The Gracida brothers from Mexico were both world-class ten goalers. Yes. It was not a bad bet at all—and when I learned several weeks later that the tournament was already fixed, our bet looked even better.
What polo people call “gentleman’s polo” is a very different game from professional, or “high goal.” The gentleman’s version is an amateur horse sport, a kind of Rodeo for Rich Cowboys that is played all over the country by not many people at all—maybe .001 percent of the population, or even .0001 percent—and it is not a spectator sport. Less than .00001 percent of the U.S. population ever watches polo, and only 666 people have ever seen it on TV. Jai alai is a major sport compared with polo, and more people paid to watch the Calaveras County Frog Jumping Contest last summer than attended the prestigious month-long U.S. Polo Open on Long Island in September.
Polo is a sport for the filthy, aggressive rich and a handful of skilled professional horse athletes who roam the world and sell themselves to the highest bidder, often a different one each week and always for princely fees.
The people who pay these fees are called patrons, pronounced as in the Spanish: patrones. A patron hires his own players—or at least the other three—and he plays every minute of every chukker, no matter how useless he is. But make no mistake about it: patrons are polo; they pay all the bills and buy all the horses and support the high-goal players in the extravagant style of the polo world, which is the only style they know.
Patrons are a strange breed with no common bond except hubris. There are fewer than thirty of them in the world at any given time, and they travel a feverish high-dollar circuit, one that stretches from Palm Springs and Santa Barbara in the West to Palm Beach and Greenwich in the East, and then from England to France and back across the Atlantic to the pampas of Argentina, the mecca of high-goal polo all over the world and the sacred birthplace of Belinda, the mythical four-eyed horse goddess of polo and everything it stands for.
Belinda is lewd yet friendly; she is an all-knowing, dissolute slut horse, insanely rapacious yet very inviting and maternal at the same time. She dwells alone somewhere up in the Andes, and on moonlit nights she comes down and mingles regally with normal horses and sometimes even with the gauchos. They weep and shout at the sight of her, and a few even claim to have ridden her.
Patrons are no different. They worship Belinda for many reasons, but mainly out of fear. It was Belinda who made Argentina the ruler of the polo world and the hatchery of high-goal champions. She is capricious, however, and is said to take bribes and wantonly peddle her influence from time to time.
She usually favors Argentines, but there were rumors this year that Doug Matthews got to her first. This news sent a wave of excitement through American polo circles and ignited an anti-Argie feeding frenzy among North American patrons. The cost of entering a team in this year’s U.S. Open rose to roughly $1 million, and the prize was still a bent silver cup worth less than $200. But to them it made no difference.
Eleven hard-riding patrons bit that bullet without blinking, and one of them, a mysterious black sheik from Nigeria, went so far as to “sponsor” two teams—which raised eyebrows here and there, but only among hard-core traditionalists. What the hell? There is nothing weird about a trainer entering two horses in the Kentucky Derby. It’s called an “entry” for betting purposes, and it’s done all the time.
The rules are different in horse sports, and brazen cheating is widely accepted as Normal. Hideous shenanigans that would get you barred from any other professional sport except dog racing are widely admired among horse people. Probably it is the legacy of Genghis Khan, who made his own rules and killed anybody who violated them.
There are many rules in polo—too many, in fact—but when it comes to the buying and selling of major championships, there are no rules at all. It is sleazier than pro wrestling and more expensive than a terminal cocaine habit, but the rich have warmly embraced it, and many have turned into addicts.
If there is any natural sport for the ’90s in America, it is polo. It is a dangerous game ruled entirely by money and utterly without any redeeming social value. Loyalty in any form is a weakness to be jeered at, and the only thing that prevents some half-bright millionaire horse thug from buying his way to victory in the U.S. Open is ten other half-bright millionaire horse thugs who also crave to buy it and will fight to the death to prevent anyone else from winning.
A million dollars is nothing to Team Revlon or the billionaire patron Henryk de Kwiatkowski of Calumet Farm. These people fly their ponies around the world in custom-built DC-8s, luxurious airborne stables that can haul forty or fifty finely tuned horses at a time, along with fifteen or twenty grooms and usually a dozen criminal pimps on the run from Interpol or the Mafia. The polo crowd is eclectic and dangerously hagridden with narcissism and treachery, and that is the way they like it. Victory is all that matters.