Polo, Anyone?
That’s the length of a chukker. (Why chukker?
Well, why “inning”? Think periods, quarters and
halves.) Most polo matches are four chukkers,
though some are six. Chukker is a word with
Hindi/Sanskrit origins and also is spelled chukkar.
Some people say chukka.
There are four players on a team, playing the
one, two, three and four positions. Meredith
called the three player “the quarterback – the
one who sets up the play, the strongest player
and the strongest hitter. He or she is the one
who advances the ball upfield and has to be
able to hit it the furthest, to set up the people
who score the goals.”
The one player is the main offensive player,
the goal-scorer. But everyone’s switching from
offense to defense constantly, as the ball ricochets
off mallets and around the huge field. (I said it
was the size of “nine football fields” – but don’t
think of nine football fields, end-to-end, 900
yards long; more like nine football fields aligned
in sets of three, so three times as long but also
three times as wide.)
“...They
have to be
able to stop
on a dime
and go the
other way,
real fast.”
“As you’re trying to hit and advance the ball,
you’re also trying to keep your opponent from
hitting the ball,” Meredith explained. “That’s why
the horses have to be agile. They have to be able
to stop on a dime and go the other way, real fast.”
It may seem helter-skelter, and perhaps
somewhat dangerous, but the rules are all about
safety. A horse can bump another horse, but it has
to be sidelong, shoulder-to-shoulder. A player can
hook an opponent’s mallet, to keep him or her
from hitting the ball, but the hooking can only
occur below the horses’ shoulders, so nobody
– player or horse – gets whacked in the head.
Players can swing their mallet with their right
arms