Sportsmans Insurance

A sportsman with a gun is sitting peacefully on a mossy log, lighting his pipe. Suddenly he sees something moving in the underbrush. He thinks it is a deer. He reaches for his gun. burns his fingers with his match, sprains his ankle falling off the log, accidentally fires a shot which removes one of his toes. . . .

Not because this is a likely sequence of events but because most insurance companies seem to think it is, sportsmen have a hard time getting insured against sporting injuries. Most companies will pay only part of an accident policy's values for injuries incurred at games or in the hunting field. A man who admits that he plays polo constantly, rides to hounds, steeplechases or drives a racing motorboat, is lucky to get a policy at all. Three years ago it occurred to smart Peter Vischer, editor of Polo, that insurance specially intended for sportsmen would be popular. Three of his friends--Charles Miner of the Litchfield County Hunt, Reginald C. M. Peirce, who played polo for Squadron A in Manhattan, and Capt. Carl B. Searing, retired, of the Army--organized Sportsmans Mutual Assurance Co. to write such policies. Licensed Jan. 3, with 400 policy holders, $600,000 in policies and a reinsurance contract which will guarantee all losses for each policy issued, Sportsmans Mutual was last week paying off its first indemnity--to Charles Wadsworth Howard, Joint Master of the Fairfield & Westchester Hounds, who had severed a tendon in his right hand while firing an expensive foreign-made shotgun.

Sportsmans Mutual premiums (starting at $30 for a $500 reimbursement policy) are a little higher than most accident rates; they cover mishaps outside the sporting field as well as in it. At present most policy holders, like Crawford Burton, twice winner of the Maryland Hunt Cup who insisted on having his policy (No. 1) printed in gold, are foxhunters, steeplechasers, poloists. Sportsmans Mutual hopes that its special $500 policy which costs $10 will soon be standard equipment for U. S. footballers, hockeyists et al. in all secondary schools and universities. Most dangerous school sport, shown by a preliminary survey made by Professor Frank S. Lloyd of New York University, is touch football. Its accident incidence is 17.11 per 1,000 to 13.68 for gymnastics with heavy apparatus, 8.75 for regulation football.

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