12 minute read
Varsity Polo
Black and white prints of the Armory are available for sale to support the Yale Polo program. Contact Liz Brayboy at LBrayboy@att.net for more information
Yale University, one of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, is also home to the country’s most decorated polo team. But to reach their stables, you must drive some 25 minutes from the tightknit campus, out where the gothic towers sink below the horizon, out through the sleepy residential neighbourhoods of New Haven, past the strip-mall suburbs, down winding country roads without stoplights, and finally onto a gravel drive that smells of horses. Beneath an A-frame roof is a dirt arena and a row of stables. Alongside the building is a small outdoor playing arena, bounded on the far side by the Connecticut woods. You wouldn’t know it, but you’ve arrived at the home of one of the most successful collegiate polo programmes in the country.
One Thursday evening in October, while other students hit the books or the bars, four varsity polo players, two boys and two girls, rode horses here under the white lights of the barn. Liz Brayboy, a former Yale Polo captain and the volunteer alumni advisor of Yale Polo, barked tactics from the sideline. Then Seppi Colloredo-Mansfeld, the team captain, briefed the squad on the upcoming game against Harvard as they squatted on the concrete floor next to the stables. He pointed to Rebecca Smith, a fellow junior and the team’s president. ‘You mark Albany,’ he said. ‘Take him out to lunch, whatever.’
Brayboy, an insurance consultant by day, likes to say this place – the C&S Ranches in Bethany, Connecticut – is a world away from Yale. Riding horses at the barn, schoolwork is a distant reality. But the polo team is disconnected from the university in other ways. Few students know the team exists and fewer come to their games. And yet, polo has been one of Yale’s most successful athletic programmes, turning out some of America’s best polo players and making Yale an
important part of the history of the sport in America and the world. Yale still commands a charitable respect in the world of polo – the patron of the elite Black Watch team recently donated ponies and equipment, and British retailer Jack Wills flies the players out to Guards each summer to share the field with Oxford and Cambridge.
Within the university, polo’s place is more tenuous, culturally and financially. Since they receive little support from Yale, the players work and pay to play. They scrub saddles, clean equipment, and trailer their ponies down to Yale for home games. It’s a far cry from the sport’s patrician image, and from the glory days of polo at Yale in the early 20th century. But the surprising thing is not that the programme is a shadow of its former self: it’s that it exists at all.
The Yale Polo team was founded in 1903, and quickly gained a following at the college. By 1906, the team was drawing hundreds of enthusiastic spectators to games like the Quinnipiac Cups contest against Rockaway: ‘society was out in force,’ wrote The New York Times. It was the beginning of a long era of dominance for Yale polo, driven by a series of stars like Winston Guest, America’s first 10-goal player in indoor polo. Polo historian Frank Milburn credits Yalie Harry Payne Whitney with changing the nature of the sport, popularising long passes, fluid positioning, and hard riding: ‘Modern polo is an American game, a power game, and Harry Payne Whitney invented it.’ The team was a training ground for the US National team, sometimes supplying three of its four players.
By 1923, polo was a varsity sport at Yale, joining baseball, football and other spectator sports in that pantheon. The team won nationals four years in a row, from ’23 to ’26. Their games were at the Armory, a building built in 1916 by the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), which supported Yale Polo because of the sport’s military ties – it was often used to train cavalry. At the height of the Roaring Twenties, which were as close to a heyday as polo has had in America (sometimes 30,000 people attended big matches), an old Yale family called Phipps
From left Harry Payne Whitney; 10-goal players, Michael Phipps and cousin, Winston Guest; Annie Phipps presenting the Open Polo Championship trophy to her grandsons, Raymond Guest, Winston Guest and Michael Phipps at Meadow Brook Club,1934. All played polo at Yale.
gave a grant to the university to ensure the future of polo at the school.
Even as crowds flocked to games, polo at Yale was generating controversy. In 1915, Devereux Milburn, one of the best Americans ever to swing a mallet, wrote in the Yale Daily News that polo was undemocratic and not appropriate for college play: ‘The expense of the game was so great that very few could afford to play it… My idea of a college game is a game in which all can compete on an equal footing. This is true of baseball, football, rowing and the other college games. It could not be true of polo.’ The team tried to reassure the student body via a Yale Daily News editorial, urging that ‘everyone who has ever ridden should try out for the team. Inability to afford more than one pony should not hinder any one from competing.’ (Obviously, the standards of collegiate wealth were a bit different in those days; at Princeton, two polo-playing brothers from Colorado arrived with a string of 13 ponies. This was typical.) But as horses disappeared from everyday life and retreated to the stables of the rich, polo grew more exclusive, its reputation more tainted. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald had the reprehensible Tom Buchanan play polo at Yale, and Gatsby slyly and repeatedly refers to him as ‘the polo player’, a nickname that Tom tries to reject: ‘I’d a little rather not be the polo player.’
With the exception of a few well-attended matches in the coming years, such as the annual game against Harvard, popularity declined and costs mounted. The ROTC, which funded the Yale team through World War II, and whose presence was responsible for a number of Yale’s ponies and the upkeep of the Armory, was kicked off campus in 1969, a casualty of the burgeoning anti-war movement. The team lost its varsity status in 1967. Since then, Yale’s financial contribution has amounted to what one player called ‘gas money’. Coach Lou Lopez and a polo alumnus named Bill Ylvisaker brought life to the programme in the mid-Eighties, engaging alumni with events like the Harriman Cup, expanding the squad, and renewing the relationship with the athletic department. But the resurgence was short-lived. In 1986, Yale Polo won the national championship; they haven’t won since.
Meanwhile, the original, explicit purpose of the Phipps donation seemed to have been forgotten even by the team itself. Yale Polo played inside, and the fields had for decades hosted more popular and accessible sports like soccer and baseball. When Ylvisaker brought this issue to the attention of the University in 1979, it provoked a flurry of internal memos. Faced with the fact that there was no polo on the Phipps fields, Assistant General Counsel Linda Koch Lorimer, who is now the University Vice President, went looking for 98-year-old Howard Phipps to discuss a revision of the terms, apparently without success. General Counsel José Cabranes, who is now an Appeals Court Judge, wrote to Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti that ‘it would clearly be advantageous to have a “tidier” record’, but in the end, the administration felt it was in little danger of being sued. One memo read: ‘After all, are there not rooms throughout the
Top left Yale vs. Princeton at the Eastern Collegiate Championship, Governors Island, 1937 Bottom left George C. Sherman Jr, aged 14. Later captain of the Yale Freshman team and one of the founders of the Museum of Polo and Hall of Fame in Florida Opposite Yale University Polo Team, 1924 University which were given in someone’s name to be, say “a reading room” and may now be a microfilm area or a catalogue area?’ With the exception of odd outdoor games during the summer, the fields remained the host of more popular sports than polo.
For Yale Polo, the worst was yet to come. In the summer of 2009, the Yale administration announced without warning the closure of the stables at the Armory. The quality of the team had declined from the high-water mark of the Eighties, and the programme sometimes finished in the red, with Yale covering its debts. With the financial crisis eating away at its endowment, amid hiring freezes and larger cuts, the university said it could not spare funds for long-overdue renovations to the Armory. Some polo alumni saw the decision more cynically, as a move by a university to eliminate a lingering vestige of Old Yale, that stomping ground for the blue-blooded aristocrats of Andover and Exeter. Was polo at Yale a proud tradition or an embarrassing, expensive and exclusive anachronism? What determined the value of a sport to Yale? History? Popularity? Uniqueness?
The more pressing concern was to figure out where the 30 homeless ponies would go. The entire team was on summer vacation: Captain Jessica Glass, for example, was doing bird research in the Colorado wilderness. The task of saving the programme fell to the team’s fiercely devoted alumni, who met with the administration several times that summer. ‘We talked about getting fundraising to renovate the Armory, but that wasn’t really the issue,’ said programme director Liz Brayboy. ‘They didn’t want polo on campus any more.’ She and the other alumni convinced Yale to let them take control of the team. By that point half the horses had been sold or given away, and by October 2009, four months after the closure of the Armory was announced, they had found room for the 15 remaining ponies at the C&S Ranches, half an hour outside New Haven.
The athletic fields that serve most of Yale’s 33 varsity and 49 student-run sports sprawl across several acres on the edge of New Haven. The complex includes the famous Yale Bowl (football), as well as a cavernous brick track building, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, baseball, soccer and softball stadia, and a wide expanse of grassy fields. In the middle of all this there is a large building with a sloping roof that looks like it might serve as a haunted house come Halloween. This is the Yale Armory, the historic home of polo at Yale. The team is still allowed to play here, but they must truck in their ponies from
By the time the four th chukka star ts, i stand in awe of a sport played so cleanly and well
Bethany, which makes a home game an all-day commitment.
I go out to see a game on a Sunday afternoon in November. The early afternoon sun is low in the sky. I take a Yale shuttle bus from campus out through a rundown neighbourhood to the city outskirts. There is only one other person on the bus.
Around the hulking stillness of the Armory, the Phipps fields are playing host to a high school lacrosse tournament. Sticks and pads swarm the grass and parents and coaches shout advice and encouragement. Aside from the shiny steel donated horse trailer parked outside, the only indication of what’s going on in the building is a plastic sign with ‘Yale Polo’ handwritten in blue marker, propped up against the open door of the Armory and repeatedly tipping over in the wind.
Inside the building, the Yale women quickly take a 12-0 lead over the University of Pennsylvania. It was at Yale that women officially entered the world of polo, and the first female USPA member was a Yalie, Amoret Cardeiro, who was admitted – legend has it – because the USPA assumed her name was a male one. The captain of the women’s team, a junior from Paris named Lucy Topaloff, had never played polo before coming to Yale – which is not evident during the afternoon’s game. But this is fairly typical of today’s Yale polo players, some of whom have never ridden a horse when they show up to practise for the first time. Jim DeAngelis, Yale’s coach and a former pro, is something of a specialist in turning amateurs into the kind of people who will, later in life, spend their disposable income on ponies.
There are about a dozen players here, and as many spectators. I am joined in the stands by the family of Kara Fikrig, a freshman playing her first Yale polo game; a postgraduate research fellow from Germany, guided by curiosity; and a freshman from Jacksonville, Florida, who wanted to play but whose parents thought the sport too dangerous. Couples wander in and out of the Armory, straying from the afternoon’s sports headliner, lacrosse, for a chance to see more exotic sporting fare.
By the fourth chukka, when Topaloff and Smith (the team’s president) are on, I stand in awe of a sport played so cleanly and well
DeAngelis, who is the chief financial officer of a company in New York when he’s not coaching Yale Polo, has settled in as a spectator, and is giving tips to Fikrig’s parents about potential Christmas presents – a helmet, a face mask, a mallet. After a foul by the Penn team, Smith smacks the ball from the line and it flies straight and fast like a baseball, smack into the metal door painted with a Y that serves as the goal. The final score is 41-0.
Though not entirely unexpected – Penn’s team is only a year old – it might be the most emphatic victory a Yale team has had over an opponent all year. But it’s unlikely that anyone will be talking about this in the dining halls on Monday. The Yale Daily News hasn’t written about a polo game in decades, and aside from the odd Facebook update, this result – the final home game of the semester – will fade into the memories of the players and the spectators, conversation fodder for Thanksgiving dinner with aunts and uncles, a simple figure in the long history of Yale Polo.
But this is no time to be daunted. There’s beginners’ practice on Monday night. From 6:30 to 10pm, Colloredo-Mansfeld and Smith will be back at C&S Ranches, preparing eight recruits for the prospect of one day inheriting the responsibility for the team.
