The Legendary Fields of Myopia Polo Pay Homage to the Game

by Brion O’Connor

The club’s tournament polo pitch — Gibney Field — coupled with Winthrop Field and the Joseph Poor Memorial Arena, stand as a testament to the club’s long-run ning love affair with the sport. A brand-new pitch, the Neil R. Ayer Polo Field, completed last fall, will only add to Myopia’s legacy. Wilber is well aware that each playing field reflects the club’s storied past.

“I always bear that in mind, when I’m working on them, that these are a piece of history,” says Wilber, Myopia’s grounds superintendent. “I try to put my heart and soul into really making sure that we can keep both of them in the best shape possible.

“I’m incredibly proud and impressed with how dedicated my guys are and how much they care about their jobs,” he says. “It’s like a family atmosphere here, and being that type of family atmosphere, we take a great deal of pride in what we do in terms of being stewards of these historic pieces of property.”

Together with polo manager Erica Kratz’s crew, Wilber and his staff maintain three grass polo fields. The fields are roughly the equivalent of 27 football fields, or 30 acres. It is a formidable task. But the reward, says Wilber, is an environment where players and spectators can cherish a bygone era.

“There’s a feeling that when you cross into Myopia property, that you’re going back in time,” he says. “We want to keep that feeling. It’s a very nostalgic feeling. It’s a good feeling to have.

“We want to update the nervous system, and things that we can do to be stewards of the environment, but we want to do everything we can to protect the historic aspect,” says Wilber. “That way, when people come here, they get that extra special feeling that they just went back to 1875 again.”

 Where it all began 

Though the Myopia Hunt Club is synonymous with Hamilton, the club was first established in Winchester in 1875. The original founders “chose a site in Winchester high on the hillside overlooking Mystic Lake, with a distant view of Nahant and the blue waters of the Atlantic,” wrote Edward Weeks in “Myopia, A Centennial Chronicle.” A clubhouse was built, and the club hosted baseball games and tennis matches.

Author Allan Forbes, in “Early Myopia,” noted that the horses and hounds of “the hunt” arrived at Myopia in the early 1880s, but club equestrians soon found the Winchester landscape lacking. Charles Dalton, chairman of the Boston Parks Commission, and William Appleton of Appleton Farm suggested the hunts be moved to “the broad meadows and treeless slopes of Hamilton and Ipswich,” wrote Weeks.

“In the fall of 1881 (Appleton) persuaded Mr. Gibney, owner of the old Dodge Farm ‘to rent the farm for care of the master, his horses and hounds,’” he wrote.

In 1882, the Myopia club membership shifted, with horsemen outnumbering ballplayers. The hunt moved from Winchester to Beverly Farms and Hamilton that fall, and the following spring, club members voted “to raise about $4,000 for the purpose of building a clubhouse and kennels on the Gibney Farm and Hamilton.”

“In 1891, after Mr. Gibney’s death, the club purchased the pre-Revolutionary farmhouse, barns, stables and the 149.5 acres for $20,000,” wrote Weeks. It would prove to be a provident decision for the future of polo at the club.

Late last November, Wilber’s crew put down one last application of lime on the grass polo fields before they “put them to bed” for the winter. Despite concerns about climate change and unseasonably warm winters, the mild stretch has not had an adverse effect on the fields.

“If anything, a slightly warmer winter is more beneficial, because you won’t get any desiccation or low-temperature kill,” says Wilber. “As long as you are getting below-freezing temperatures at night, it’s enough to keep the fields dormant.”

The fields typically begin to wake from their winter slumber in early April. Then the fieldwork begins in earnest, and Wilber and his crew perform their annual magic act. Unlike larger clubs, Myopia Polo doesn’t have a limitless budget for the upkeep of these fields. (Roughly half the maintenance budget for the polo fields comes from gate receipts.) Wilber’s two biggest challenges are “water and funding.”

“It’s getting the products and the tools you need try to help maintain a high-end polo field at a very low budget,” he says. “It’s a self-funded entity, meaning Myopia Hunt Club isn’t funding

Myopia Polo’s budget.”

Due to persistent water shortages, Wilber no longer uses a traditional blue and ryegrass blend. “With the climate and water restrictions, I’ve moved to a tall fescue,” he says. “I will do a 70/30 tall fescue and ryegrass blend, so you don’t need as much water.”

The goal is to create “a high-end athletic field,” says Wilber. “I call it high-end rough. Just like on the golf course, where we have an inchand-a-half rough.

“I know how to grow good grass,” he says. “I know how to grow high-quality, healthy turf. The learning process was figuring out what polo players are looking for.”

To do that, Wilber meets regularly with Kratz and polo captain David Strouss, and solicits player’s opinions regarding conditions at Gibney and Winthrop.

“They don’t want them too firm, because that can hurt a horse. They don’t want them soft, because someone could slip and fall,” he says. “They want kind of an in-between, moist field, not so firm that they don’t have any footing. And then they like to cut it as short as you can get it for speed.”

Polo Arrives 

Shortly after Myopia’s move to Hamilton, “the sport of kings” was introduced. Longtime Myopia member and journalist Crocker Snow Jr., who wrote the polo chapters for “Myopia, A Centennial Chronicle,” credits newspaper magnate James Gordon Bennett with bringing polo to the United States in 1876.

Less than a dozen years later, several intrepid horsemen at Myopia — led by Randolph M. “Bud” Appleton, who played on the Harvard polo team — tried on the sport for size. Snow Jr. reported that Marshall Abbott, in “Myopia Songs and Waltzes,” claimed the first polo match in Massachusetts was played at the Gibney farm field in the summer of 1887.

“The so-called Polo Ground, a rough pasture rolled for a week or two, was not worthy of the name,” wrote Abbott. “If the field was bad, the game was worse. It might be described as a series of scrimmages.”

If the players were frustrated, there’s no lasting record of their disappointment. The early attraction only grew with time. In 1890, the United States Polo Association formed, and Myopia joined as a charter member — the only charter club that remains active at its original location.

As polo manager, Erica Kratz has similar yet subtly different priorities regarding Myopia’s polo fields compared to her counterpart, Jonathan Wilber. “My major concern as a horsewoman is the safety aspect,” she says. “That’s the priority.”

Kratz and her small crew of six are responsible for post-game repairs of the fields. Essentially, that comes down to “flipping divots,” filling the holes that are a natural consequence of the game, and then mowing and then rolling the fields to produce a superior playing surface. The result is a better game and a safer game.

“That’s a pretty big job,” she says. “It is wildly influenced by weather conditions, as well as how much the field is actually being used. If there’s a lot of polo being played on one of the fields, it gets very churned up. That doesn’t make for a very pleasant game, since it makes it harder to hit a ball. And you really don’t want these holes that the horses can step into and trip.”

One great tradition during polo matches is inviting spectators to replace divots during halftime. But that whimsical custom also has a practical benefit, resulting in a better playing pitch. Plus, it lends itself to the random comical moment. For instance, women are encouraged to