“Marco…Polo!” shouted the bike-borne combatants across the court and on either side of me.
And thus the match began, as I awkwardly accelerated toward a red street hockey ball placed at the center of the Central Avenue overpass tunnel in the Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium parking lot. I attempted to steer clear of bobbing and weaving bike frames with one hand while making feeble use of a handmade mallet with the other.
I was largely ineffective, as my fellow competitors twisted across the court in opposing circles. The ball passed in between wheels and bounced off walls. Suddenly I was chasing after a breakaway with the orange street-cone goal in sight, only to be cut-off and skid to the pavement as I squeezed my brakes a bit too feverishly.
“Nice one, news boy!” joked Zack Roberts, co-founder of Louisville Hardcourt Bike Polo, as he hooked the ball with his mallet and pedaled back up court.
Typically played three-on-three on a surface that’s roughly the size of a tennis court, polo players race around on a mixture of fixed and single-gear, low-ratio mountain and road bikes. Players advance toward the goal by shuffling the ball alongside, slapping a successful pass downfield, or ricocheting it off the sides of the court enclosure. Teams compete to be the first to score five points or to have the most points after 10 minutes.
Players are armed with DIY mallets, usually constructed of old ski pole shafts, segments of HTPE gas and utility piping, and seemingly endless rolls of black electrical tape. Any side of the mallet may be used to move the ball, but a successful scoring strike must originate from the mallet’s head.
Amid other visual oddities, front wheels are often covered with hand-cut and colorfully painted corrugated plastic disks, both for spoke protection and to serve as a blocking surface. Particularly in the Derby City bike polo scene, you’d be hard-pressed not to find a few cans of Miller High Life or Pabst Blue Ribbon resting on the sidelines.
Bike polo has been an internationally organized sport for the past three years. Geneva, Switzerland hosted the World Hardcourt Bike Polo Championships 2012 in August. Yet the groundswell of momentum and passion for the game is as bottom-up and crowd-sourced as ever.
“I think, at that point when we started, polo in general didn’t really have any organization,” said Jimmy Flaherty, LHBP co-founder, about the start of the Louisville organization in 2007. “Even on the national level, there wasn’t much going on. There was still a couple of tournaments per year at that point. And then in the next couple years is when it turned into, like, floodgates open.”
Only five years later, eager polo players willing to drive can find themselves a tournament of some type just about every weekend throughout the Midwest. Other nearby clubs include Bloomington, Indiana; Lexington, Kentucky; and Cincinnati, Ohio. Roberts explained that the newfound organization was a natural evolution of networks of like-minded enthusiasts scattered across multiple cities.
“We knew a couple of guys in Lexington,” said Roberts. “And then Lexington knew a couple of guys in Cincinnati. And Cincinnati knew a couple of guys in Columbus. And basically you would have these weekends every now and then. Maybe once or twice a year you’d go to these meetups…You meet these people that are the next city away…After about a year of this, we all had this network of people that are a city or two cities away.”
“And then people decided, instead of doing these little play date kind of things, we just started throwing tournaments,” said Roberts. “And it was like, ‘Hey, you put your city against our city. Send your top team.’ So you started out with, I think, 16 teams in the first tournament we did.”
This loosely connected and yet largely decentralized nature has led to an ample amount of variation by region, as each city puts its own spin on the game. Some cities, like Lexington, Milwaukee, and Seattle, are consistent North American powerhouses. However, the character of LHBP, self-styled as the “Most Sinful Polo Club in America,” has historically been significantly more laid back.
“The third time that they played polo was my first time out,” said Roberts. “And I had run into a co-worker of [Flaherty’s] who was working on his polo bike in the bike shop. I just started asking him some questions about it. And I had seen it online and was like, ‘Oh this is awesome. Do you guys play?’ So he told me 11 o’clock Sundays, in this shady parking lot across from the strip clubs downtown. And that’s where I showed up at 11 o’clock. I showed up at 11 a.m. – actually I showed up at like 10:45. Nobody there. So I just kind of went and rode around downtown on my mountain bike and came back an hour later. Nobody there. And so I thought, ‘OK, well maybe they’re not doing this.’ But I went and rode around a little bit more… And then I came back again and there was one guy, who doesn’t play anymore, but he had an office chair he had pulled out of a dumpster next-door and was sitting with his feet propped up on this column in the basement with a Colt 45 resting on his beer gut, just drinking it. He heard me come down the ramp because I was running a mountain bike with knobby tires. And he goes, ‘Oh, you here for polo? Cool. They’ll show up sometime in the next hour.’ At this point it’s like 1:30 and there are actually people starting to show up and play. And what I realized pretty quickly was that it was basically just a group of friends who hung out, drank coffee, and got drunk at 11 – pseudo-11 – o’clock on a Sunday morning.”
Roberts and Flaherty assert that over the past couple of years LHBP has somewhat dialed down their reputation of having a penchant for drink.
“We were definitely the only team in a tournament heckling each other,” said Flaherty.
But they are nonetheless proud that the Louisville game’s basis of friends and fun first has endured, even while they are striving to become more competitive on the national level.
“When people come to [Louisville], they’re not coming here for a serious tournament,” said Roberts. “They’re coming here to have a light-hearted good time with polo friends. Whereas two weeks ago, or maybe a month, a lot of these guys – you were playing against the same people and it was in a very serious format, but it wasn’t as friendly.”
One such light-hearted affair returns to Louisville on October 27, as LHBP will once again be hosting a two-on-two, costume-mandatory Halloween tournament in the chain link cage off the back patio of the Barret Bar.
“It’s a $5 entry fee,” said Roberts. “And we’re going to have players from, apparently, around the Midwest, excluding Indiana because they decided to have their state championships on the same day.”
“It’s crazy how organized they are up there,” said Flaherty about Indiana’s eight or more established clubs around the state. “If there ever was an area of complete polo nerds, it’s Indiana.”
LHBP has been playing at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays and Sundays at Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium for some time. Thanks to the much-welcomed and admittedly appropriate addition of the new space at Barret Bar earlier this summer, they’re now hosting spectator-friendly newcomer nights on Thursdays at 8 p.m. at this location. Although, as you may have guessed, things usually get started a little later.
“[Barret Bar owner Rick Wessling has] given us 100 percent control over it,” said Roberts about the former basketball court behind the bar. “We kind of toyed around with the idea a few months ago, how cool it would be to have a knife fight, which is a one-on-one polo match, in this thing… He was like, ‘Oh yeah, have at it.’ And then three days later he comes back and there are [plywood] boards all around it and we’ve cut holes in the corners for goals.”
“And that’s the whole thing,” said Roberts. “It’s similar to skateboarding or mountain biking when it started out. There’s not an infrastructure for that. We have to do it ourselves. And so every city does it their own way with what they have available to them.”
As happy as LHBP has been using tunnels and bars, Flaherty and Roberts were quick to note that Louisville lags well behind other cities in access to facilities. They are hoping to find an avenue toward a partnership with the city and other hard-court sports clubs on creating a permanent mixed-use space in the near future.
“Cincinnati had an amazing court built by the city,” said Roberts. “But East Vancouver has what…I would like to use as kind of our model. East Vancouver has a space that is – first of all they’ve got roller hockey in the area. So in the summer it’s roller hockey, it’s bike polo, it’s also basketball…And broom ball is big up there. So it’s also for broom ball as well. But they have this facility that’s one court. But at the same time they understood going into it that each sport isn’t going to need that space 24 hours a day or even 12 hours a day, seven days a week – that they can split that up between all these other groups depending on season and depending on availability, which is what I would like to push for in this city.”
LHBP hopes that creating this mixed-use space will help draw in new fans and players of the sport. However, they admit that there are challenges to taking up the sport – challenges that I experienced firsthand.
“You’re going wreck,” said Flaherty.
“Yeah, it’s gonna happen,” said Roberts. “I had a pretty bad injury, which I think was the most serious injury we’ve had as a club…playing in the rain. It was like 30 degrees down in Little Rock, Arkansas. But that was a competitive tournament. That was the South Central Qualifiers for the North American Championships…And there was stuff on the line in that game. And I got tangled up with a guy – who, incidentally, is from Lexington – and dislocated my shoulder. But that’s not the norm. Here in town, every now and then you might have a bruised wrist or a skinned elbow, but it’s not as violent as people think it’s going to be.”
“Two wheels,” said Flaherty. “You only need two wheels. And not more than two…And a willingness to look like you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. Because it’s weird.”
After I had completed both aspects of Flaherty’s advice, my inaugural polo match ended. Despite running over a three-foot wooden barrier and only scraping at the ball once or twice, I was yearning for another go as soon as possible, if only to make it through an entire game without eating pavement.
As the howls of the next match echoed through the tunnel, we cracked some beers off to the side.
“You know, there’s straight edge people who play bike polo too,” said Flaherty.
“Yes, just not in Louisville,” said Roberts.
-Chris Ritter, @CT_Smash
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