Читать книгу Bushell's Best Bits - Everything You Needed To Know About The World's Craziest Sports - Mike Bushell - Страница 19

First of all I have to apologise to the people enjoying a picnic, or queuing for an ice cream on a gloriously sunny day at Hurtwood polo club in Surrey, in 2008.

It was a charity polo day to raise money for the Mark Davies Injured Riders Fund, and there were teams made up of professionals, celebrities and novices from the media. I was on a team captained by Kenny Jones, the former drummer with The Who and talented polo player. Other stars who were proving they could swing it with their mallets were Katie Price and Matt Baker.

I had been given some lessons by Kenny’s son, and he had built a few foundations, so that I could even trot and hit the ball at the same time. Word about my ‘ability’ spread and to my horror, on the big day I was paired with the best, most decorated polo pony there: a high goal stallion who knew the game inside out.

However, that was the trouble. He did, and I didn’t. In my defence, it is such a different form of riding. For a start it’s one handed, and I was told to grip the reins as if holding a steering wheel on a go-kart. Push the reins forward, then back, and side to side to steer. It seemed simple enough, but my ‘Champion the wonder horse’ wasn’t going to listen to my cautious instructions. He had pride; he was king of the pitch and was intent on showing it.

My efforts to restrain him with tweaks of the reins and polite croaks of ‘whoa!’ only seemed to confuse the poor athlete, who took a canter towards the ice cream van. With just a white line of rope and tiny sideboards separating the charging Bushell from picnic hampers and children, the crowd started to scatter with panic, saving whatever they could. But just as I was about to be the flake in a 99, my majestic mount averted any carnage by banking around to the right. He took us back to the horse boxes, where he could replace me with a proper polo player. He had given the crowd a glimpse of what he was having to put up with, and we were both relieved when we swapped partners.

I spent the rest of the match on a retired grey who loved the fact that I didn’t have the conviction to get him out of a walk, and we gently turned in the middle as the action stormed past us like a tornado. Play whizzed past one way, and then by the time we’d turned our bewildered heads, the whirlwind came back in the other direction.

What I did see close up was how physical top polo can be. It’s no wonder it has been described as rugby on horseback. There is another sport which fits that description and has similarities with basketball, and that’s Horseball, and a date with the British team is pencilled in for the future. As for polo, don’t be fooled by the chink of champagne glasses and polite country chatter. This is raw, physical and played at a thunderous pace. The sight of thoroughbred juggernauts putting on the emergency brakes and turning on a few blades of grass, while potentially colliding with others doing the same, is spine tingling. They reach 40 miles per hour as the high-speed scrums flow from one end of the pitch to the other.

It’s no surprise that the top polo players have to be like gladiators, because the roots of this sport are in war. Alexander the Great is quoted as saying that he represented the stick, while the ball was the world he intended to conquer.

There’s doubt over when polo actually started, with different sources claiming there was a game played by Persians in the 5th century BC, and in China even earlier. The word polo comes from the Tibetan word ‘pulu’, which means ball. According to the website Indiapolo.com, it seems that at first, polo was a way of training mounted troops for battle, with as many as 100 on each side. It became the national sport of India under the Mughal dynasty until the end of the 16th century, and India has often been seen as the home of the modern game. By 1870 it had spread throughout British India, where serving army officers and high ranking officials had ponies to hand. As word got around, one officer who’d read about the game in a magazine tried to set up a game with walking sticks and billiard balls. Needless to say he didn’t get very far. Thankfully if you go to a match today, the balls and sticks are much more sophisticated and the players have the skills to match.

Even after a few lessons, my full polo debut had ended in personal humiliation. I like to think I played a crucial midfield holding role on my grey though, because our team, led by the talented Kenny Jones, won the tournament. It seems the drummer is a wizard whatever shape of stick he’s holding. I could and should have ended my polo career with my head held high, but then a version of the sport came along that really does enable relative beginners like me to get involved without any danger of putting ice cream vans out of business.