Overview
in New York. Malletmen were often thrown from the cars during matches. Automobile polo or auto polo was a motorsport invented in the United States that featured rules and equipment similar to equestrian polo but using automobiles instead of horses. The sport was popular at fairs, exhibitions and sports venues across the United States and several areas in Europe from 1911 until the late 1920s; it was, however, dangerous and carried the risk of injury and death to the participants and spectators, and expensive damage to vehicles.
History
The official inventor of auto polo is purported to be Ralph "Pappy" Hankinson, a Ford automobile dealer from Topeka who devised the sport as a publicity stunt in 1911 to sell Model T cars. The reported "first" game of auto polo occurred in an alfalfa field in Wichita on July 20, 1912, using four cars and eight players (dubbed the "Red Devils" and the "Gray Ghosts") and was witnessed by 5,000 people. While Hankinson is credited with the first widely publicized match and early promotion of the sport, the concept of auto polo is older and was proposed as early as 1902 by Joshua Crane of the Dedham Polo Club in Boston, with the Patterson Daily Press noting at the time of Crane's exhibition that the sport was "not likely to become very popular." Auto polo was also first played in New York City inside a regimental armory building in 1908 or 1909.
The popularity of the sport increased after its debut in July 1912, Hankinson himself promoted auto polo in Manila in the 1910s with events sponsored by Texaco and recruited teams in the United Kingdom. Auto polo was further spread to Europe by auto polo teams from Wichita that toured Europe in the summer of 1913 to promote the sport. In Toronto in 1913, auto polo became the first motorsport to be showcased at the Canadian National Exhibition, but the sport did not become popular in Canada. The sport waned in popularity during the late 1920s, mostly due to the high cost of replacing vehicles, A tuk tuk polo tournament was held in Galle, Sri Lanka, starting in 2016.
Rules and equipment
for their exhibition game in 1902. 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, a factor that greatly increased its popularity in the northern United States. 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 (equivalent to $ today). As the sport progressed, auto polo cars resembled stripped down Model Ts and usually 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 malletman 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 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.
Safety and damage concerns
Due to the nature of the sport, cars would often collide with each other and become entangled, with malletmen frequently thrown from the cars. Installation of rollcages over the radiator and rear platforms of the cars helped prevent injuries to players, but falls did result in severe cuts and sometimes broken bones if players were run over by the cars, Most of the cars would usually be severely wrecked or demolished by the time the match was finished,