First person

A polo manager is key to the smooth running of the game at every club. Veteran Jimmy Newman looks back on his 30 years in the business, including riding herd on no fewer than 16 US Opens

I L LU S T R AT I O N JAMES TAYLOR

The job of polo manager has to be the best one going in the sport. You get involved in every single aspect of the game when you’re running it for a club, and you get to know the players really well in the process. Many of the close friendships you make in the world of polo are friendships for life.

Over the past three decades, I’ve been privileged to serve as polo manager, or to help organise tournaments, at several of the biggest and best clubs in the world: Retama Polo Center in Texas, Palm Beach Polo & Country Club in Florida and, more recently, Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club in California and International Polo Club Palm Beach (IPCPB), where this past winter I was involved in my 16th US Open Championship.

The era between the wars is often referred to as the ‘golden age of polo’, with legendary players like Tommy Hitchcock and Cecil Smith; team patrons such as Jock and CV Whitney; 40,000 spectators in the stands at Meadow Brook on Long Island; and polo in the Olympics. But for my money, the last quarter of the 20th century and where we are now in the 21st century have been even more impressive for the sport.

We have more countries involved in polo, more players, more and bigger polo clubs. The fields are better, as are the quality of the ponies, and there are more teams than ever playing in the major tournaments.

We’ve had our share of superstars too, like Juan Carlos Harriott Jnr and Adolfo Cambiaso, not forgetting to mention enthusiastic patrons like John Goodman,

Peter Brant, and the Packers in Australia.

I was the first in my family to be involved with the sport. My grandfather and father were tavern keepers in Ohio, where I was born. I learned a bit about horses as a boy; the father of a school friend had racing stables and we used to help out there, mucking out the stalls and tacking up the thoroughbreds. But I wasn’t really a rider then. It was in Boca Raton, Florida that I first got into polo. An uncle by marriage, Don Beveridge, was running the old Royal Palm Polo Club in Boca. I was 18 and broke, trying to put myself through junior college, and Don was short of help, so he took me on.

Because I found working with horses more interesting than doing odd jobs, I started grooming. Bennie Gutiérrez, a great horseman who became an 8-goal player, took me under his wing. He taught me how to play polo and to ride properly. I switched to nightschool so I could play at Gulfstream up the road from Boca, and eventually started travelling to scratch a living from playing professionally (although I never got higher than a 3-goal handicap), but mostly from training and selling ponies.

Along the way I found myself working several summers for Bill Ylvisaker up in Chicago. Bill was not only the highest handicapped amateur player of his day at seven goals, but also a driving force behind polo. He was chairman of the US Polo Association (USPA) and the first man to offer big prize money in tournaments. He developed Palm Beach Polo, which was the centre of high goal in the country for years. John Goodman honoured Bill by naming a tournament after him at IPCPB.

When I was caught up in the Vietnam draft in 1970, I got really lucky with a posting, serving as a medical technician at the army’s main medical facility at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. That meant I could spend all my off-time from the army playing polo with the guys at San Antonio Polo Club. Then it was straight out of khakis and back into polo whites full time.

I got my first crack at being a polo manager in 1975, organising the games at the small Iowa City Polo Club. But my first big break came when Steve and Marty Gose took me on at Retama outside San Antonio. I became their polo manager in ’77. Over the next 10 years Retama grew to be the biggest polo facility in the world, with 16 fields, of which six were the best anywhere. We hosted the last Cup of the Americas that was played, USA v Argentina, and eight US Opens. After the Goses sold up in 1987, I stayed on for another nine years with the new owners, but the place was never quite the same again.

My years in Texas, at the San Antonio club and then Retama, were some of the happiest I’ve spent in polo. We had players like Tommy Wayman, Owen Rinehart and Mike Azzaro, who went on to become 10-goalers, and hands like the Barrys, the ‘cowboys’, who were all master horsemen. Why were none of the Barrys or other great American 9-goalers of the ’70s, like Billy Linfoot, ever raised to 10? In those days Argentina’s 10-goaler Juan Carlos Harriott Jnr was in his prime, the greatest player of all time, some say, worth 12 goals or more. I think the USPA felt that none of our American players could compare with such a master. During the 1960s and early 1970s, very few top Argentine players competed in the USA.

Polo’s handicapping system is tricky at the best of times. I’ve been on USPA handicap committees for years, as well as being a governor of the association, and I think we sometimes award handicaps for the wrong reasons. There seems to be a tendency to raise some professionals after they have won a big tournament rather than looking closely at their performance throughout the whole season.

From Texas I moved on to Palm Beach Polo, helping to organise the Open there with Cali Garcia. Then in 2003 I became the first polo manager at IPCPB, which has replaced Palm Beach Polo as the premier high-goal club in the US. I work there in the winter and in the summer help organise polo at John Goodman’s ranch outside Houston and at the Johnstons’ spread in Wyoming. Last year I also took on the role of tournament director for the USPA Gold Cup in Aiken, South Carolina.

My one great sadness in 30 years as a polo manager was losing my son Jimmer. He was a good 1-goal player and played some high goal, but realised he would never make it as a pro, so looked instead at getting into the managing business like I did. I succumbed to nepotism and took him on during the 2004 winter season at IPCPB. He worked really hard at it, so I made him my assistant at Santa Barbara that summer, organising low-goal tournaments.

‘Dad, I think I’m getting pretty good at this,’ he said, and I agreed. Then he went out clubbing with his friends one night and died. He was just 24 and with a great future before him. I’m proud that IPCPB now plays a high-goal Jimmer Newman Memorial tournament in his honour.

A lot of a polo manager’s time is taken up with the business of organising and running tournaments, but safety — for players, ponies and spectators alike — is always uppermost in his mind. This can be a dangerous sport, to which I can personally testify, having broken no fewer than 11 bones playing polo over the years. You have to watch the whole scene like a hawk.

For example, a polo field has crucial safety zones around it. Grooms had a habit of ignoring this and riding spare ponies between the boards and spectators to be close when a player wanted to change in mid-chukka. A few years ago a pony got loose when a player dismounted at the boards and three ponies went down. Now we make it a requirement for a player to ride to the safety zone behind the goal if he wants to change during a chukka.

The late Henryk de Kwiatkowski, patron of the Kennelot team, used to get all suited up and ride around the grounds on his Appolosa pony while other matches were being played. At Palm Beach one day, I spotted him parading dangerously in the safety zone behind the goal, an accident waiting to happen, but he ignored my instructions to leave the area. A couple of minutes later, Mickey Tarnapol of Revlon galloped over the backline, didn’t see Henryk and slammed into him. It was just lucky neither was hurt. Players who ignore the rules are a danger to themselves and others.

As polo manager, I try not to think of players in terms of ‘personalities’. When an issue comes up, I contact each team as soon as I can so that everyone involved has the information. It’s not good for one team to hear something ‘on the street’, so to speak.

The 20 or so high-goal patrons we have at IPCPB, for example, put a great deal of effort, time and money into the sport, and they want to have a voice in the polo they are paying for. If someone is upset about something – a certain call in a game, say, or an issue with the club – then I want to know about it. Maybe I can’t solve the issue, but it’s always going to be my job to try.

Years ago, as a player at another club, I witnessed a situation where a patron asked the club why something was done a certain way. He was told, ‘Oh, that’s just the way we do it here, and you have to do it that way if you want to play polo here.’ I’m not saying I can change everything to suit everyone, but I can hear them out, and, who knows, their suggestions may be something that will help us all in the future.

Managing the game is a challenge, but looking back, I wouldn’t swap my job even for that of a highly paid top professional player, and all the glory that goes with it.

Safety is always uppermost in a polo manager’s mind. This can be a dangerous sport, to which I can personally testify, having broken no fewer than 11 bones playing polo over the years. You have to watch the whole scene like a hawk