$2.20 Polo

What was in many respects the most interesting game of this year's U. S. Open Polo Championship came the first day between the robin's-egg-blue stands that run the length of International Field at the Meadow Brook Club on Long Island. Hurricanes v. Hurlingham was, in a sense, a rehearsal for the matches for the Westchester Cup, No. 1 trophy of the game, which a picked U. S. team will defend in England next June. England lost the Westchester Cup in 1921 and has been trying ineffectually to get it back ever since. Ostensibly, the Hurlingham team that played at Meadow Brook last week was merely one of the seven entered in the Open but actually its members have been campaigning on Long Island all summer in a serious, calculated attempt to get used to U. S. play and the U. S. players they will face next summer. Two official observers of the Hurlingham Club were in the Meadow Brook stands last week to witness the results.

For British observers, the results of all polo between England and the U. S. for the past 14 years have been uniformly painful. Last week's game was no exception. Against the best-mounted U. S. team in the Open, the inadequacy of Hurlingham's string of ponies was twice as apparent as it had been in earlier scratch games. The Britons' invariable emphasis on style rather than speed, the tendency to hit from the saddle instead of the stirrups, were as obvious as ever. For the Hurlingham observers, the most encouraging factors of the game were negative ones. Hurlingham was handicapped by the loss of its regular No. 1, Captain Michael P. Ansell, who chipped a bone in his wrist last month. Eric Tyrell-Martin. who showed the effects of a winter's polo at Del Monte, Calif., played above his seven-goal U. S. handicap. Far from the runaway that the crowd half expected, the game turned out to be a tight struggle in which the score was tied seven times and in which the goal that finally won, 9-to-8, for the Hurricanes, was scored in the last chukker when Hurlingham was addition ally burdened because its No. 1, "Chicken"' Walford, had in a crisis chosen a mare named Golden Gleam which of all the British ponies was patently the worst.

With the most serious foreign threat since an Argentine team won the tournament in 1931 thus neatly disposed of, the Open promptly became what it usually is, the climax of the summer's rivalry be tween young men who have been living on Long Island and vying with each other at polo ever since they were old enough to pick up the rudiments of the world's most patrician pastime. On the same afternoon that Hurlingham was losing at Meadow Brook, Old Westbury was losing at nearby Bostwick Field to Seymour Knox's Aurora, champions in 1933. Two days later, Aurora nosed out the Hurricanes 11-to-10, for a place in the final against Greentree. Greentree, Jock Whitney's team, has never won the Open but this year, ahead of Whitney at Back, are Pete Bostwick, Gerald Balding and Tommy Hitchcock. They got into the final by beating Templeton, champions last year and warm favorites to retain their title, 10-to-9, at Meadow Brook when, with the score tied in the last chukker, Bostwick. on his speedy Mio Mio, picked up a long hit from Balding and carried it down the field for the winning goal.

If the excitement of having a British team campaigning on Long Island has been the major polo interest of the season, the doings of young Pete Bostwick on and off the field have run a close second. Last year, Bostwick, whose diminutive size had aided him to become generally rated the world's ablest amateur jockey, decided to give up racing in favor of a game which his other interests had kept him too busy to play seriously since he was 10. Promptly and characteristically, he concluded that if polo was good enough for him to play, it was good enough for more people to watch than those who could park their cars along the boards at the dozen or so private fields where high-goal players customarily perform, or afford to buy seats at Meadow Brook. He improved Bostwick Field at Old Westbury until it became, next to Meadow Brook, the best playing surface on Long Island. He put up gigantic signs "Polo--50-c-" on four Long Island boulevards, built a grandstand (without boxes) to seat 3,000, had the biggest Scoreboard in the world erected at the end of the field, advertised in the newspapers. The experiment turned out well, made enough money for Promoter Bostwick to build a club room and bar for the newspaper men who report his games, to put up additional stands to seat 5,000. This year has been even more successful than last, and polo bigwigs, who were at first inclined to consider the idea undignified, have also capitulated to popularizing polo. Tommy Hitchcock went so far as to start a bus service from Manhattan's Times Square to the Sands Point Club for Sunday games. Prices for reserved seats at Meadow Brook last week were down from $10 to $2.20.

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