Sport: Hurricanes v. Santa Paula

Rivalry between the two South American teams entered in this year’s Open Polo Championship was a shade more than friendly. The Santa Paula Team, which won the Pacific Coast Open in 1930, arrived first, played at Chicago and Detroit this summer. The Anglo-Argentine Hurlingham team got to Westbury, N. Y. just in time to steal some of Santa Paula’s thunder. If they played brilliantly in the Open, their accomplishments might have affected the enthusiasm with which U. S. buyers would bid for the spare-limbed, light-footed, cattle-trained ponies Santa Paula had brought with them to sell. Talk about an International series in case an Argentine team won the Open dwindled soon after the tournament started. The

Hurricanes, defending champions, smothered Hurlingham in a semifinal, 18 to 5. The day Santa Paula played the Hurricanes for the championship, thousands of excited Latin-Americans crowded the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires to hear cabled accounts of the game relayed to them by an announcer.

The best players in the U. S. were split up between the four U. S. teams in the Open, but the Hurricanes had at least one of them—tall, noisy Winston Guest at No. 2, and England’s only 10-goal player, Capt. Charles Thomas Irvine Roark, at No. 3. No. 1 man and captain was Stephen (“Laddie”) Sanford; back, selected after two others had been tried, was Terence Preece, who learned the game at Westbury where his father deals in polo ponies and hunters. Santa Paula had been badly handicapped early in the tournament when chunky Manuel Andrada, captain and back, sprained his mallet-hand in an early match. They ran into more of the bad luck that always seems to follow Argentine poloists in the U. S. when their No. 1, Alfredo Harrington, fell at a polo pony show and tore his leg muscles. Andrada took his arm out of its sling, moved Andres Gazzotti up to No. 1, left mustachioed Juan Reynal at No. 2, in front of his brother, Jose, at No. 3.

The crowd in the Avenida de Mayo, pleased at least that Santa Paula rather than Hurlingham was playing for the championship, cheered more loudly than the crowd in the pale blue stands at Meadowbrook through the first period. Santa Paula, riding wildly to get a lead that might serve them when Andrada’s swollen hand hurt him too much to be useful, made three goals before the Hurricanes got one. They stayed ahead till Guest tied the score at 4-all. It was tied again at 5-all, 6-all, 7-all. Santa Paula was a goal ahead when the last chukker started. Andrada, on Yarara and Mio Mio, had scored three of the Argentines’ goals. He had had his hand doctored between chukkers, played the whole field without dislocating the Santa Paula teamwork. In the last period on Pichon, a fresh pony, he still flickered down the windy field, an amazing figure of speed and courage, scored the last two goals which gave Santa Paula the championship, 11 to 8.