Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

46. RUBE EVANS AND POLO

1 66 +- +46+ RUBE EVANS AND POLO ALTH O UGH we tend to think of polo as an Eastern sport played by millionaires with names like Harry Payne Whitney and Devereux Milburn, it was introduced into Texas in the 1890s by the army and was avidly played by cavalry officers in San Antonio and at posts across West Texas. From those posts it seeped onto neighboring ranches and was taken up by cowboys who did not always play byAmerican Polo Association rules. When my mother was a young woman, about the time of the First World War, she was visiting an aunt and uncle on their ranch in Wise County and borrowed a horse to ride over to a neighboring ranch. Shortly after starting Qut, she returned to the house to report that she could not get her horse past a certain thorny bush beside the road. "Oh, you'll have to go across the pasture," her uncle told her. "That bush is one of the goals when we play polo. No horse on this ranch will go past it." In fact, one of the greatest polo players of all time was a Texas cowboy, Cecil Smith of Boeme, who learned to play while training polo ponies for an Austin horse dealer. In 1933 Smith led a Western team to victory over the East in an East-West match at Lake Forest, Illinois, causing polo player Will Rogers to remark that "the hillbillies beat the dudes and took the polo championship of the world out of the drawing room and into the bunkhouse." Smith went on to take a US team to England and win five titles, including the King's Coronation Cup. During his career his teams won the United States Open seven times, the Pacific Coast Open seven times, and the Monty Waterbury Cu p four times. Smith was rated as a ten-goal player, the highest ranking a polo player can receive. Polo is a game that calls for expert horsemanship and a great deal of stamina on the part of both rider and horse. The play is divided into six periods called chukkers, each lasting seven and a half minutes. Players usually change horses after every chukker. The point, of course, is to move a little ball through the opposing team's goal, using long-handled mallets to hit the ball from horseback . Although polo seems to have originated several thousand years ago in Persia, modern polo derives from a game played by native royalty in India in the early nineteenth century. The British army picked it up there and brought it to England in the 1870s and '80s, and from England it spread to the United States, where it was particularly popular in cavalry regiments. Generals Patton, Pershing, and Wainwright were all accomplished polo players. Rube Evans of Marfa is probably the Big Bend's most accomplished polo player, and certainly its most colorful. I interviewed Evans last winter in connection with a column I was writing about his father-in-law George Jones and somehow we kept getting onto the subject of polo. Evans is an affable, easygoing man in his late seventies and it is somehow difficult to picture him as the daredevil polo player that he says he was in his twenties, but he has the pictures to prove it. One in particular, which was on the front page of the sports section of the New York Times in 1952, shows him at the National Collegiate Polo Championship in New York's Squadron A Armory, playing for New Mexico Military Institute. He is riding hell-for-leather straight at a Princeton player, his mallet raised in his right hand, preparing to brain his opponent. He told me that he got control of himself at the last split second and let the man pass without striking a blow. "That impulse to maim," he told me, "is what Will Rogers had in mind when he said, They call polo the sport of gentlemen for the same reason that they call a tall guy Shorty.'" 168 +Evans , who was born in El Paso in 1929 but whose family moved to a ranch north of Winston, New Mexico in 1934, saw his first polo match when he was nine years old. His cousin Bob Evans was captain of the New Mexico Military Institute team, and the whole family went to El Paso to watch...