Читать книгу Strange Things Happen: A life with The Police, polo and pygmies - Stewart Copeland - Страница 19

Ten years after scraping the streets of Londonas a starving musician, things are looking up.

Hey, Rock Star!” a large voice is booming across the polo field. I look up from my pony inspection to see a pin-striped, extravagantly mustachioed Sikh striding across the grass toward me. “I have a team for you,” he announces. This must be Kuldip “Collin” Singh Dhillon, about whom I have heard jealous rumors. In person, he is the most affably energized person that I’ve met in the polo world: big smile, easy laugh, and a jaunty style. Butter wouldn’t melt in his fangs.

I’VE BEEN HOLED UP on my country estate for several years now. This place seemed like the obligatory destination of my success in music. Apart from basic financial security, this was the best I could come up with as a dream to realize. It contains the recording studio of my dreams and every musical instrument that I ever dreamed of owning. It even has a couple of horses.

I had almost forgotten about horses. At Millfield I learned to

ride the hard way—hours of cantering around a paddock without stirrups. We also played polo. I was never much good at the game, but did seem to have a good seat on a horse. The riding program was so enveloping, with the cantering, tack maintenance, horse maintenance, and mucking out the stables, that riders tended to exist in a world that was removed from the rest of the school. For a while, horses even crowded out my obsession with music.

Music just came into my life and dragged me into its world. Since there was no room in the wretched struggle of my music career for horses, I forgot about them. Years later, when I got the country estate I was excited to rekindle the horse thing. Now there would be no one barking at me, and I would be able to play with my own horses without having to shovel their shit.

The only problem was that after I cantered around my fields a few times and clopped along the country lanes around my village, I pretty quickly ran out of things to do on my horses.

ON AN INVITATION OF an old friend to attend a polo game at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor, I am reminded of the most fun thing of all to do on horses. With the riders uttering strangely familiar cries as the horses gallop past me on the emerald expanse of the Windsor polo ground, the bulb blinks on in my head, and I am striding up to the clubhouse with a whole new hobby hatching.

The first person I see inside is a swooning young woman, who points me to the back office where I must talk to the boss, a Major Ronald Ferguson. This is still in the height of The Police ascendancy, and I’m wearing leather pants and a violent shirt. My hair looks like I’m being electrocuted.

The major is mystified by my presence in his office. “Are you a member of the HPA?” he asks, squinting suspiciously beneath his outthrust eyebrows. “USPA?” he ventures, upon hearing my American accent. As a nonmember of any known polo association, he tells me regretfully that I am an unknown quantity and therefore am presumed to be unsafe on the polo field. The horses are moving fast out there, and there is very real danger if a player is not qualified. Also this, by the way, is an ancient military club; it is the apex of the polo ziggurat, with a membership waiting list of generations.

So with a little research I find the Kirtlington Park Polo Club in Oxfordshire, about forty minutes away from my house. I arrive as quietly as possible, but Rupert, the club manager, erupts with enthusiasm. In a twinkling he has rustled me up a horse and helmet and has thrust me out onto the field for a chukka. Well, it’s like a pillow fight in the harem. At this entry level of play, hardly anyone can hit the ball and some of the players are kind of loose in the saddle. So there is much swinging of mallets and cursing at horses but not much galloping. If the ball goes through the goalmouth, a horse probably kicked it. By some strange miracle, however, all I can think about when it’s over is how to get more of it.

It doesn’t take long to scare up some horses (horse dealing is the second-oldest profession), and soon I’m out there every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, with thoughts of nothing else for the remainder of the week. In England, summer afternoons last forever. The late sun catches the greens and golds of the fields in a particular way that lights up the Saxon heart.

Sometimes my teenage son Sven rides out to the games with me, bringing along some of his suave boarding school friends. Sometimes my smaller boys, Patrick, Jordan, and Scott, pile into the car and swarm the horse box while I play. None of the lads seem interested in the horses, but they all love the truck that they travel in. So do I, for that matter; it’s my favorite vehicle. I can load six horses in the back, Margaret Churchill, who runs my horses, and her crew drive up front, and in the middle is my little traveling clubhouse. For a great view of the game I can climb up on the roof with deck chairs. The boys are all over that truck, although they don’t spend much time in the deck chairs watching Daddy’s game.

It’s a faintly familiar alien world. My new polo chums are just like my old schoolmates, but I’ve been around the world ten times and they haven’t. They are like the cast of a Merchant Ivory movie, and I’m from another planet. They are very impressed that I’m a Millfield boy, which surprises me. My old school was no Eton. It was most notable for the raffishness of the parents (King of Thailand, Elizabeth Taylor, various bin Ladens, and other nouveaux riches) but also for its sports programs. In the polo world, Millfield is second in prestige only to Sandhurst. In fact I soon learn that one of the biggest heroes of English polo is none other than my old school buddy Sniffer Kent. At Kirtlington I can dine out on just having met the man.

At first, I assume that among this rural crowd, I’m regarded as just a mysterious American with a clean slate and odd hair. But one day in the clubhouse, someone blurts out, “So what’s it like to be a pop star?” Oh well, they were on to me from day one and were just being polite. Pretty soon the conversation goes back to horses.

These are the first people that I’ve met since high school who aren’t in show business. Even in college I shrank from the light of “straight” society, and I’ve been underground ever since. These country polo folk are kind of insular themselves with their überstraightness, V-neck sweaters, corduroy pants, and Old World charm. Although they are feared and despised by the British middle class, they seem completely harmless to an American like me. The accent gets me every time. They live with frowsy grace in beautiful country estates and are extremely vague about their jobs. If you already own several acres of Twinkishire, it doesn’t take much to throw a couple of horses into one of the fields. If you have grown up in the country with plenty of time for such pursuits, you can make your own polo ponies and be equipped on Sunday afternoon with enough of a string to earn your gin and tonic. These folks are not so much wealthy as leisurely.

Kuldip Singh Dhillon is a contrast to this. There is no subtle mystery about his wherewithal at all. He is that most dreaded creature of all in the country set: the self-made man. He may have started off selling jeans in the market stalls of Manchester, but now he’s an unstoppable force. Somewhere out there in the world he’s a slash-and-burn real estate developer. In polo world he’s just having fun as he chews up the gentle folk. But his personal magnetism is such that they grudgingly enjoy his company. Hard not to.

Also out there on the polo field are the triple-alpha-type big shots. It doesn’t just take money to play polo. If you work for a living, you need to be able to walk out of the office on weekday afternoons for matches around the country. For this you need to own the office. These are the guys who show up on the field in Ferraris with hot second wives and slick livery. They are used to winning and love the idea of polo, but most are learning to ride as they try to master the game.

And this isn’t the kind of riding that you do on rented trail horses. These horses are revved up and hog-snorting for fast galloping, sudden stops, mad turns, and explosive acceleration. You need your horse to go exactly here, or there, so you can hit the ball or push someone else away from it. And then there is the strategy of the game. You actually haven’t got time to think about the horse. You read the play and race to hit your mark. The horse is on a hair trigger. You communicate with leg and bit but your mind has to be on the game, not on the horse.

In the winters, I go to Argentina and buy horses. My friend Adrian Laplacette has a ranch there, and every day is spent in endless polo. The speed of play is terrifying but smooth. The Argies start young, and by the age of twelve have complete command of horse and ball. Any other player at my level is either eleven, or not Argentine. Unlike the free-for-all melee of the Kirtlington players, the Argies all hit the ball accurately with strategic purpose, and can turn on a dime as they read the play.

The game is divided into eight-minute chukkas. Actually with stoppages for penalties, they take longer, and by the end of one chukka the horses are soaking in sweat and breathing hard. The players leap onto new mounts and roar off to the next period. The spent horses are quickly stripped of gear, hosed down, rubbed, and then walked until they are calm and dry. Better treatment than I get after a show.

The best horses are made in Argentina. They mix the right amount of thoroughbred for speed with a dab of American quarter horse for muscle. They have enough stock that they can be very selective and throw out (to the cattle ranches) anything that doesn’t have a natural talent for the game. Pretty soon there are twelve equine athletes lined up in my string.

To play on a team with Collin will be a step up for my polo involvement. I had been content to play with my horses at practice chukkas at my sleepy little club, but have recently been bringing my string over here to the higher-octane Cirencester club for faster play. Over here, the talk is of tournaments, qualifying matches, and storied trophies.

At Kirtlington, my club, I play formal games on the weekends as arranged by the club, but it’s just Sunday fun. There is no urgency to the competition, no ongoing rivalry with enemy teams. Kirtlington Sunday polo on the main ground is about fun with horses combined with Pimm’s cup, the scent of fresh-cut grass, the wooden clubhouse, and that beautiful tinkling music of clipped British accents. Not many settings are as beautiful as a golden afternoon in rolling Oxfordshire with the sound of the horses hoofs thundering softly, accented by posh military expostulations, “Oh bloody buggering hell!”

Kirtlington does have one team, the official club team, captained by the formidable John Tyler. In the club bar players tell war stories about heroic away games on fabled fields. It all sounds very sexy, but no one ever asked me to play on this team. Decades of brownnosing are required to make the cut, and I have only been out here for a year or two.

So Collin’s proposal is interesting. It will be him and me with two professionals to make up the four-man team. It will be my team, so I get to think up a cool name, choose some colors, and get the shirts made. And I pay for one of the pros.

Entry-level team competition is at the “eight-goal” level. This means simply that the combined handicaps of the four players cannot exceed eight goals. The polo handicap system is the opposite of golf. As a beginner, you start at -2 and then work your way up to a pinnacle of 10. There are maybe six living 10-handicap players in the world. Amateur players can be mighty proud of a 2 handicap. You can start getting paid to play at a 3 handicap and up. I am rated at -1, which means that I gaze down upon about half of the players at Kirtlington but barely qualify for practice chukkas at Cirencester.

Collin has a handicap of 1. Add that to my—1, and we must hire eight goals’ worth of pro to make up the eight-goal team. How about if we call the team Outlandos?

With a careful eye he has recruited two quietly underhandicapped big hitters for our team, one at 3, the other at 4, which is only seven, but good enough. Philip Elliott is a professional from Australia, and Johnny Kidd is a natural from old money.

Collin hasn’t just chosen me for my wallet, nor for my autograph. He and I are under the radar, undiscovered by the HPA, and are also underhandicapped. We have both been building up strings of fast horses by sneaking down to the Argentina ranches. Strangely, horses make a big difference in polo. No amount of investment in a tennis racquet will make you win at Wimbledon, but, as we are about to find out, fast horses can get you to Windsor.

When other kids were developing hand-eye coordination, I was more into my ears I guess. I’ve never been very good at connecting with a ball. In fact polo is the only ball sport that I have ever worked at. In this sport the ball is addressed from the back of a charging beast, which is a kind of leveler at least. Although my control of the ball is patchy, I’m pretty good at getting to the spot. Some rhythmic part of my brain is in tune with the way horses move, and my fancy boarding school taught me the technique. So on the right horse I can at least get to the ball first, or sometimes more important, deny it to the enemy pro. I may not be able to hit the ball so far, but he ain’t gonna be hitting it at all!

Collin is somewhat better. When he connects, the mighty Hammer of the Punjab strikes terror into the hearts of the enemy as the ball flies overhead. The fighting Sikh is fearless and will charge invincibly along the line of play, scattering all before him.

So with me confounding the enemy and Collin intimidating them, Philip and Johnny calmly make the plays.

The big tournament of the season at our level is the Archie David Cup, which is played at Windsor. It’s the most coveted trophy of the semipro polo world. At clubs all across the land teams are mustered and qualifying matches are played. The competition to make the final eight is endless.

First we pick off the riffraff, the local lads on their homemade horses. These guys are generally quite sanguine about getting thrashed by our hired assassins because they probably haven’t got the horsepower to get very far in the tournament anyway. They’re just having a jolly good try. With so many games to play it’s hard on the ponies, so you need many.

Slightly more challenging are the Porsche drivers with their assassins. They are not sanguine at all. These qualifiers are not the beautiful Sunday games. They’re played during the week on distant back fields. There are no ladies in beautiful dresses out here; just flinty-eyed grooms and trucks full of horses. Since every game is a knockout, we can’t lose a single one.