To my untrained eye, it looks like a game nine-year-olds would dream up one bored summer day. David Goldmiller, a court regular, likens the scene to an early episode of Ken Burns' Baseball documentary, where “a bunch of guys were drinking beer and whacking a ball around, making up rules and calling it a fucking game.” The atmosphere is genial. I'm offered a beer immediately, pot smoke hangs in the air, and onlookers talk shit to each other while tweaking bike gears. But after watching the action for a few hours, seeing cyclists weave around the court in tight spirals and shovel off no-look passes, it becomes obvious that these are athletes who know exactly what they're doing. They are playing a sport that requires balance, coordination, and endurance. They are playing a sport that they think is poised for dramatic growth. They are playing a sport one veteran calls “perfect for our time and place.”
They are also playing a sport very few people know exists.
The first hardcourt bike polo match was played 13 years ago in a Seattle stockroom at the dot-com retailer Kozmo. The small crew of bike messengers employed by the long-since-defunct company did not have grand ambitions when they came up with the idea; all they wanted was a fun way to kill time between deliveries. While the players were in no way regal, the game they concocted was nominally descended from polo, the Sport of Kings, invented by the Persians 1,500 years ago and popularized in the 19th century by British colonialists and then, later, by Ralph Lauren. It also shared similarities with cycle polo, a strain of the equine game played with bicycles instead of horses that gained traction during the turn-of-the-century cycling craze--particularly in England--and was featured as a demonstration sport at the 1908 Summer Olympics. Traditional cycle polo's popularity peaked long ago, and never spread widely outside of Europe.
The bored messengers at Kozmo weren't overly concerned with traditional bike polo, and came up with their own rules. Two teams of three lined up on either side of the stockroom straddling their work bikes and holding crude mallets made of wood or bamboo. A set of cones on each baseline served as goals. A roller hockey ball was placed at center court. [1] On the count of three, one cyclist from each side pedaled furiously to reach the ball first, “jousting” for possession. With that, the game was underway.
The messengers in Seattle did prohibit a few tactics, and those infractions haven't changed dramatically in the years that followed. To score, an offensive player must hit the ball across the goal line using only the narrow end of the mallet. (If a player knocks it in with the wide end of the mallet, it's called a "shuffle,” and his team forfeits possession.) Whenever a player's foot touches the ground, he must briefly “tap out" by slapping with his mallet a designated area on the court, either in the middle or along the boards. Contact is allowed so long as it's “like-to-like”: body-to-body, bike-to-bike, mallet-to-mallet. (No t-boning your opponent's legs with your bike, in other words.) The first team to five wins. The only other guiding principle, which almost every player I spoke with remembers learning on his or her first day, was “don't be a dick.”
by Adam Doster, The Classical | Read more:
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