I was recently in Argentina and I am an old feller. There have been a lot of changes over the years and even here we have made things much better.
Boca Raton, FL and Oakbrook, IL were amazing in their time and then around 1979 Palm Beach Polo and Boca as well made things light years better. Different stadiums and electric scoreboards just buried Oakbrook and other places. But as we know, time gets us all. Then it was Palm Beach no more and Boca withered too. The Hamptons happened, but they are in a hard market. In August they do great and there is Polo everywhere in the Northern hemisphere. John Goodman pulled out the checkbook and wrote a new chapter in Polo here in the USA and nobody followed. Calgary has an amazing facility seldom used because it is a summer club and remote, but maybe not for long. The Northwest maybe the place to be soon as you have Sheridan, WY, Portland, OR and Calgary. Three monsterous and attractive polo facilities and all you lack is people. Well there are a lot more horses and room between Sheridan, Calgary and Portland than there are from Brooklyn to the Hamptons. So maybe it will happen. You have youth and energy in the Johnstons (Gillian and Will), Fred Jr., and Sean Keys. This is a party – just the four of them … add a few and its time to rock and roll. We need to take a lesson from the southern section as for years and even centuries there has been polo in Argentina and 15 years ago it was very quiet most of the year. There were the few big clubs which still exist, as they have much more respect for the past, but now there are places like Centavos, Pilar Chico as well as Ellerstina, La Alegría, La Canada, El Paraíso , Merlos’, Alfonso Pieres, Piki’s and Polo 1. All of these places make any club here in the U.S. look very average and not quite as nice. Maybe Houston and Palm Beach can compete, but other than a few private places there is no comparision. You can go to Pat Nesbitt’s or Tom Barrack’s or John Hall’s and find this, but never with 4 or 5 fields. Its just not going to happen again in America I guess.
Why is our greed to succeed beyond good things – its all in the pocket or something. There may never be another John T. Oxley or Bill Ylvisacker. The successful clubs and facilities in Argentina are not built by rich foriegners. They made it from polo in the U.S. and Europe, but they built it from their love of the game and haven’t put it in their portfolio to say I am who? I feel sometimes that it’s just a few who make the game happen here. If they did not help polo like they do, what would happen? The new generation has done little to keep it going. John Goodman, Peter Brant, Russ McCall – other than them the others are old fellers like Glen Holden, Bud Dardi, John C. Oxley, Ken Walker, Fred Mannix, Bob Daniels and some others in and around the country. The problem seems to be that new people to polo want it for free and lack the commitment to change it for the better.
Maybe we could hire the U.S. VP to budget polo. He has brought Haliburton from bankruptcy to 100 billion dollar contracts and is now trying to get an extension for $150 billion for the aid of our soldiers! How much aid do they get? Same as old polo owners! When the U.S. became a country back in 1776, a Scottish professor named Alexander Tyler said “A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.”
‘From that moment on, the majority always voted for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.’ This is true in polo already. In Polo the dictators are polo and everyone wants their gifts now and complain about the owners being dictators. They may well be, why not? The U..S is a free country more or less, but like Mr. Buffet said the other day he pays fewer taxes than his secretary by percentage. How free are we? All in all where do you want polo to go to? Argentina or the Pacific Northwest, or do you really care?