Chicago Tribune, Monday, July 28, 1902.
The newest twentieth-century game is called automobile polo. The name, however, has already been found too long and has been conveniently abbreviated to "auto polo." An interesting exhibition of auto polo was given last week on the field of the fashionable Dedham Polo Club of Boston. Mr. Joshua Crene Jr., a member of this club and an expert polo player, made a series of polo strokes from his automobile to the amazement of polo enthusiasts. Mr. Crane is a clever all-around athlete and adept at handling an automobile as well as a polo mallet.The play is executed so quickly that an unpracticed eye has difficulty following it. The nimble little mobile machines used in the game are capable of developing a speed of about forty miles an hour in a few feet and can be brought to a standstill practically within their own lengths.
Auto polo was a dangerous but popular motorsport that originated in the United States in 1911. It was similar to equestrian polo, but instead of horses, players used cars. The sport was played at fairs, exhibitions, and sports venues across the United States and Europe until the late 1920s. Auto polo was dangerous because of the high speeds and the risk of collisions. Players and spectators were often injured or killed, and vehicles were often damaged.
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| Auto Polo played at Chicago's Comiskey Park on June 5, 6, 7, and 8, 1913. |
Almost as soon as automobiles became somewhat practical, people were figuring out dangerous and fun things to do with them.
The earliest automobiles were typically rich folks’ novelties, which may explain why, in 1902, Joshua Crane, Jr., a polo enthusiast active with the Dedham Polo Club of Boston, decided to put on an exhibition polo match wherein Mobile Runabouts replaced horses.
That it might not have been the safest endeavor can be seen from a surviving photograph of the match catching one of the drivers/mallet men doing a header into the ground, about to be run over by his own steed.
Chicago Tribune, Friday, June 5, 1913
Chicago will get its first taste of auto polo on June 5 when a four days series between teams representing Chicago and New York will be started at Comiskey Park. A syndicate of Chicago men is promoting contests. The first game will be played on the afternoon of June 5, followed by another at night, then by others as follows: The afternoon and night of June 6, the night of June 7, and afternoon and night of June 8.
Just exactly how dangerous it was is hard to tell. The risk of injury to both competitors and spectators eventually put an end to the practice in the late 1920s, but a contemporary account says that deaths were rare. It’s clear that some of the danger might have been exaggerated by staged photographs, but broken bones were apparently not uncommon. In some photos, it seems that competitors wore leather football helmets, showing there was at least some concern about safety.
Though Mr. Crane put on the first auto polo match, it was a Topeka, Kansas, Ford dealer who turned it into an organized sport.
Ralph “Pappy” Hankinson saw polo with cars as a way of promoting the sale of the Model T. The first match Hankinson organized took place in an alfalfa field near Wichita on July 20, 1912, with four cars, eight players, and a reported crowd of 5,000 spectators. Each car carried a seat-belted driver and a free-standing mallet man who had to hang on—often unsuccessfully. The ball was the size of a basketball (some accounts say it was, in fact, a basketball), and after learning something about physics and inertia, weights were added to the mallets so they didn’t “backfire” when striking the balls. Stripped-down Model Ts were fitted with crude roll bars to protect the driver and the cars’ radiators. Speeds were not high, never more than 35 mph, but high enough for mayhem.
Auto polo was invented before the radio, let alone television, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Hankinson’s idea quickly caught on. Under the Auto Polo Association, local leagues were founded across the United States, and a large exhibition of the sport was staged in Washington, D.C.’s League Stadium in November 1912.
Hankinson sent exhibition teams to England, Europe, and even the Philippines to promote the sport. In 1913, auto polo became the first motorsport to be featured at the Canadian National Exhibition. Britain’s The Auto magazine was impressed but described it as a “lunatic game” that they hoped would not catch on in the UK.
By the 1920s, New York City and Chicago were hosting daily auto polo matches, with some of the games played at NYC’s famous Madison Square Garden.
Many car racing fans today disavow their interest in crashes, but that was genuinely part of the appeal of auto polo. By the end of the matches, the cars were either severely damaged or completely demolished. Hankinson’s own accounting of damages to the cars used by his British and American auto polo teams in 1924 lists 1,564 broken wheels (most cars used wooden spoked “artillery” wheels), 538 unusable tires, 66 broken axles, 10 cracked engines and 6 completely destroyed cars.
While injuries to competitors were frequent, and even spectators were not infrequently hurt by balls flying into the stands or runaway cars, it appears that economics, not concerns about safety, put an end to auto polo.
According to the book Bain’s New York: The City in News Pictures 1900-1925, as the 1920s wore on, the cost of fixing and replacing the cars became too costly. By then, organized car racing was well established. If that wasn’t dangerous enough, there were board-track motordromes and walls of death. So as dangerous as auto polo must have been, it might have seemed a bit quaint during the Roaring Twenties.
In any case, auto polo was a real thing—loony but real.
Auto Polo—No car but the Model T Ford of the
early 1900s had the forward and reverse speeds
and brakes applied by foot pedals. The throttle was
operated by hand, and it was the transmission
system that made such maneuvers possible.
The Dedham Polo Club first used Mobile Runabouts for their exhibition games in 1902.
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| 1902 Stanley Stick-Seat Runabout. |
Unlike equestrian polo, which requires large, open fields that can accommodate up to eight horses at a time, auto polo could be played in smaller, covered arenas during wintertime. This factor greatly increased its popularity in the northern United States. The game was typically played on a field or open area that was a least 300 feet long and 120 feet wide, with 15-foot wide goals positioned at each end of the field. The game was played in two halves (chukkers), and each team had two cars and four men in play on the field at a given time.
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| The first auto polo cars used by the Dedham Polo Club were unmodified, light steam-powered Mobile Runabouts that seated only one person and cost $650 ($22K today). |
As the sport progressed, auto polo cars resembled stripped-down Model T's. Usually, they did not have tops, doors or windshields, with later incarnations sometimes outfitted with primitive rollbars to protect the occupants. Cars typically had a seat-belted driver and a mallet man that held on to the side of the car and would attempt to hit a regulation-sized basketball toward the goal of the opposing team, with the cars reaching a top speed of 40 miles per hour and while making hairpin turns. The mallets were shaped like croquet mallets but had a three-pound head to prevent "backfire" when striking the ball at high speeds.
The Truth About Cars
Edited by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.
