IT IS AN intimate sort of thing, this indoor polo, that makes sport of the winter of our discontent, and gives a real “close-up” of the galloping game. From the time these lines appear until well past the Ides of March there will be something of a furore in the armories, East, West and North—New York, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Newark, Toronto, Chicago, Springfield, Baltimore and elsewhere, centering finally on the tanbark of the Squadron A armory at Madison Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street, where the National and Intercollegiate championships will be played. There are sectional elimination tournaments which will serve to thrust out the leading teams that will go into the finals for the President’s Cup, and there will be home and home games among the colleges that go in for the mounted game, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, West Point and the Pennsylvania Military College. Every Saturday night there will be a clash in all the classes in the Squadron armory, the original “little theatre” of the sport.

The progress of this “close-up” sport that none the less goes at the galloping gait, has been little short of remarkable. To the Squadron goes much of the credit for sticking to it and making a go of it at a time when the outdoor polo experts were not even willing to look upon it as so much as a little brother. Today it is a full-grown brother, and there are times when the outdoor stars discover that they have something left to learn in the way of shot making when their efforts are crowded into the small space of an armory.

From the point of view of the public, that fills up the armory seats, even on the snowy nights of midwinter, indoor polo is a game of personalities. There are favorites promoted or demoted night after night—Matthews and Vietor, two of the Squadron’s troop captains, Brady and Fitzgibbon, also wearers of the Hussar uniform. Winston Guest, now leader of the Commonwealth team of Boston, and an internationalist, Forrester Clark, that whale of an all-round athlete from Harvard, Wallop, the “cowboy peer” from Wyoming, Hanley, the smallest man in polo, the little package of mounted dynamite who looks, according to his own description, when on a tall horse, like the whistle on the Mauretania, Gerald Dempsey, Arch Kinney, Dr. Blackwell, “Jerry” Smith, who persists in topping fences during the outdoor season, and has to do a hurry order job of mending his bones in time to get into action indoors, the young and husky Pflugs of the Brooklyn Riding and Driving Club, that purple-shirted avalanche that generally manages to surge through to the finals, Arthur Borden, son of General Howard Borden, and something of a polo figure at Princeton and in the neighborhood of Rumson, New Jersey, Gerald Dempsey, originally of Boston, but now one of the salient figures in the Meadow Brook contingent, and a glittering host of other stars.

THE GAME is quite as simple for the spectator as the outdoor affair, save that in this case fouls cost a team one half point instead of an opponent’s free shot for goal, and because of the restriction of space much is made of the angle shots off the boards. Indoor polo has a generalship all its own, as the outdoor experts who have tried it have found to their cost, and the numbers of the positions mean next to nothing. The motto of the game is “Hit it where you find it,” which means many a scoring shot with the backhand, and turning on the ball only when one has so manceuvred as to find his opponents reining in and themselves turning. Practically any position in the arena is a scoring position or an incipient scoring position, and there has been built up around the play a form of generalship as distinct and as effective as that applied by the Meadow Brook masters to the outdoor game.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of the indoor game, considered as a preparation for the outdoor affair, is the development of Winston Guest into the successor of the mighty Devereux Milburn on America’s Big Four that turned back the Argentines. It will be remembered that Guest on his big days out of doors, was anything but merely a back, that at one time or another he played all of the positions on the great outdoor four, coming through again and again into the scoring positions. Well, much of that versatility was due to his experience under the roof of the Squadron armory, where he was always an outstanding star.

There will be Argentines in action sooner or later. When Jack Nelson, who led the last invasion from the pampas, was in town, lie had several conferences with Granniss that were of considerable moment to the international feature of the game. Nelson was properly enthusiastic over the indoor game, and told of a player in the Argentine who was, in his opinion, a better player indoors than the famous Lewis Lacey. In Buenos Aires there is a huge riding enclosure, but polo has been handicaped from time to time by the fact that it was open to the skies. It is to be roofed in now, and the Argentines plan a development of the indoor game along the lines of their promotion of the outdoor sport.

In Chicago and Cincinnati the game is moving so fast, and there has been such a rapid increase in the number of players, that it is possible another year that the championships will be moved into the Middle Western sector. There is no doubt that a bid will be made for them. These championships come along in March, at a time when some of the best mounts in the outdoor game, and also the players who have been wintering in Florida, the Carolinas and elsewhere, are on their way North.

IN THE meantime there will be plenty of tournaments in and around the big indoor polo centers. In addition to the Squadron, which has three or four teams in action every week end, sometimes playing twice on the same day in New York, Philadelphia and West Point, there will be tournaments held in the Eastern sector by individual organizations, such as the New York Athletic Club, and the Riding and Driving Club of Brooklyn. In the West there will be the usual elimination matches, as well as in Pennsylvania and the New England area. It has become a commonplace to say of any sport that it is in for its best season, but it is certainly true of this sport that has fought and won an uphill battle for public favor, and won it purely on its inherent merits.

Source: Outlook, 2 January 1929