September 27, 2013
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Tianjin Goldin Metropolitan Polo Club
Thrilling polo tournaments are scheduled year round, whether played on snow, on grass or in the arena. Exciting youth activities are also being developed for budding young riders and China’s polo players of the future.
Metropolitan Intervarsity Polo 2013…saw representation from polo teams from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and Yale University.
The Club hopes that the tournament will raise the awareness of polo amongst the region’s youth and widen the horizons of Chinese youth and allow them to experience the beautiful game of polo as well as instill in them the values being driven off the back of polo….
An atmosphere of gaiety began to gradually develop as Tianjin Goldin Metropolitan Polo Club members, invited guests as well as alumni from all four universities who have travelled specially to Tianjin to support their alma maters cheered for their favorite teams.
The Great Helmsman must be cringing in his grave as the Gang of Four’s children gallop overhead and the vanguard of the polo-playing proletariat cheers the Red Army 20-goal team to carry socialism’s banner forward to Smith’s Lawn and Boca Raton.
Despite Asia’s escape from Marxist gloom, New York’s Bloombergian nanny state isn”t about to embrace Oxford’s Dangerous Sports Club or endorse snow polo in Central Park. The Taliban may be content to suppress kite flying and soccer, but the Big Apple’s teachers” unions are out to euthanize any sport more competitive than Frisbee or concussive than a Nerf ball.
What 21st century dean or provost would dare sanction un-helmeted intramural football’s return or the stabling of hunters within the halls of ivy? Today’s textbooks have expunged all trace of how “elitist” sports once overflowed into popular culture. New York’s Polo Grounds once hosted the Yankees, Giants, and Mets. Yale’s fictional polo captain, Flash Gordon, starred in Saturday serials and Sunday funnies alike. No longer. With second-graders being expelled for fashioning Pop-Tarts into popguns, it’s hard to recall that the favorite big stick of America’s greatest progressive president was an elephant gun.
In Teddy Roosevelt’s day, Americans considered polo a natural extension of the nation’s cowboy culture. Even the American Museum of Natural History had a team, and the “Father of American Football,” Yale’s Walter C. Camp, was a rated two-goal player. Only a few decades ago, you could still see Harvard history professors riding to class to lecture in jodhpurs and hear the winding of hunting horns add to the joyous noise of football games. Imagine how PETA would greet any postmodern college dean who smiled at the sight of rhino heads on dorm walls or tiger skins on the floors.
Though it may be hard to bring back Princeton’s Tigers, the last decade has not been a lost one. It has seen the successful revival of many decimated equestrian, polo, and shooting clubs in a transcontinental arc from Harvard to USC, but in the long run, cultural conservation is youth’s concern. Unless America’s surviving Sloanes and Hooray Henrys rise up against the craven democratic Homintern that threatens the real cultural pluralism of today’s universities, the implosion of fun into its most common denominator may continue.
