Strange Things Happen: A life with The Police, polo and pygmies. Stewart Copeland

it. And then there is the strategy of the game. You actually haven’t got time to think about the horse. You read the play and race to hit your mark. The horse is on a hair trigger. You communicate with leg and bit but your mind has to be on the game, not on the horse.

      In the winters, I go to Argentina and buy horses. My friend Adrian Laplacette has a ranch there, and every day is spent in endless polo. The speed of play is terrifying but smooth. The Argies start young, and by the age of twelve have complete command of horse and ball. Any other player at my level is either eleven, or not Argentine. Unlike the free-for-all melee of the Kirtlington players, the Argies all hit the ball accurately with strategic purpose, and can turn on a dime as they read the play.

      The game is divided into eight-minute chukkas. Actually with stoppages for penalties, they take longer, and by the end of one chukka the horses are soaking in sweat and breathing hard. The players leap onto new mounts and roar off to the next period. The spent horses are quickly stripped of gear, hosed down, rubbed, and then walked until they are calm and dry. Better treatment than I get after a show.

      The best horses are made in Argentina. They mix the right amount of thoroughbred for speed with a dab of American quarter horse for muscle. They have enough stock that they can be very selective and throw out (to the cattle ranches) anything that doesn’t have a natural talent for the game. Pretty soon there are twelve equine athletes lined up in my string.

      To play on a team with Collin will be a step up for my polo involvement. I had been content to play with my horses at practice chukkas at my sleepy little club, but have recently been bringing my string over here to the higher-octane Cirencester club for faster play. Over here, the talk is of tournaments, qualifying matches, and storied trophies.

      At Kirtlington, my club, I play formal games on the weekends as arranged by the club, but it’s just Sunday fun. There is no urgency to the competition, no ongoing rivalry with enemy teams. Kirtlington Sunday polo on the main ground is about fun with horses combined with Pimm’s cup, the scent of fresh-cut grass, the wooden clubhouse, and that beautiful tinkling music of clipped British accents. Not many settings are as beautiful as a golden afternoon in rolling Oxfordshire with the sound of the horses hoofs thundering softly, accented by posh military expostulations, “Oh bloody buggering hell!”

      Kirtlington does have one team, the official club team, captained by the formidable John Tyler. In the club bar players tell war stories about heroic away games on fabled fields. It all sounds very sexy, but no one ever asked me to play on this team. Decades of brownnosing are required to make the cut, and I have only been out here for a year or two.

      So Collin’s proposal is interesting. It will be him and me with two professionals to make up the four-man team. It will be my team, so I get to think up a cool name, choose some colors, and get the shirts made. And I pay for one of the pros.

      Entry-level team competition is at the “eight-goal” level. This means simply that the combined handicaps of the four players cannot exceed eight goals. The polo handicap system is the opposite of golf. As a beginner, you start at -2 and then work your way up to a pinnacle of 10. There are maybe six living 10-handicap players in the world. Amateur players can be mighty proud of a 2 handicap. You can start getting paid to play at a 3 handicap and up. I am rated at -1, which means that I gaze down upon about half of the players at Kirtlington but barely qualify for practice chukkas at Cirencester.

      Collin has a handicap of 1. Add that to my—1, and we must hire eight goals’ worth of pro to make up the eight-goal team. How about if we call the team Outlandos?

      With a careful eye he has recruited two quietly underhandicapped big hitters for our team, one at 3, the other at 4, which is only seven, but good enough. Philip Elliott is a professional from Australia, and Johnny Kidd is a natural from old money.

      Collin hasn’t just chosen me for my wallet, nor for my autograph. He and I are under the radar, undiscovered by the HPA, and are also underhandicapped. We have both been building up strings of fast horses by sneaking down to the Argentina ranches. Strangely, horses make a big difference in polo. No amount of investment in a tennis racquet will make you win at Wimbledon, but, as we are about to find out, fast horses can get you to Windsor.

      When other kids were developing hand-eye coordination, I was more into my ears I guess. I’ve never been very good at connecting with a ball. In fact polo is the only ball sport that I have ever worked at. In this sport the ball is addressed from the back of a charging beast, which is a kind of leveler at least. Although my control of the ball is patchy, I’m pretty good at getting to the spot. Some rhythmic part of my brain is in tune with the way horses move, and my fancy boarding school taught me the technique. So on the right horse I can at least get to the ball first, or sometimes more important, deny it to the enemy pro. I may not be able to hit the ball so far, but he ain’t gonna be hitting it at all!

      Collin is somewhat better. When he connects, the mighty Hammer of the Punjab strikes terror into the hearts of the enemy as the ball flies overhead. The fighting Sikh is fearless and will charge invincibly along the line of play, scattering all before him.

      So with me confounding the enemy and Collin intimidating them, Philip and Johnny calmly make the plays.

      The big tournament of the season at our level is the Archie David Cup, which is played at Windsor. It’s the most coveted trophy of the semipro polo world. At clubs all across the land teams are mustered and qualifying matches are played. The competition to make the final eight is endless.

      First we pick off the riffraff, the local lads on their homemade horses. These guys are generally quite sanguine about getting thrashed by our hired assassins because they probably haven’t got the horsepower to get very far in the tournament anyway. They’re just having a jolly good try. With so many games to play it’s hard on the ponies, so you need many.

      Slightly more challenging are the Porsche drivers with their assassins. They are not sanguine at all. These qualifiers are not the beautiful Sunday games. They’re played during the week on distant back fields. There are no ladies in beautiful dresses out here; just flinty-eyed grooms and trucks full of horses. Since every game is a knockout, we can’t lose a single one.