Polo Players Edition

JAN 2011

Polo Players' Edition is the official publication of the U.S. Polo Association. Dedicated to the sport of polo, it features player profiles, game strategy, horse care, playing tips, polo club news and tournament results.

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A young Prince Charles attends a polo match in 1955. play polo. Prince Albert had learned to play at Aldershot in 1885 while serving with his regiment, the 10th Hussars. Prince Philip had taken up polo at the Marsa Club in Malta where he was stationed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and where he established a home with his young wife, Princess Elizabeth. One of the reasons for his interest in polo was that he had discovered that his wife preferred to watch his uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, play polo rather than watch her husband play cricket. Naturally Prince Philip turned to his uncle to help him start playing. Lord Mountbatten’s father, Prince Louis of Battenberg, had been a keen polo player in Malta during the 1870s and 1880s. By a strange coincidence Lord Mountbatten had played his first game of polo when, as a staff member, he had accompanied Edward, The Prince of Wales, on his 1921-1922 tour of India and the Far East. Mountbatten replaced an absent player in a match in Jodhpur and he immediately became hooked on polo. Mountbatten said later that during the game he only hit the ball three or four times, but a lifetime’s passion was truly born. He wrote of the experience, “I’ve gone completely dippy about polo, which in my opinion is the best game in the world.” Mountbatten has made lasting contributions to the game. As a player he reached a 5-goal handicap, he was the author (under the The Queen treads in divots at a polo match at Smith’s Lawn in 1955. pseudonym of Marco) of An Introduction to Polo, still the definitive textbook written on polo, and as chairman of the Hurlingham Rules Committee in the 1930s he did much to help the coordination of the rules of polo around the world. He also devised and patented the R.N.P.A. oval-shaped head for a polo mallet, which gives “loft and length” to a shot. Prince Philip has also left his mark on the game. He too became a 5-goal player and did much to popularize polo in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a founding member of the Household Division Polo Club in Windsor Great Park in 1955 (which in 1969 changed its name to the Guards Polo Club). Prince Charles’ interest in polo started as a child watching his father play at Windsor, and he was encouraged by his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten gave the Prince a copy of his book inscribed with the words: Love from Great Uncle Marco. Prince Charles reached a 4-goal handicap and was in the words of Lord Patrick Beresford, “an inspiration to other players and spectators becoming the sport’s main bastion, not only in Britain, but worldwide on the retirement of his father Prince Philip in 1971.” Prince Charles played high-goal polo in Britain and has also played in exhibition matches around the world. In 1988, Lt. Col. Alec Harper wrote in the Hurlingham Polo Association Yearbook, “Prince Charles is certainly a contender for the ‘Leading Amateur’ title.” It is estimated that in the last few years of his polo playing, POLO PLAYERS EDITION 63 COURTESY OF NIGEL A BRASSARD COURTESY OF NIGEL A BRASSARD

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