Faraway Horses (14 page)

I got off my horse while the colt was still down, and as I was getting ready to pull my rope off his hind foot, he rolled an eye back, looked at me, lifted a hind leg, and kicked me right in the middle of the thigh. Then he lay flat again. He was really something.

The benefit of the doubt I’d been giving him was now completely used up. He was still down on his side, and I muttered, “Horse, there is nothing you can do to me while I’m sitting on your back that you haven’t already done to me on the ground.” I couldn’t wait to get on him. I laid a leg over the top of him, just as you saw Tom Booker do in the movie
The Horse Whisperer,
except this wasn’t a gentle horse, and we weren’t in a movie.

I rocked the colt up and pulled on the saddle horn. He tried to reach around and bite me while he was still lying down, but I was able to get my leg out of the way. When I nudged him in the ribs with my foot, he got up and off we rode.

It wasn’t too long before I had him loping around and being guided pretty well. Within a half hour he found out I
was different from the man who brought him. Before the morning was out, he and I were roping colts and moving other horses around. He was operating like a saddle horse. We were on our way.

I later found out his owner used a “hot shot” cattle prod to run him into a metal squeeze chute. Then, while clamped in the chute, the horse had a halter forced on him, after which he was spooked into the horse trailer the same way you’d load a cow. The squeeze chute was how he’d gotten so skinned up. It seemed the owner’s plan was to save the extra hundred dollars I charged for horses that weren’t halterbroken, and at the same time see how much trouble he could get me into.

The next morning the owner arrived with a different horse. “I want you to know that I’m not scared of that horse I brought here yesterday,” he assured me. “I just thought I’d learn a lot more from you if I brought a colt I’d already rode a few times. I won’t have any problem getting that other horse rode at home. Because like I told you, I’m not scared.”

“That’s fine,” I replied. “But what you don’t realize is that with what I accomplished on your horse yesterday, you could have ridden him today. But you go ahead and ride that colt you brought. That ought to be just fine.”

He got his second colt saddled up and ready to go. Everyone else in the class was putting a first ride on their colts. When he got on, his colt didn’t put up with him for two minutes before he bucked him off on his head. I call that frontier justice. The guy eventually did get the horse
ridden and finished out the clinic, but he didn’t make many friends that weekend.

I remember that horse quite often because the experience did sharpen me up. I felt so much sympathy for the abuse and torture he’d suffered before he came to the clinic that I tried to do the minimum. What I did helping him come out the other side was not enough for him and certainly not enough for me. To be honest with you, with the kind of owner he had, I don’t think that horse survived.

I’ve worked with similar horses that went away in the same condition, and it always makes me wish I was in a place where I could save every one of them. At the same time, I learned a lot from them, and a lot of people learned from them as well, so maybe it was worth it in the long run.

As I said, I’ve thought fondly of that horse lots of times. The best I can do is honor his life by using what I learned from him to help others.

J
ORIE BUTLER KENT WAS OLD MONEY
. At one time Paul, her father, owned most of what is now Oakbrook, Illinois, the corporate headquarters for McDonald’s worldwide business. Paul’s family also owned a large paper company. Jorie ran their horse operation outside Ennis, which included raising and training the thoroughbreds ridden by her husband, Jeffrey Kent, and others on the Abercrombie & Kent and the Rolex high-goal polo teams. Jeffrey was a
patron,
a Spanish word meaning “team owner.” Patrons surround themselves with professional players, mostly from South America, who do just about all the scoring.

If you’ve never seen a polo match, it’s basically hockey on horseback. It can be just as rough, too. The play is so hard and so fast that the four players on each team have to change horses after each chukker, the name for each of the six periods of play. A horse—polo people refer to them as
ponies, no matter their size—can play two chukkers at most. Not counting spare horses that fill in for tired or lame ones, each player needs a string of five or six horses.

The manager of the operation was Sherry Merica, who came from around Ennis. She had been one of the local moms all through high school (Smokie and I had gone to school with her kids), and after I went to work for Jorie, she and I got to be good friends.

My job was helping to start the horses. After the horses were started, Jorie took them down to Florida where the teams’ players would play them. She tried to get the players to ride in the same manner that I did, without tie-downs, bit gimmicks, or other devices of torture that the players thought were absolutely necessary. Their response was that a Montana cowboy might be able to ride a colt, but he wasn’t qualified to educate a polo horse.

I grew tired of hearing that reaction, so in the winter of 1988–89 I finally told Jorie, “If you don’t mind, I just might go to Florida and play the horses myself this winter.” Jorie thought that was a great idea, and I was pleased to hide from the harsh Montana winter.

The Florida sun was shining when we arrived, and it felt glorious to be warm (it had been snowing in Bozeman the day we left). The town of West Palm Beach was right out of
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
I thought some of the houses were hotels until Jorie told me they were single-family residences.

The first time I visited the Palm Beach Polo Club, I arrived with Jorie in her Bentley. Actually, Jorie and I rode behind
her driver, and I thought that was the way to travel. I can’t see putting $250,000 into a car, but it was a nice ride, there’s no doubt about it.

The polo grounds occupied the biggest flat spot—no trees or water—that I saw the whole time I was in Florida. There must have been a couple hundred acres of nothing but beautiful green grass and polo field after polo field. Everyone stared at me as I walked onto the grounds in my cowboy hat and boots. I felt like a bug in a jar.

A day or two later I checked out Royal Palm Polo at Boca Raton. A bunch of people were standing around a big chalkboard, and I figured they were signing up for some polo. So I promptly signed up. They were going to be playing that coming Sunday, and I thought if I wanted to get into it, the only way to do it was to show up.

I arrived early Sunday morning with my horses. Brett Kiley, a really good polo player from Perth, Australia, and manager of Jorie’s horse operation in Florida, helped me braid their tails and get them ready. I didn’t know anything about doing the polo braid, a knot that keeps the tail from getting tangled with the player’s mallet, but with Brett’s help I got them ready.

Someone came by with an armload of polo jerseys. When he saw what I was doing, he tossed me one with a number 2 on it. I had played enough organized sports, so I thought I’d just watch a polo match that was in progress; in that way I’d figure out what a number 2 does.

In the box seat that Jorie had reserved for me, I sat watching polo and eating onion sandwiches with other
spectators. They were dressed in furs and dripping with gold and diamonds; I thought it was pretty funny that people who could eat anything they wanted to eat were eating onion sandwiches.

As the players galloped up and down the field, I discovered that you could take your opponent out of a play by getting your horse to push his horse away from the ball (I later learned that’s called “riding off” an opponent). Although I didn’t know a hell of a lot about offense, it looked to me as if I could handle that kind of defense. My horses were very comfortable being around other horses, and they could move up close to them. Thanks to all the ranch work they had done, especially roping other horses, bumping another player’s horse off the ball seemed like a piece of cake.

As I was saddling up for my match, the man who ran the club came up to me. “Son, I can’t let you play your horses in a plain snaffle bit. You’re going to get somebody hurt, or get somebody killed.”

Polo ponies are played in gag snaffles, full bridles with long curbs, and other severe bits that create the kind of stopping power the players want their horses to have. However, that wasn’t my way. My horses were all capable of doing the quick turns and hard stops that ranch horses have in common with polo ponies, but mine went in plain snaffles.

So I replied, “I know that grounds fees for this club are seventy-five hundred bucks for the three months I’m supposed to be here. Why don’t you just let me play a chukker or two, and if you think I’m dangerous to people, then I
won’t come back anymore. I’ll just go back to Montana where I belong, and you can keep the seventy-five hundred bucks, and I’m out of here.”

The fellow agreed that was a good deal, so when the time for my match came, I got up on my horse and went out on the field. During the first two chukkers, all I did was gallop up to my equivalent position on the other team and ride him off the ball. Every time he’d make a run for it, I’d ride up beside him and just shove him off. It seemed to work well, so well that I sensed a little irritation from him.

After a few chukkers and changing horses a few times, I started to pick up the rhythm of the game and how it was played, so I figured I’d take a swing if the opportunity arose. My chance came, and darned if I didn’t score a couple of goals. This, my friends, was Montana luck. I could hardly hit the ball, but my horses turned around well and ran straight so I could line up my shots. That gave me a little more time to figure out how to time the swing with my mallet. I’d seem to end up in the right place at the right time, and I could smack the ball a few feet or more and get it to go between the goalposts.

I felt pretty good after the match. I hadn’t cost my team anything, and, as my horses worked well, I hadn’t embarrassed myself. Then the club manager came up to apologize. “I’m sorry to have doubted you,” he said, “but you have to understand the type of horsemen or would-be horsemen that I’m used to seeing. You can play in a snaffle bit around me anytime.” That manager’s name was Buzz Welker, and
we got to be great friends that winter. He’s a very well-respected instructor who has taught polo out near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I’ve seen him now and again.

Back at my horse trailer, an older fellow in a straw hat came up to me and asked, “What club did you play for all summer long, son?” A lot of players played in New York or in other northern parts of the United States in the summer season.

“Club?” I said. “Well, sir, I didn’t play for any club. This was my first time.”

“You mean here?” he asked.

“No sir, playing polo.”

Because of my horses, he didn’t believe me. Nobody did. Everybody thought I’d been in polo for a while. Thank goodness I didn’t have to hit the ball very often to show them how inexperienced I really was. It was the defense that impressed them, I guess, and if it hadn’t been for my horses, I probably would have embarrassed myself. Riding that fast swinging a hardwood mallet sort of sets you up for a mishap. My horses really carried me through.

That’s the beauty of the foundation I put on all the horses that I start. The basics are all there, so you can then finish up a horse to do anything you want him to do, whether it’s ranch work or horse showing or polo.

When I wasn’t playing, I worked with troubled polo ponies, including a whole barn full that had been trashed by some of the pros. A lot of pro polo players had the hands of
a butcher. They’d whip a horse on the butt to get him going thirty miles an hour to catch up to the ball, and about the time a player on the other team hit a back shot, they’d tear their horses’ heads off to get them stopped and turned around and off in another direction. The horses were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. It was very frustrating for them, and it didn’t take too long before their minds were blown.

Not all of the players were that rough, but there sure were an awful lot of them, at least in those days (nowadays, a shortage of good polo horses has placed a greater emphasis on better horsemanship).

Using patience, kindness, and consistency, I was able to get the horses to recover fairly quickly, to the point that they were able to play for me. As a result, I had some real top-notch polo ponies for the weekend matches. I didn’t really do anything different with them than I’d do with any other horse, no matter whether it was troubled or just hadn’t been started. I ride every horse pretty much the same way. Some of my cues may be a little less forceful with a horse that’s been troubled and perhaps a little more assertive with one that’s been spoiled. I ride the way I ride, and eventually all horses I’ve been on begin to look like my horses.

If I hadn’t been around to work with those polo horses, they might have been sold to some local players at bargain prices. The locals wouldn’t have gotten along with them either, and they’d have been sold again. Many would have
ended up on a Frenchman’s dinner table, some with sauce and some without.

The work I did might have convinced some people about my methods, but it didn’t really change the way high-roller players treated their horses. They were too into their own thing. In those days, polo was all about money and winning punch bowls at tournaments.

Some great polo horses have come off ranches in the West. Some receive basic training at polo facilities in the East. These generally don’t turn out very well because they haven’t been exposed to the real world of moving cows and riding out in the hills. Being raised and trained in the East can be a pretty stressful experience for a horse.

My winter in Palm Beach was nice and warm, but it was also pretty expensive. Toward the end of my run there, I had my truck stolen right out of the hotel parking lot. I went to Texas to pick up a new one, and I drove it back, but before I packed my gear and headed for Montana, I had one more gig to do at the grand opening of the Vero Beach Polo Club.

Jorie, who had seen my trick roping, thought that it would be a wonderful thing as a part of the entertainment for me to demonstrate the way I trained a polo horse and then do a few rope tricks.

Prince Charles, who was a friend of Jorie and Jeffrey, had been invited to Florida to play polo at the new facility. When I got back from Texas, Jorie said, “Since you’re going
to do a training demonstration and then a few rope tricks, why don’t you do a polo demonstration as well?” As it turned out, she had already set it up for me to smack some balls around with Brett Kiley.

That stopped me a little short. “Jorie, I don’t feel comfortable hitting those polo balls around,” I told her. Prince Charles was going to be there, and she wanted me to hit balls in front of him. Not only was he the future king of England, he was also a very accomplished polo player in his own right.

Jorie saw me start to sweat and said, “Dahling”—she always called me “dahling”—“you’ll just take turns. You will hit one shot, and Brett will hit the other.” I must not have looked convinced because she went on, “It’ll be great, dahling, don’t worry. Everything will be fine, you just trust me.”

For the next couple of weeks, I was beside myself. Since Prince Charles was playing, there were going to be five or six thousand people watching, maybe more. That’s a big crowd in any man’s league.

Jorie and Jeffrey owned two or three hundred acres in Lake Worth, near West Palm Beach. The property included a private polo field, where all I did for eight or ten hours a day was ride horses and practice hitting. A couple of other guys rode on the grounds, but I was on my own.

When the fateful day came, the training demonstration was right up my alley, and that part of the program was all net, no rim. The rope tricks went well, too; I’d been doing them since I was a kid, so that was a slam dunk. Then came the polo demonstration.

Brett and I rode out to face a sizable sea of humanity, and the announcer started talking about polo. As he described the different shots we’d attempt, I loped up to my first ball, worried to death I’d top it. If I did, the ball would go about six inches, and five thousand people, including Prince Charles, heir to the throne, would be laughing at me.