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There had been something of a polo scene previously in the Hamptons, but, recalls Walentas, who is a real estate magnate and the owner of Two Trees Farm, it was "more amateur" and had moved around in search of a permanent home. "Neil and Peter came to me and formed BPC to bring high-goal polo to the Hamptons," he explains. "It's really become the training ground for future patrons," he says, naming Internet entrepreneur Michael Donahue and insurance executive David Rubin as two examples.
Walentas himself took up the sport six years ago. "It's a kick! It's really exciting for the players. It's really macho--the passing, the plays. It's contact sport." When one player attempts to "ride off" an opponent, he literally pushes his pony into another's, with 1,200 pounds of high-priced horse flesh galloping 40 miles per hour towards potential collision, injury, or even death. "It's intense. Every polo player gets injured sooner or later," says Walentas, who has been hit many times by the hard three-and-one quarter-inch ball, which can fly at 100 miles per hour. "It can knock you unconscious. There's an ambulance waiting at every match."
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Not for Amateurs
The injury rate remains frighteningly impressive. Jeff Blake, a young player from Long Island on Hirsch's team, recently broke his left hand after recovering from the effects of taking a mallet in the face: a broken nose and cheekbone, ruptured sinus, and the insertion of a metal plate in his face. Hirsch himself bears 22 well-disguised stitches in his lip from one match and says it's normal to come off the field with his arms and legs covered with bruises from hitting other horses and his body covered in welts from stray balls.
The horses' lower legs are tightly wound in thick cotton bandages to protect them from the ball; players wear helmets, and some wear face-masks. Jordan recalls the day he swung his mallet high behind him into another player's teeth, and he proudly recounts the day he took a cut requiring eight stitches in his left arm. "It's a rough sport," agrees Hirsch. "I've seen players become paraplegic, go into a coma. It's part of the game. I'd say it's one of the most dangerous sports in the world." Unlike many players, Hirsch now wears a metal face-mask for protection.
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Nonetheless, Hirsch loves polo dearly for its excitement, exhilaration, and, being many years past high school, the feeling of once again being part of a team. "That's a thrill," he says. At 52, Hirsch says he's in his best-ever physical condition, thanks to the sport's rigorous demands: Riders whose hands are full of four reins, a mallet, and a crop can only hang on using the strength of their legs.
Despite its inevitable brutality, polo has many fans, Donald Trump feels that the sport brings back a note of sophistication to our now laid-back society: "Polo represents a certain elegance that's missing from the world today." Jane Holzer offers, "Polo is really the closest thing we have to combat." The event's guest tents are inevitably star-studded, with past visitors including comedian Chris Rock, actors Billy Baldwon and Tommy Lee Jones, designers Cynthia Rowley, Nicole Miller, and Jill Stuart, music moguls Tommy Mottola and Russell Simmons, Bianca Jagger, and Martha Stewart. And, of course, a BPC fixture is supermodel Stephanie Seymour, Peter Brant's wife.
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From left to right, Donald Trump and Sean "Puffy" Combs, Renne Russo, Stephanie Seymour and Kelly Klein, and Shoshana Lonstein |
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