MOTOR POLO IN AMERICA

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 229, 15 February 1913, Page 2 (Supplement)

MOTOR POLO IN AMERICA

A NERVE-RACK fXG SPECTACLE.

Motor-polo, a game replete in thrills and accidents, threatens to supersede all others in public favor in New York, and before long it is probable that a hundred rival teams throughout the country will be smashing each others' machines and heads in a wholesale manner.

The first public exhibition of motorpolo was given in Madison Square Garden, and according to the wildly excited, nerve-racked audience, it was better than horse-racing, motor racing, or any other sport where life and limb are not so immediately in danger. The game differs from pony-polo in that motor cars take the place of ponies, and there are only four players—two in each motor car. The contest is split into four "periods" of ten minutes each, and fiveminute intervals, during which the cars are "rested. 1 ' The object of the game is to knock an inflated ball about the size of an ordinary football through the goal-posts with short-handled mallets. Persons who have never seen the game will be able to form some idea of the dangers of motor-polo bv picturing two high-powered cars rushing headlong at each other from both ends of a field, stopping aead. backing, shooting forward. climbing over each other, colliding, over-turning, and so forth, while all the time a nimble, grim-faced athlete climbs over every part of the machine in his efforts to swing his mallet at the elusive ball.

Several times in the game it was demonstrated amidst the howling excitement of the almost mad spectators that it was quite possible to twin a motor-car quickly on two wheels after travelling thirty or forty yards at top speed. Collisions, upsets and tumbling apparently have no terrors for the well-padded players of motor-polo. Many times cars overturned, their riders being thrown many yards through the air beforelanding on the ground, but they always resumed play with the utmost nonchalance. It had been hitherto believed that American football, with its terrible annual death-roll, was sufficiently dangerous to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty Yani kee, but, as one spectator puts it, "foot- ! ball as compared with motor-polo is i about as dangerous as playing marbles."