By Tom Goodspeed
If you answered both, you are dead on. I will start with the thing. Happens to be a mallet thing and some of you may be walking around or rather running around with a ringer and you may not even know it. In the world of mallets, a ringer is when the portion of the mallet cane that extends into the mallet head is broken. It is hardly ever visible to the eye, but the mallet is pretty much useless. Once the cane breaks inside of the mallet head, you no longer have the stability in the mallet head to hit with accuracy, as the head of the mallet will rotate as you are hitting the ball. You may get away with a few hits, but the mallet will worsen considerably and quickly. The only way to fix the mallet is either by splicing the cane or shortening the mallet. In any event, a ringer mallet is opposite to our next subject, the ringer player.
If you are not sure how to tell whether your mallet is a ringer, it is a simple test. You reach down and hold the mallet head in your left hand and then you hold the mallet grip with your right hand and twist. If the can moves independently from the head of the mallet, you are the proud owner of a ringer.
So…moving onto to the other ringer in polo. The best way to describe a ringer player is that it is one whose skills considerably exceed their current handicap. They are usually on the other team and are constantly running down to goal and scoring. If they are on your team, it’s not such a bad thing, in fact it is quite nice.
Ringers are often younger players that are improving more rapidly then the handicap committee meets. Sometimes they are foreign players that haven’t been properly viewed even though every attempt is being made to reduce those occurrences. Another breeding ground of ringers is when a schooled eye can spot a young talent that just needs some better horses. It should be of no surprise that you could immediately improve one’s handicap by several goals just by placing them on better horses.
It is said that if you are trying to put together that winning team, it is best to have every team member playing over their handicap…preferably…four ringers.
However, the National Handicap Committee does a command job of trying to equalize the playing field, as it should be. The committee spends countless hours twice annually, working with delegates, and circuit handicap committees in properly assessing handicaps. There is also a tool that the USPA has available for their use, called the “monster rule”. A reported ringer can receive a two-goal correction with a single swipe of a pen.
In any event, ringer mallets are a bad thing, actually so are ringer players, unless of course, they are on your team. I wish you a playing career that is void and at the same time, full of ringers.
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