TRAINING NEVER ENDS

An excerpt from WINNING WITH HORSES by Shelley

Onderdonk, DVM, and Adam Snow.

On our polo farm in Aiken, between the ages of five and seven we add an important layer to a horse’s early foundation—exposing horses to the demands of competition. This involves introducing a young pony to the feeling of immersing in the flow of the game, reacting play-by-play. This part comes naturally for me, so I can let my body lead. Since I fully trust my own feel on the horse (especially with a mallet in my hand), I try to stop thinking about ways to improve everything and let the game be the teacher. My horses can ask questions: Do you really want me to try to squeeze through that traffic? Don’t you think this is fast enough? Didja’ see that freaky looking mower over there? Sometimes the horse is actually teaching ME, and often, these are lessons in humility.

The homebreds that I play today have all, in their own way, contributed to the lore of the New Haven Farm training program. And it is always the hiccups, rather than smooth sailings, which lend themselves to the most frequent retelling.

One cool morning during winter green horse chukkers at Owen Rinehart’s facility Isinya HDC, Tequila’s daughter, Rum Runner, demonstrated her cat-like quickness by disappearing out from under me while banking to the right. One moment I was out over her neck reaching for the ball on the offside (vaguely aware of some traffic ahead on the right) and the next...the cold, hard ground was approaching fast. Some of my peers in that practice still refer to Rum Runner as “PBR” for the case of Pabst Blue Ribbon I purchased and distributed later as penance for leaving the tack. (In polo’s “green horse circles,” there is a tradition that if you fall off without your horse going down, you owe everyone a case of beer. I’m not sure where this tradition started, but when it’s my turn, I make sure to pay up quickly so as not to tempt fate and risk another tumble.) The crazy thing was that in the previous chukker, when another rider had fallen, I had been the first to start joshing about what kind of beer he should buy the group. I don’t know what I was thinking—it wasn’t like me to be heckling like that—but Rum Runner taught me my lesson.

The thing about training, whatever your discipline, is that the process never really ends. Except for match time, every time I sit on a horse—he could be 3 or 23—I’m trying to improve things just a little bit more. Thus, this training continues for both horse and rider, with communications being sent back and forth, until the day one of us retires from our respective careers. The late 9-goal Hall of Famer Harold Barry said, “It takes 40 years to become a horseman—20 to realize you don’t know