Internationalist

Mourned on four continents last week was Irish-born Captain Charles Thomas Irvine ("Pat") Roark, retired British Army officer, considered by many the greatest of the world's great polo players. Knocked unconscious when his mount stumbled and rolled over on him during an International test match at California's Midwick Country Club, 43-year-old Captain Roark died of a brain concussion two days later.

In Eire's County Carlow, natives recalled the day Pat Roark first played polo, at the age of nine, along with his famed polo-playing father in a county tournament. Londoners remembered best that memorable match at Roehampton in 1930 when the Family Roark (Father Roark, then 67, and his three sons) beat Australia's four famed Ashton Brothers before one of the biggest crowds in the club's history. In India, British Army officers exchanged tales of his hell-for-leather riding in the regimental polo matches just after the War. His handsome, bronzed face smiling under a red-puggreed helmet was almost as well-known to polo crowds in the Argentine as it was to the galleries at Hurlingham and Meadow Brook. For Pat Roark was a true polo internationalist.

Ever since 1924, when he met idle-rich Laddie Sanford in London and was asked to join his Hurricanes for the polo season on Long Island, convivial Captain Roark has been identified with U. S. polo even more than with British. As storm centre of the Hurricanes, he helped win the U. S. Open polo championship three times (1926-29-30). But when it came to a British-U. S. International match, Pat Roark played on the British side--once in 1927 and again in 1930. Like his brother Aidan, Twentieth Century-Fox executive, he settled down in Southern California, married a U. S. socialite, was a favorite in the polo-playing movie colony.

Last week's fatal accident, the first among high-goal (7 or over) poloists, not only spread a pall over the polo-playing fraternity but robbed Great Britain of its star player for this year's International matches, to be held at Meadow Brook in June. Without Captain Roark, Britons viewed with gloom their sixth attempt to win back the Westchester Cup they lost to the U. S. in 1921.

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