Herbert Spencer worked with Own Rinehart on this article about Isinya, a polo breeding business owned by Owen Rinehart. This article is reprinted from the Hurlingham Polo Association Magazine‘. www.hurlinghampolo.com

All our own work

Nothing can be more satisfying than playing ponies bred, born and trained on your own farm, says the former American 10-goaler Owen Rinehart. And he should know. His high-goal string is 85 per cent homebred.

I’ve won quite a few trophies and prizes in my 26 years as a professional, but one of those I rank highest was awarded this autumn – and it had nothing to do with my winning a tournament or my skill as a player.

The Skeeterville team for whom I was playing in the US Polo Association’s 26- goal Gold Cup tournament in Aiken got knocked out in the semi-finals. During the competition, six of the eight ponies I played came from our own breeding and training
operation on our farm outside this South Carolina town. This is one of the highest percentages of homebred mounts played by any professional anywhere, although pros like Pepe Heguy and the Pieres brothers in Argentina are also moving in this direction.

At Palermo, they present a trophy for the best pony string in the Argentine Open, but there was no such prize in the US. So, after the Gold Cup final, I was surprised to be called up to the podium to receive a new award for Best Mounted Player in the tournament – for the quality of my homebred ponies.

My wife, Georgina, and our farm manager, Beth Skolnik, are the heart and soul of our operation because it is they who breed and foal the ponies, breaking them in and caring for them before passing them on to me. The Best Mounted Player trophy, a bronze by the Canadian player and sculptor Rich Roenisch, also belongs in a sense to one of the greatest and most respected pony breeders of all time, the late Ricardo S. ‘Dickie’ Santamarina of Argentina. You’ll see why later.

Since I turned professional, I have trained all my own ponies, with the rare exception, but before moving to Aiken I had never been involved with breeding, nor had Georgie. Previously, I was based on my farm in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Georgie helped with the horses as well as playing polo (I don’t think her handicap was ever more than 0, but she was a great little goal scorer).

In the summer of 1992, I captained the United States team against England in the first post-war revival of the Westchester Cup, with Adam Snow, John Gobin (both of whom now live in Aiken) and Rob Walton.

We won 8-7 in extra time, a great match. It was a thrill to play before 20,000 spectators in Windsor Great Park – we never get crowds that big in America – and an even greater thrill to be presented with the 106- year-old trophy by the Queen. After my re- turn to the States that year, Georgie and I bit the bullet and made an off er on a farm in Aiken.

Th e climate is dry and mild without the harsher winter weather further north and the sandy soil offers good footing for horses. And Aiken has a long history of Thoroughbred training and polo, dating back more than a century.

Georgie, who comes from Kenya, named the farm Isinya, a Masai word meaning ‘a
place of sand’.

We decided to have a go at pony breeding to build up my string. Georgie is one of those people who has to keep busy doing something productive – she’s never been content with just being a ‘polo wife’ – so we decided she would be in total charge of the breeding operation. It also made good accounting sense to keep separate the finances of the breeding and that of my work as a trainer and professional polo player. We treat them as two separate businesses, Georgie breeds and I buy green horses from her to train.

Initially, Georgie ran the breeding business with just one American Thoroughbred stallion, until we were fortunate enough to get to know Dickie Santamarina and his wife, Frances. Frances was from Aiken and the sister of Billy Post, a leading player between the wars. Dickie and Frances visited her family here every year and when Georgie met him at a cocktail party, they hit it off immediately and the four of us became good friends.

I knew of Dickie’s reputation as a breeder and trainer, and one of my first ponies had come from his estancia, La Fortuna, in Argentina. All his ponies were Thoroughbreds, registered with the Jockey Club in Buenos Aires. After we became friends, I kept pestering Dickie to sell me a stallion.

‘You’ll have to come down to choose one,’ he said. ‘ No, you choose for me,’ I replied. Finally he sent me photographs of two: one of his famous greys and a bay, Lord Franco, which I chose.

When the stallion arrived, I asked Dickie what I owed him. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘it’s a gift from Frances’. After Frances died, Dickie seemed to lose heart. He still bred ponies on the estancia but did little with them. On one of our visits to La Fortuna, he offered Georgie the pick of his stallions and also gave her a fine mare. I think he would have given her the lot if she had asked, they were that close.

Dickie died about two years after Frances. We are so proud that we have been able to continue the Santamarina bloodlines through his two stallions at Isinya. Since we started, an average of about five foals per year have been born on the farm. I’ll take two, sometimes three per year to enhance and upgrade my string, others have
been bred for clients. Either Georgie or Beth or both have been present at the birth of every foal. There are various things that can go wrong, so when a mare’s time approached, they would bring her into the stable where they had a remote camera installed so Beth could keep an eye out between cat naps.

Sometimes, Georgie would wake me up in the middle of the night to announce that such-and-such a mare was foaling, and to ask if I would like to come down. My response was usually ‘no, just wake me up again in theree years time.’

I think three or four years is about the earliest one should put horses into training. Typically, when a pony is three we’ll start playing ‘keep-away’ with it: three or four of us will go out and try to keep possession of the ball, no rules. This accustoms the pony to a lot of stick work, bumping and mingling with the crowd.

We don’t work them for long, maybe just five or 10 minutes a day. ‘A fresh horse can’t learn and a tired horse can’t learn’ is what Billy Wayman (father of 10-goaler Tommy) used to say. Everything I do in training is done without making an issue of anything. Make something an issue and it will be with the pony for life; don’t make an issue and it will come round naturally.

In a pony’s fourth year I’ll put it into slow chukkas on the farm. I used to start playing them in matches when they were five, but have backed off that now and will give them another year of farm chukkas. I think a six-year-old pony has just that much more maturity and physical strength for match play.

Things will be changing a bit at Isinya now. Georgie is hooked on flying (she owns a fast, single-engine plane, has her instruments, instructor’s and twin-engine licenses and is learning to pilot helicopters as well) and wants to spend less time with the horses, so I’ll get more involved with the breeding. I’ve been looking at the new embryo transfer program at New Bridge Polo & Country Club here, and am also considering breeding and training ponies for sale rather than mainly just for my string.

Of the 16 match ponies I’m taking to Florida for the 2006 winter high-goal season, all but two are homebred. If I had to choose one pony from the string as my favorite, it would have to be Pipsqueak, a dark bay mare out of Pip by Lord Franco. The 2005 high goal in Florida was her first major season and I played her throughout
the tournaments. She has incredible stamina, great lateral movement and good speed and performed brilliantly for me in the first chukka and part of the fifth, sixth and seventh in the final of the US Open.

She is only seven years old and improving all the time and I think she has the makings of a champion. Sadly, we lost Pipsqueak’s sire, the great Lord Franco, last winter when he broke his shoulder out in the pasture and had to be put down. As with all the other animals that have died on the farm, he was buried there and Georgie planted a tree over his grave.

Over the coming years that evergreen live oak tree will grow into a permanent reminder of how much Dickie Santamarina’s stallions have added tot he quality of our stock, of all t he work Georgie and Beth put into our breeding – and of the immense satisfaction I have had, as a player, in training and playing homebred ponies.

Since this article was written Owen won the best string in Florida last Spring.

For more information on Isinya visit their Web site at http://www.isinya.com/