Sport: East v. West

The East had 50 first-class polo players to choose from and most of the best ponies in the U. S. Tommy Hitchcock at No. 2 and Winston Guest at No. 3 are powerful, polished internationalists. With Winston’s younger brother Raymond at back and stubby, black-haired Michael Phipps, one of the few natural No. is in the U. S., the team had a handicap rating of 32 goals. The Westerners had fewer and, supposedly, poorer ponies. Eric Pedley, No. 1 on the team that beat England in 1930, was too busy to play. Even if the West’s two Californians, Elmer Boeseke and Aidan Roark. and two Texans, Cecil Smith and Rube Williams, had had more time to practice together they would have had a hard time finding a team to play against. Almost all the top poloists in the U. S. live on Long Island.

That was the background for last week’s East v. West polo matches at Chicago, to which poloists have been looking forward ever since the last two one-sided series against England made it look as though international polo was on the wane. Even Westerners, who have sometimes felt that their best players were discriminated against at Meadowbrook, were not too sanguine until the first furious game had been played on the field that lies between three fairways of the Onwentsia Club’s golf course, with a crowd of 12,500 in the stands. When it was over, the West had won, 15 to 11, and Hitchcock’s team was rubbing its eyes as well as its bruises.

Hitchcock polo—which has replaced the old British style of soft, adroit passing— is based on speed and hard hitting. Last week, as soon as the first chukker opened, it was seen that the Westerners would play Hitchcock polo too, with all the trimmings. Fouls were soon being called on both sides, for rough riding. Cecil Smith scored first, on a free hit. Then Boeseke galloped the length of the field for another goal before the East got fairly started. The East managed to tie the score before the period ended, when Hitchcock centered the ball for Winston Guest and then scored himself. Young Raymond Guest put the East ahead in the second chukker, when he knocked down one of Smith’s drives and then smashed the ball 60 yd. for a goal, but Smith did the same thing on a free hit a few moments later and his team was never behind again.

In eight periods of magnificent polo, the most exciting was the fifth. The West was leading, 11 to 6, when Smith fell after a smashing collision with Raymond Guest. As he tried to get up, his pony, Texas Beauty, rolled on him and knocked him unconscious. Smith came to 20 minutes later. An ambulance was clanging on the sidelines; his substitute, Neil McCarthy, was warming up. Indignant, Smith remounted, waved the ambulance away, rode back into the game and finished it with more goals than anyone else on the field—six to Hitchcock’s five. In the seventh chukker Rube Williams, who has probably been cut and bumped more than any other polo player in the U. S., got a bad mallet bruise but by that time the East would have needed machine guns to win. With Raymond Guest playing splendidly at back, the best Hitchcock’s team could do was to match the West’s three goals in the last period.

A team of individually brilliant and strangely assorted players, the West’s raring, tearing performance last week was the more remarkable because the team had never played together until last fortnight when Chicago’s Major Frederic McLaughlin, president Louis E. Stoddard of the U. S. Polo Association and Carleton Burke of Los Angeles, manager of the Western team, finally completed arrangements for the series. Smiling Elmer Boeseke, the West’s No. 2, is a square-cut, young socialite who plays polo all year round at Pasadena’s Midwick Club. Aidan Roark is the younger brother of Captain Charles Thomas (“Pat”) Roark, famed British Internationalist who last week arrived in the U. S. for next month’s Open championship. In Hollywood, Aidan Roark is an executive in 20th Century Pictures Inc., whose Production Manager, Darryl Zanuck, started to play polo two years ago and liked it so much he took to playing between conferences on a field near Warner Brothers Studio. Cecil Smith and Rube Williams, No. 3 and No. 4, made it look last week as though the best way to make a polo player is to find a cowboy and give him a mallet. They both work, cowpunching, schooling and selling ponies, on a ranch near San Antonio owned by George Miller. In 1924, Miller urged them both to take up polo, supplied them with equipment. In 1930, Williams and Smith went East together, played for Roslyn in the Open. Last year Smith played two periods with a broken arm on Jock Whitney’s Greentrees. Last winter the U. S. Polo Association gave him a handicap of 9, second only to Hitchcock’s 10.