A while back I wrote about how some people have faced retirement from polo and their various responses to an inevitable passage in life. Although he has recently retired from the game, I did not mention Danny Melville in that article, possibly because Danny’s response to said passage is long, complex, and merits more than a mere mention. But if I were going to give it just a mere mention I might say simply that Danny Melville has given up polo but taken up an interest in dogsled racing in the Great Frozen North. But that would hardly be enough.
COOL MUSHING
Danny Melville took something with him when he left polo and it wasn’t just his boots. It was something he has had all along and couldn’t drop if he tried, something that might best be understood in the words of one of our patron saints, Tommy Hitchcock: “Try as hard as you can all the time. Do not let up for one second, and do not stop until the umpire blows his whistle.”
32 POLO PLAYERS EDITION
Danny, like rust, never sleeps (although he has been known to pass out from time to time). But even in such an altered state—I should say, especially then—he never stops thinking up wonderfully crazy ideas. Daniel Archer Melville was born in
Kingston, Jamaica, on September 29, 1947, the fourth child of John and Janet Melville, a wealthy landowning family of Scottish
Playing to the whistle in the Great Frozen North
by Dan Harvey Pedrick
extraction whose ancestors first arrived in the Caribbean region in the eighteenth century. Melville grew up in Jamaica, attended school there and in the U.S., and has served his island community and nation as a businessman, as Racing Commissioner, and as a Member of Parliament. Melville acquired a waterfront sugarcane plantation near Ocho Rios on Jamaica’s