was the insistence of the Wellington executors that it be developed with a decent regard for the environment. Ah, said Ylvisaker, we shall devote it to polo. Also to tennis and golf. Also to the construction of homes for people who care about these sports, and particularly for people who ride horses. Aside from the twelve tennis courts (nine night-lighted), five swimming pools and a 70.5-rated golf course, the PBPCC boasts seven full-size polo fields. There are stables for more than 300 steeds, miles of bridle paths to ride them on, and bevies of lasses to attend them.

The Palm Beach club is the first real estate development in the U.S. to be planned around polo. Its facilities for horses and horsemen may also be the best in the world after Argentina, where polo is the pride of the pampas, and riders and mounts are national heroes. Like the West Indians, who learned cricket from the English and went on to beat them at it, the Argentines acquired their first 50-in. rattan mallets and 3 1/4-in. willow polo balls from Britain in the late 19th century (the word polo derives from pulu, Tibetan for a willow knot).

The British still play a devilish fine game, but their island's limited land and horsepower have made them the third-ranking polo nation. The Americans are second. Argentina is indisputably Numero Uno; all five of the world's ten-goal (i.e., top-handicapped) players are Argentines. And they are coming north. The Pele of polo, Estancia Owner Juan Carlos Harriott, captains the Palm Beach team. He leads his four-man Florida squad against teams from Argentina, Nigeria, Colombia, Texas, New York, Connecticut and Oklahoma. During this year's 17-week Palm Beach tournament season, the Americans have been the big winners. Yankee buckaroos did not, however, prevail against the Prince of Wales' Windsor Park team last week, but the sun did. Overcome by the 90DEG heat, Charles was admitted to a hospital for the first time since he had appendicitis at the age of ten, but was back out the next day in good spirit.

The panache of polo and the added attraction of a spacious, well-planned Sunbelt environment have already worked their magic. Some 200 condominiums have been built on elegantly laid-out acres. The dwellings are selling for an average $140,000 a unit, up $30,000 since they were first put up for sale 13 months ago. Furnished studios fetch $110,000; penthouse suites in four buildings go for $300,000 to $350,000. The two major housing areas center on golf and tennis, and, of course, polo. The polo-oriented housing is selling as fast as the builder can put in the last windowpane. Adjacent land can still be bought at $8,500 an acre; while that is more than eight times as much as Gould paid for the raw palmetto and cypress scrubland, it is a fraction of the cost of land on, say, the Hawaiian island of Maui. By the end of the decade, the developers plan to have sold 1,900 condominium units, leaving intact a 120-acre stand of cypress trees. Also planned are a shooting range, access to a private Atlantic beach, and a second golf course.

Almost certainly the PBPCC spread will remain the bastion of polo in North America: a cosmopolitan oasis of good sportsmanship, high living and galloping glory. It was said of a polo-playing Persian prince that when he hit the ball it often "went up into the clouds and disappeared." They still lose a lot of balls that way.

*Well, not quite. Polo is known to have been played in Persia in A.D. 100.

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