13 minute read
Interview
Opposite Skey at Bendabout Farm, Tennessee This page Skey (middle) suited up for polo with his mallet in his left hand
Skey Johnston
As a long-standing polo devotee and former Chairman of the USPA, Skey Johnston shares his insights on how the sport is progressing and developing
Summerfield Key ‘Skey’ Johnston was raised in the mountains of Tennessee, riding horses, playing polo, foxhunting and competing in rodeos. He has played polo in Argentina, Aiken and all over the United States. Johnston served as Chairman of the United States Polo Association from 1984-1988 and was inducted in the National Polo Hall of Fame for his contributions to the sport in 2001. He was one of the last left-handed players in the game.
With his late son Skeeter, he started the Flying H Polo club on his ranch at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains in Big Horn, Wyoming and also Everglades Polo in Florida. Skey has promoted Team USPA, to develop young American polo players. His daughter Gillian and grandson Will are both active in the sport. Sam Morton spoke with him at Bendabout Farm in McDonald, Tennessee.
How did you get into polo?
My father got to know some of the Army officers at Fort Oglethorpe and they talked him into playing polo. He built a field and bought horses from the Barrys, hired some country boys here and hired an Army lieutenant to teach them how to play polo and they started playing here back in the early Thirties. I rodeoed, I showed jumpers, hunters, saddle horses, driven horses. I like anything associated with a good horse. [Polo] is a game with enough danger to get your blood pressure up a little bit, [combined with] speed and teamwork. It’s a game with a little of everything, and I was never that good, but I enjoyed doing it and in addition to that, I did it with the wrong hand which was even more difficult. There were several left-handed polo players when I played. I think if you are left-handed and start the game early, you will learn the game, but if you are left-handed and try to start the game in your thirties or forties you will have a difficult time. I had some experience playing before I really started playing. I had stick-and-balled and ridden and understood the game. I think one of the problems is, that after the war a lot of people began to play polo in their late thirties or forties and fifties
Polo is a game with enough danger to raise your blood pressure a lit tle bit
even, and that is difficult if you are naturally left-handed. If you never played and are trying to learn a game that the rules are basically for right-handed players, it is probably more dangerous. Truthfully, I played with one or two of them and it confused the hell out of me (laughs).
What are your feelings about the new handicap system?
I hate to say it, but I think the new attempt to even out the handicap system appears to me to be too complex. It’s another thing that’s going to be hard to explain to people. Polo is a very complex sport. It’s not that well understood and has never been able to attract real media attention.
Polo changes rules constantly like most sports do. I really believe that if they’d left the original rules alone as they have [in] most every other country, and mainly concentrated on interpreting them and making sure the umpires interpret them properly then we wouldn’t have to do this. The handicap system itself obviously doesn’t fit the game any more; it needs to be broadened; I admit that. Nobody wants to be a negative anything. I don’t think too many people want to be a half of anything (laughs), so I think this is going to complicate it and be very hard to explain.
I think they [USPA] should have gone to 12 goals long ago. They are lowering many of the American polo players. To me I think it’s disheartening to drop players to get them jobs. These players work hard, they are proud of their handicaps [and] their polo, they are trying to get to 10 and all of a sudden they cut the legs out from under then and they find themselves back where they started five or six years ago. It makes some sense in trying to balance things up, giving these guys a chance to play, but on the other hand if you work your hardest for 10 years trying to get to a reasonable handicap and buy good horses and spending the money you have to spend to get there, and all of a sudden someone says, ‘wait a minute, you’re not that good, we’re going to cut you back down to seven goals,’ you might get a little more work but any time you try and tell people that you’re not as good as anybody else, it discourages them.
There is only one 9-goal American player now, nobody else is over seven. I think it would have been much more positive to raise the handicaps by two goals and have a 12-goal handicap. The argument against that point is that it would be an insult to all the old 10-goal players. But why? It’s a different world, different times, they can still be counted as the best players of their time and maybe the best players of all time. You need a new handicap. All sports have faced this, one way or another.
The basic rules of polo are for safety purposes and that’s what they should be. It’s a dangerous game. I know that better than most people. It’s like car racing. It’s always going to be a dangerous game and the rules are made to protect the participants but there are too many nebulous rules that affect the conduct of the game which affects the spectator. Nobody ever thinks about the spectator any more. People watch sports because they like to watch skilled people play the sport and they understand what they are doing. The more complex you make it and the more nitpicking rules you make when you blow the whistle and stop the game and the length of time in which it’s stopped each time, it makes no sense in trying to promote the game. Blowing a relatively non-dangerous foul on the attacking team’s 30- or 40-yard line, and taking the ball somewhere else, just takes time in setting it down, makes no sense. A
Left Three generations of players: Skey Johnston, Summerfield Johnston Sr., and Summerfield ‘Skeeter’ Johnston III Below left Awards ceremony with Skey (daughter Gillian in front), Skeeter Johnston (brother Robert in front) and Mrs Gil Johnston with the trophy Below right Skey and Skeeter in Africa
penalty five to me, for non-threatening fouls, ought to be used all the time. Pick it up and set the ball down and hit the ball and play. People don’t understand it, [they are watching the game and saying,] ‘what they are doing now?’ People don’t understand it and they don’t like it. No other sport has that draconian set of rules. All sports have penalties, but unless someone does something terrible and gets thrown out of the game or runs over someone, there is no need for draconian rules.
I think we do things in the sport that makes it a mystery to most people and a pseudo-sport which will never attract media attention and will bring money into the sport. They are bringing in money in by selling clothes and watches, well, that’s fine too, but [in] every other sport that is ancillary to the main source of income which is media. I think it’s the polo association’s duty to try to get media involved. I hate to admit this, but I feel we have to go professional. It’s what happened to golf in the PGA which lifted golf in all areas. The amateurs hated it but when it happened it certainly may have put golf on the map. I don’t think the type of polo we play now, unless it’s handled differently, will ever put it on the map. Nobody can go watch a 26-goal game and all the skill that’s attached to that with the Cambiasos and the Merloses and the great players that can go out there and do wonderful things without noticing there’s somebody riding around out there that is about to fall off his horse. To really attract media attention it’s got to have balanced teams where everybody plays.
One of the ways to broaden polo’s appeal would be better viewing facilities. The Flying H Polo Club has elevated berms above the field. You can see the lines, and what goes on.
One thing that makes the Argentine Open so unique is sitting up in the high stadium so you are looking down on that big field and you can see everything that goes on. That’s the reason the Argentines are well educated in the game and they don’t even need an announcer; they understand it.
Unfortunately people don’t build stadiums high enough and too far from the field. It’s almost impossible from field side for a neophyte to have a clue what going on. When two horses race down the field, they can understand that, because it’s a race, but
I hate to admit this, but I feel polo has to go professional. It ’s what happened to golf
Opposite top Flying H Polo Club, Wyoming Below Skey with the winning Coca-Cola team (daughter Gillian, far right) at the Joe Barry Memorial Cup, Palm Beach 2012 This page Skey and Gil with Gillian Johnston - winner of the US Open 2002
the other manoeuvres that go on, and the skill of the riders, and moving the ball around, they can’t see that, which hurts the ability to sell the game.
American polo is at a crossroads now; whether it’s going to be a backyard game or whether it’s going to be a real sport. It’s a coin toss right now to where it’s going, as far as really high-level polo. I don’t know where it’s going to go.
Polo is a funny game. The owners of major league baseball, football, basketball teams get their egos satisfied by watching their teams. Kind of like the old Roman circus. Unfortunately the owners of polo teams feel like they have to get on a horse and get out there and play. A lot of them, especially nowadays, look uncomfortable and out-of-place in high-goal polo. If I couldn’t have played, and I was playing, and no one hit me the ball, I would never have played. In Chicago, when I played open polo if I’d have gone in there with some hotshot players and they’d have said, ‘you go over here and get out of the way and we are going to play this game’, I’d have said, ‘well boys, I’ll tell you what, ya’ll go home!’ But everybody that had teams up there could play. I think they were all at least two goals. We’ve given up our standards, for money, for teams. I think if you want to play 26-goal polo, you have to be at least two goals, and these guys will either get better or will sponsor the kids of someone. On the television, there are one hundred stations all desperate for content and we can’t get polo on there in any form. We can’t get anybody to pay us to sponsor a game. I realise that it is a big field, it is difficult to film, but on the other hand I think if the Polo Association wants to spend some of their money, they have two things they can spend it on: one is to take a select group of young American players and really give them an opportunity to play by sponsoring them and putting them on teams or sending them to Argentina or doing something to give them an opportunity and putting them in the hands of competent professionals like Owen Rinehart, Julio Arellano or Adam Snow and say ‘take these guys and make polo players out of them.’ Don’t try to do it to everybody, don’t try to broaden it out and put people in it that are never going to get there. Pick out the people that will, and give them means to buy horses and find patrons for them and encourage them to sponsor them.
The second thing is, I think they ought to hire a really high-calibre public relations person and have them work full-time in trying to get television coverage for polo. Once you get it started you can roll a lot of
stuff off it like golf has done and other sports. But get it started to put on the right kind of polo to get these people to put on polo on television and try to get some interest in it. If you don’t do those things you are going to have a backyard sport and that’s kind of the direction we’re headed unfortunately.
Why are there no high-goal players coming up in this country?
We don’t have high-goal polo year round. The English send them [their young players] to Argentina to play where there is good polo year round. We didn’t win a game in the FIP tournament. I think until we find a way to develop some players it’s going to be very difficult; we’re going to be playing low-goal, amateur polo with American players.
Unless someone takes an interest in one of them and gives them horses and gives them an opportunity to play, they are not going to get any better, or much better at least. It takes money to do this, to have the facility to do things like that. One of the things I tried to do [as USPA Chairman] in Lexington is to have the association control fields so you don’t have this big pull by patrons who want to play on their field. The Argentine association has their own fields, the British don’t have their own fields, but they do have Cowdray and that area that they pretty much control. I’m not sure there is a good solution for it. But at any rate, I’m too old, and been here too long, so I don’t go around beating the drum. (Laughs) I have enough things to do other than that.
What was the motivation in starting The Flying H Polo Club?
Skeeter was playing high-goal polo then. He wanted to have a place to play in the summer and persuaded me that we could build a couple of polo fields and bring some pros out to improve the polo. We dropped it to 12- and 14-goal polo and tried inviting people to play and bring a 4- to 7-goal player with them. We play for six weeks and now have three tournament fields and two practice fields and we’ve built polo barns where we rent facilities. There’s polo six days a week in Big Horn. In all, the Flying H polo has worked out very well. We had 48 players out there last summer. It’s been a successful formula; we have three or four players buy ranches out there. I think the fields are good, the climate is good and people enjoy the area and the people there. It’s good for the local club and a lot of people have sold a lot of horses out there. There is no place in the country that you can raise a better horse than Big Horn, Wyoming, maybe in the world, and having some control of it and the people who come out there, keep it what we want it to be, which is a place where you have fun and enjoy the game and have as little controversy as possible. I think Skeeter would be very pleased with it. We intend to continue as long as we are able to, and other members of the family are happy with it.
