Grabbing the Reins

Nicholas B. Snow ’09 wasn’t meant for walking. His shoulders slant downwards and his arms hang awkwardly at his sides; the athlete sometimes looks downright goofy. But on a horse, the brawny 23-year-old is all grace, efficiency, and power. Nick happens to be the best player in intercollegiate polo—and he’s willing to share some of his secrets.

“If I’m on a horse that isn’t very fast, I’m not going to try and run with the ball. I’ll try and hit it and sit back because I know that I’m not going to be able to run by everybody. Or if I have a horse that runs very quickly, then I can stop with the ball and turn with it. But if not, then I’ll just hit a backshot,” Nick says, offering on a frenetic sermon on his controlled approach to the game. “Does that make sense?”



It doesn’t, at least, not to a novice. But once Snow hops onto a horse and wields a mallet, it all becomes clear. Snow—who was the captain of his high school hockey, lacrosse, and soccer teams—is that all-around athlete who possesses the added dimension of poise that distinguishes the truly talented from the merely overeager. Crocker Snow Jr. ’61, coach of the Harvard men’s polo team, sums it up by calling his son a “quiet player.”

“If you watch him, he’s making three times the plays as anyone else, and he’s never rattled,” says Crocker, who has few reservations about extolling Nick’s prowess on the field. Nick is “clearly” the best player on the team, “obviously” the exceptional one, and the “advantage” Harvard has over other schools.

Nick has taken the Harvard Polo Club quite far in just its first formal year of activity. “The Great Leap Forward,” Crocker calls this past season—presumably excepting the famine and millions of deaths that followed the Maoist version. After nearly a century of failing to gain a foothold at Harvard, the club has been able to practice with its own horses in its own practice facility this past season, generating the first official women’s team and a threefold increase in the number of players in just a year.

Under the coaching of Crocker and wife Katherine T. “Cissie” Jones, most of the players have been transformed from inexperienced riders to mallet-waving, galloping fiends. And with only three players per lineup on the field during an intercollegiate game, having even one player as experienced as Nick has made the national championships a genuine possibility this year for the young team. But for that very same reason, Nick’s success is a constant bleak reminder of how much the club will lose next season.

“I’m just looking ahead and thinking, ‘uh Jesus.’ They’re really enthusiastic, they can learn, definitely—but they need somebody they can grow around, somebody to feed off of,” Crocker says. “We’ll have an inevitable setback for a year or two, until we start developing one or two players with more game experience.”

For Crocker, the issue is finding talent rather than retaining it. “It’s a very narcotic sport,” Crocker says. “There are very few people who get a little taste of it who don’t want more.”

DRIVING TO RIDE

It is February, and the top three players on the men’s team have less than a month to prepare for the Intercollegiate Regional Tournament at Cornell University—but they’ll first have to beat University of Kentucky in a few days to secure a spot. Nick, the men’s captain, is not prone to exuberant flourishes of emotion, but he whistles and growls, low and off-key, to a Johnny Cash track blaring from the car speakers. He is confident of a victory against Kentucky and hopeful—perhaps even sure—of success at the tournament. If Harvard beats the University of Connecticut in its first slotted game at Regionals, the team will move on to play Cornell; regardless of the outcome of this second game, the first victory alone could be enough to move Harvard on to the National Intercollegiate Tournament.

Among the 30-plus intercollegiate programs across the country, Harvard polo ranks below top teams like Cornell, Texas A&M University, and University of Virginia. But Nick says Harvard is “leaps and bounds” above perennial rival Yale College, whose program has been around for about 45 years. Harvard has already defeated Yale twice, and one of the victories this past fall has remained the highlight of the season—but Snow hopes that will be topped in the coming weeks.

In the backseat, Michael J. Scalise ’10 sits with knees high and head looming close to the roof of the car. He replenishes an earthen gourd of mate—a caffeinated drink prepared with the dried leaves of a South American holly—with hot water from a thermos. Unlike Nick, who has a dark, leathery complexion, Scalise is of a lighter cast, his wispy blonde hair framing a bright-eyed face that jerks about when addressed. He passes the gourd to Pablo Botero ’09, and like some religious victual, the pungent beverage slowly makes its rounds among the three. “Nothing illegal,” Snow assures upon surfacing from a deep sip through the steel straw.

Without its own equestrian center on campus, the polo team drives to a rented barn at the Canter Brook Equestrian Center in Hamilton for four practices a week throughout its October to April season. The long drives to practices and games are hallowed arenas for team bonding, whether players are partaking from the same gourd of green goop or scoping highways for options other than Nick’s Famous Roast Beef. “I think I’m getting the chicken parm’, baby,” Snow says. The three men consider other possibilities. “I was thinking the steak and cheese sub, but I can do pizza,” Scalise concedes. “If it’s the right pizza.”

It is completely dark outside by the time the men arrive at Canter Brook. Snow strides down the stable to check the stalls occupied by Harvard’s 14 “polo ponies.” Of five donated to Harvard, three are gifts from actor and polo fan Tommy Lee Jones ’69; the rest are privately owned, typically older horses lent to the team for the season. Though a school like Cornell boasts a 30-horse string, Harvard’s 14 are better than nothing (what the team had last year), and if proper arrangements with outside interests are made, the team may see double the number of ponies next fall, according to Crocker.

Nick enters one of the enclosed wooden cubes and firmly pushes away a horse, which lazily shifts its bulk aside to let him through. “Who left the windows open?” Nick says, shutting the window in the back of the stall as he shudders. “This is silly!” He noisily kisses Pinocho on the head, and the grey gelding stares back with bulbous eyes, steam issuing from his nostrils.

For the next hour, the three boys troop around the stable to tack the horses. They wrap protective bandages around the ponies’ fore legs, attach the bridles, lay out saddle blankets, and braid the tails to make room for back swings. Nick jumps onto a golf cart with a large rake attached to the back, and the vehicle wheezes and rattles across the indoor arena in sweeping symmetrical arcs to smooth the sand, or “footing,” which is looser than most other indoor fields. Mid-way, Nick gets out of the car to swiftly scoop up a pile of thick excrement. The next team T-shirt, he thinks, should say, “We Scoop Shit.”

“It’s a huge contrast with life in Cambridge,” Crocker says. “To be able to come out to a barn three to four times a week helps keep you grounded.”

Crocker bristles at polo stereotypes—associations of the sport with a culture of “Great Gatsby, Ralph Lauren, and white britches.” He considers life in the stable anything but glamorous—you have to do a lot more before you can put those white jeans on, he wryly observes.

The combination of “Harvard” and “polo” may reek of rich-boy snobbery, but Nick refuses to discount the sport’s intensity on behalf of its image. “It’s expensive to play polo. There’s no other way around it,” says Nick, who believes some are involved in the polo scene simply for the presumed lifestyle. “How do you feel about those people? You kinda feel torn because they help push the game forward…but it’s not what the sport is about.”

And it’s apparent that Nick loves the game. During practice, he sings: “Walk, walk, walk—hold it, put it in. That’s you, Pabs, hit—hit!” Nick surveys his teammates. Botero rode all his life in Colombia but only began polo with the team’s rebirth two years ago, and Scalise—who stopped playing lacrosse for Harvard at the end of last summer—rode minimally before joining the team this school year with the encouragement of Nick, a fellow member of the A.D. final club. Nearly everyone on the polo team—except Nick—had no experience with polo before joining. “Ah ha! Bravo! When I turn, come to me!” Even his dad doesn’t escape Nick’s eye: “Well done, Pop.”

After practice, the boys and horses, emitting feathery clouds of steam, are back in the stable. Stale manure is replaced with fresh hay, the horses are denuded. Stinking of the barn’s musk and covered in horsehair, the players are back in Cambridge shortly before midnight.

“The percentage of playing time to the time you’re out there is less than 10 percent, maybe,” Nick says. “There’s no way you’re just going to go out there and things are going to go well just because you have a lot of money and the nicest horses. It really does reward the people who are working the hardest and are involved in it the most.”

THE SPORT OF THE EVERYMAN

When Business School student John Browne requested formal recognition of the Harvard polo team in the late 1960s, the response from former President Nathan M. Pusey was explosive: “Polo? Polo is the last thing we need at this time at Harvard!”

Pusey, fatigued by the anti-Vietnam war movement on campus, was “very polite and charming,” Browne said—but the president didn’t see the point of endorsing a low-priority activity that required a programmatic structure the University couldn’t immediately offer.

The hefty investment that polo requires is a problem for most collegiate programs. There are the horses—essentially, living tools that must be kept in, well, living condition—the concomitant need for space in the form of stables and arenas, and the riding experience needed to get a functional game started. The ebb and flow of Harvard polo over the decades duly reflects these complicating aspects.

In the early 1900s, a group of recreational polo players forged Harvard’s first foray into the sport, and by the late 1920s, the team tasted real success under the leadership of Forrester A. Clark Jr. ’58, a six-goal outdoors player. In the 1950s and 60s, Crocker himself, his best friend Adam Winthrop ’61, and Russell B. Clark ’61 further legitimized the sport on campus—but with neither official University recognition, nor the requisite resources, the survival of Harvard polo remained tenuous.

Days after that first failed encounter, Browne and his polo teammates returned to Pusey’s office. A Texan oil driller named Hap Sharp had donated six of his trade-out ponies to Harvard and dropped them off at Boston South Station for pick-up. “These belong to you—not to us,” Browne recalls telling Pusey as they handed him a telegram from Sharp. “They belong to Harvard.” In 1968, polo was recognized as an official Harvard club sport.

The team underwent subsequent decades of deaths and rebirths. But after a twelve-year hiatus, the most recent resuscitation in 2007 may be the last. With Crocker and Cissie at the reins, a club that only last year practiced infrequently with others’ horses, sometimes showing up at games completely unprepared, now has its highest membership yet and a good chance of making it to Nationals.

Though Nick considers the polo team to be in the upper reaches of the club sports, gaining varsity status for the team is not his goal. He wants to sustain undergraduate participation because “what that transfers down to is the athletic department, and the school realizing that there are kids who are involved and there could be a place permanently for polo if there was support,” he says. “Ideally, we want everybody to come out and play who can, and hopefully in the future, if alumni and the school itself realize that’s an issue, they can make it possible for these kids.”

After World War II, Crocker Sr. obtained several horses for his home in Ipswitch, Mass. and helped start the Myopia Polo Club, spawning a dynasty that would become known by many polo aficionados. Crocker Jr. played recreationally, in addition to eventually becoming a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and the director of the Edward R. Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

“He’s a very cerebral athlete,” Browne says. “When you get a chap like Crocker, he’s able to put [the game] in terms that are understandable, instead of just being good himself. That’s why Harvard is so lucky to have him.”

Crocker’s eldest son, 43-year-old Adam—Adam Winthrop’s namesake—is the last American player to have obtained the highest possible rating of ten-goals (the scale begins at -2). Now Nick is a four-goal player recruited to play for money—something that happens to only one to three out of a hundred collegiate players, he says.

Nick, who stopped playing varsity hockey mid-way through sophomore year to participate in the polo club’s inaugural season, feels that he has found his calling in a sport where he has not only become the face of a polo dynasty, but the field’s greatest intercollegiate talent and proof of professional-level ability in a college sport that continues to seek greater recognition from schools across the country.

ON THE ROAD—AGAIN

John “J.P.” Stilz ’11 cleans out his car Friday morning in preparation for the team’s imminent departure for Ithaca, and he discovers an uneaten hamburger in the backseat. A tattered, yellowed copy of “Typology of the Racehorse” lies on top of boots and gear, all reeking of barn musk. His car is a “nice compost pile,” Stilz says.

“We need gas, food, and a new windshield,” Stilz says, gingerly touching a widening crack in the glass. He thinks for a moment. “And a deodorizer.”

“That’s true,” remarks William “Albany” Mulholland ’12 in the passenger seat. For most of the trip, Mulholland’s feet are perched on the dashboard, a solid blue sock on the right and a green and black striped sock on the left.

Stilz and Mulholland are the pages to the team’s lords; they watched the victory against Kentucky a few weeks ago, and have high hopes for tonight’s game against UConn—the past two games were closely matched. Though Stilz and Mulholland will not be playing at the tournament, the two, along with junior varsity player Diego H. Nunez '12, Alexandra “Za” Tilt ’10 and Marion I. Dierickx ’12 from the women’s team, are accompanying the three core players to Cornell to help with tacking.

With the growth in membership this year, the polo team has forged a strong sense of community. “A vast majority of the people are very down-to earth people who like horses,” Nick says. “They’re definitely kids, you know, I’ve got an opportunity to know and hang out with that I probably never would have.”

After hours in Stilz’s mobile compost pile and Scalise’s “Shagg’n-Wagg’n,” the team arrives in Ithaca, on the prowl for fuel. “Scooby snacks are a must,” Scalise says, gripping a shopping cart. By the end of a fifteen-minute search in the supermarket, Botero’s interest in purchasing Cracker Stackers has been vetoed by Snow and two boxes of Scooby snacks have been claimed.

“Now you can take over the world,” Mulholland says. The truth of the statement would be tested at tonight’s game.

A HORSE IS NOT GRAPHITE

The polo community is obsessed with horses in a way that tennis players could never be with their rackets.

“He’s really fun to ride. It’s just so easy,” one girl gushes in the equestrian center. Another boasts that when she “holds his face” with both hands, he doesn’t move away. Horses are “so pretty” and “incredible.” As Nick says, “What it all comes down to is your connection with the horse”—the animal is a shared interest that makes the polo community often feel more like an overextended family than a collection of competitive localities.

“Horses bring out an intimacy that is lacking in lacrosse or any other sport that has a tool—it’s just a piece of wood, it’s just a piece of graphite,” Cissie says. “The horses are warm-blooded, hot-breathing masses of flesh and blood that are here because they love their jobs.”

“You have to love the horses in order to play the sport, there’s no doubt about it,” Mulholland says. “You have to consider what they’re capable of.”

If the stable were an incestuous high school, Nick and Pistola, a large chestnut, would be the star jock couple that not only understands each other’s power, but recognizes the formidability of combining forces. But it’s not merely a combination of talent, but a synergistic force that seems to work only between the two.

“Pistola is so meaningful to Nick that he feels like when anybody else plays the horse, they’ll be a good player,” Cissie says. “But when Nick plays that particular horse, he feels like he is three goals better—mentally and physically and emotionally.”

But the Harvard team was unable to bring its own string of horses to Regionals; the men will ride horses they briefly encountered at past games against Cornell and UConn. In an indoor collegiate game, a team of three plays a group of six horses for the first two chukkers, or periods of play, and the other team plays those same six horses in the last two. Because of the idiosyncratic dynamics between horse and rider, the advantage is huge for the home team playing on its own string—the mark of the exceptional polo player is the ability to adapt to any horse.

Horses obtain their “general framework” by the age of five or six, and afterwards, the player must cater his riding to the animal, Nick says. Does the horse have a “good mouth,” meaning, is it receptive to a pull on the reins? Will the horse go boldly into the wall, or will it balk? Are there other horses on the field it doesn’t like? Does the horse play smaller than it looks, or is it slow and unengaged, perhaps on the sluggish side?

“All these little innuendoes go into the relationship you have with a particular horse, and it’s disadvantageous to come to a tournament like a Regional or a National and not have a string of horses you’re comfortable with,” Cissie says. “Our job as coaches is to give [players]…intuition to know what to do at a particular time because they’ve been there and done it.”

As Crocker says, you don’t fight the horse—you work with it.

HOOKERS AND “QUESTIONABLE PLAYS”

“We got the lowdown on the horses we’re playing,” Crocker says. He’s gathered the team into a room before the game against UConn, and his plan is simple: Botero and Scalise would run off the men to keep Nick free to drive the ball.

“When you see me going to a ball, your only job is to take the guy,” Nick says. “Don’t even think ball. Think, I’ll deal with getting my man out of here.”

“You’re the best hooker,” Crocker says to Scalise. “He’s the best hooker with pants on instead of a skirt.” Crocker eyes crinkle as he laughs.

But when the game begins later that day, Crocker grips the arena net in rapt attention. If you close your eyes and simply listen, you can get a good idea of what’s happening in the polo match: the light pattering of pony feet as they scamper around a throw-in, the thunderous stampeding down the field when everyone is chasing a ball that’s strayed far ahead, or the clanking of mallets and buckling of side boards against horse flesh when the ball falls into the corners.

“They’ve got their swords, they’re out there with their spears,” Cissie says. “They’re out there not drawing blood, but definitely making an impression on each other about who’s tougher.”

In the first chukker, the power play between Nick and Charlie Hutchinson, UConn’s leading player, makes immediately clear that the two teams are closely matched; the seven-and-a-half minutes end with UConn in a one-goal lead. But in the second chukker, Harvard loses its close follow, racking up multiple crossing violations and missing several foul shots. By the chukker’s end, Harvard is four goals behind UConn—not a good place for a team that had seen itself at least on par with UConn in previous games.

Nick races with a new ferocity down the field. He sees plays seconds before everyone else, easily weaving himself between players and never rushing to the ball unless he is sure he can gain complete control of it. When Nick sees the need to stand back, he does; he doesn’t focus on where the ball is now but where it’s going to be.

His 52-inch mallet creates a satisfying thwack!, not a dull thud, against the ball, which flies precisely in the direction he intends even as he sits atop an animal that could be moving from 25 to 35 miles per hour. Nick rides the horse with a knowing intimacy, as he rhythmically pumps his upper body so that the two work as one fluid unit. No longer is Nick an awkward ursine: he’s a four-legged creature with two abdomens.

But he struggles under the concentrated pressure of the entire UConn team. Shouts of “Nick is coming!” ring from the UConn players, who ride their horses into Nick’s side, pushing and elbowing—an illegal move—to drive him off the line of the ball. Early in the third chukker, Hutchinson wildly flails his horse at Nick’s to ride him off, unsteadying his opponent. With a graceful tumble off the side of his horse, Nick lands with a powdery thud. The umpires call a simple penalty against UConn, and Nick receives a free shot at the goal.

“Nick gets mad, you’ll see. That always happens,” Tilt says from the sidelines. “Nick gets really upset and scores all the goals.”

Without a doubt, Nick promptly remounts his horse and scores five goals in the span of time UConn scores one. With two minutes left in the third chukker, Harvard is now only two goals behind UConn’s thirteen.

In the fourth and last chukker, the teams continue their neck-to-neck race towards victory. As usual, Nick darts ahead of the crowd towards the far wall in pursuit of the ball, but Charlie drives up from behind and bumps the rear of Nick’s horse. Mid-momentum, caught between Charlie and the wall, Nick is thrust off his horse and flies headlong into the boards, crumpling into a fetal position before impact.

“What the fuck…this is the second time,” Snow says when he gets up, hands in the air and voice breaking into amused aggravation. “Second time!”

Another simple violation is called against UConn, but growing discontent stirs within the Harvard team: a harsher penalty should probably have been called, one where Harvard could have received an automatic free goal. In the end, UConn wins, 20 to 15. Harvard will not be going to Nationals.

Jim Deangelis, the Yale men’s coach, sidles up to Crocker, who stalks about the arena after the game. “He’s the best college polo player right now.”

“But it didn’t win the game.” Crocker has no room for rationalization: a loss is a loss.

“But it’s won him some,” Deangelis persists. Crocker doesn’t respond.

AN UNINTENDED SERIES OF ENDS

The morning after, Nick is somber. He slouches in a chair, blankly staring ahead. His voice has lost its nasly cadence, and now it just drones,“Fuck the game.”

“I thought we could’ve won, and we should’ve won,” Nick says. “You wake up this morning, and you’re like, ‘Well. That sucks.’” He laughs.

Crocker doesn’t want to sound like a “sour loser,” he says, but he carefully suggests that the game wasn’t quite as fair as it should have been. According to Crocker, Nick had to play a “perfect game” but was obstructed by the numerous violations called against the team—and it probably didn’t help that one of the umpires was a former coach for UConn. Moreover, the opponent had been clearly bent on neutralizing the strongest player on the field, creating a dangerous match-up for Nick.

“I thought they were both pretty dirty plays, and I have never really seen that in playing college for three years,” Nick says of his two collisions with Charlie. “It was obviously disappointing to know that they were going after me, but that’s what happens.”

As the inexperienced players, Scalise and Botero tried to play conservatively in order to provide the space for Snow to make the big plays—but matters unraveled beyond their control. “It all happened too quickly. You don’t have time to think,” Scalise says in retrospect. “When you’re in a game, you just pretty much have to let it flow. If you think, you’re too late.”

The unexpected loss to UConn has left Crocker more expressive of his worries than usual. “The cards are really stacked against us. Cornell and UConn, they’ve got the facilities, the program,” Crocker says. In Harvard’s club, “there’s only one [player] that had any previous polo experience, which is a huge handicap against all the other teams we’re playing because they attract and recruit young players that come to play polo and have played before.”

Crocker wants to recruit at least one experienced player to minimize the effect of losing Nick. With the team’s growth this past year, several interscholastic players from all over the world—including one from Singapore that Crocker especially has his eyes on—have expressed interest in the club. If he were to have a say in the selection between two very similar applicants—one with polo experience, the other without—it could yield unimaginable gains for the Harvard team, Crocker says.

“It’s obviously frustrating to end your college career on a game like that,” Nick says. But the defeat itself is a rough reminder of just how far the team has come. “We were one or two goals away from possibly going to the Nationals, which obviously would’ve been a great accomplishment.”

“I feel bad for Nick more than anything else—not me,” Crocker says. “He was trying to will the Harvard team to the Nationals.”

INTERSECTING RIDES

“The thing that I find most important in intercollegiate polo—and I know it’s hard for a Nick Snow sitting in this chair, trying to work through what he went through yesterday—is the relationship that the kids have with the horses, first, and with each other, second,” Cissie says the morning after the game.

Though disappointed, Nick—who will likely go to Argentina (“the Mecca of polo”) post-graduation to play with the professionals—hopes that that past season has given the players something to love, as it has for him.

“I really couldn’t be more happy with the way things are going and the most rewarding thing for me is seeing the kids who are really dedicated,” Nick says. “Not one of these kids would ever have done anything close to this. That’s what’s rewarding—that’s what I like.”

“I want to tell you we’re doing fine, but we’re nervous about Nick because he really did hold the team together this year,” says Scalise, who will, for now, take the de facto role of captain as the eldest varsity player. “It’ll be a different game, but I think we can do it.”

Not one aspect of polo, even the losses, comes to define the sport as a whole. The feelings that come while you’re on top of that horse are layered—and they compound, Scalise says. The thrill of being taken from one end of the field to another in seconds, the feeling of hot horse skin underneath white jeans, the vulnerability of depending on another living thing besides oneself—in the end, losing doesn’t really seem to matter all that much, and it would be difficult to not see other players as one comrades.

“If they carry on in the sport of polo, they’re going to run into each other again down the road,” Cissie says. “They’re all going to have shared this experience during this time of their lives, and I find that it’s fascinating, because I’ve been around long enough to see a generation continue.”

“It’s a life-changing experience,” Cissie smiles. She would know.