YACHTING AND POLO: GENTLEMEN'S SPORTS

Sports and Wealth

During the 1920s the upper classes saw their control of American sports culture slip away. In the nineteenth century the wealthy had dictated both the type and tone of respectable athletic events, embracing such sports as cricket, track and field, golf, and lawn tennis. The principles of amateurism dominated, and sports were viewed as a means of protecting social status and instilling desired values in the young. After World War I, however, as athletic events attracted increasingly large audiences and began, in some cases, to feature professional stars, the influence of amateurism faded. Golf and lawn tennis—once played only by the affluent on their estates and at summer resorts—became middle-class pastimes and began to attract followings as professional sports.

Polo

Polo had first been played in the United States in the 1880s, but its popularity among the wealthy increased greatly during the 1920s. The British, who had originated the game in India in the 1860s, dominated international play until World War I. The Americans then introduced a more aggressive style of play, bred faster ponies, abolished pony height restrictions, and eliminated the offsides rule that had given defensive teams an advantage. These changes were soon adopted for international matches by the primary polo-playing nations, including Great Britain and Argentina. As a result, polo became more exciting and—because of the high cost of maintaining large strings of ponies and better polo fields—more expensive. American teams soon won most of the major international tournaments, including the Westchester Cup versus Britain in 1921 and 1924 and the inaugural Copa de las Americas versus Argentina in 1928.

Popularity

Because of the success of the American international teams, the sport's popularity soared. By 1927 there were fifteen first-class polo grounds on Long Island alone. Collegiate teams became popular, particularly in the East. In 1929 the first intercollegiate match in the Midwest was played between Ohio State and the University of Chicago. Polo was taken up as well by army officers and by students at prep schools. Ironically, though wealthy Americans had embraced the game as an alternative to the professionalization and mass appeal of other sports, by the middle of the decade polo had become a spectator sport as well. Metropolitan newspapers and sophisticated magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker gave the sport broad coverage. International matches were highly publicized and drew crowds as large as forty thousand spectators. This popularity would fade with the onset of the Depression, but by the end of the 1920s polo had become the established sport of wealthy young Americans.

Hitchcock

The greatest polo player during the 1920s was Tommy Hitchcock. His father had helped popularize the game in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. Tommy Hitchcock learned polo on his family's estates in Aiken, South Carolina, and Old Westbury, Long Island. During World War I Hitchcock joined the Lafayette Escadrille, a group of Americans who volunteered for the French air service, and in March 1918 was shot down and imprisoned in Germany. He escaped, made his way to France, and returned home a decorated war hero. Hitchcock enrolled at Harvard, where he gained recognition as a member of the United States Polo Association's championship teams in 1919, 1920, and 1921 and established himself as a ten-goal player—the highest ranking in the sport. After graduation Hitchcock captained the 1924 American Olympic team, which lost to Argentina in the gold-medal match, and led American victories in international championships against Great Britain in 1927 and Argentina in 1928. Hitchcock remained an active polo player until 1941 when, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for the Army Air Corps. He died in an air crash in 1944 while testing a P-51 Mustang.

Yachting

Though yacht racing had been popular since the eighteenth century, the sport changed markedly during the 1920s, primarily because of new design rules and advancing boat technology. Designer Nat Herreshoff's Reliance—a technologically advanced yacht—had easily won the prestigious America's Cup race in 1903, inspiring increasingly complex and fragile boat designs. The 1920 Cup was marred by the British captain's refusal to sail his Shamrock IV on the fifth day of racing, claiming the stormy sea conditions threatened to destroy his boat. The American yacht Resolute, another Herreshoff-designed craft, won handily in the make-up race, but critics decried the trend in recent boat designs, claiming their fragility made a mockery of the sport and elevated technology over seamanship. These protests led to changes in racing rules that made the 1920s the grandest era in American yachting.

New Regulations

Racing in the United States traditionally had been regulated by individual yacht clubs and local racing associations. In 1925 the North American Yacht Racing Union (NAYRU) became the first permanent legislative body on a national level. In 1927 NAYRU officials met with the International Yacht Racing Union in London and adopted the new design standards called the International Rule. Under these guidelines length, sail area, and hull shape were regulated to ensure safer, more seaworthy boats. Also instituted was a new rating system that established standardized classes of yachts based on water-line length. These new regulations led to the construction of "J-class" boats with seventy-five- to eighty-seven-foot water lines—the largest and most elaborate racing yachts ever designed.

Culmination

When the America's Cup committee announced that the next match would allow boats up to J-class to compete, groups of wealthy Boston and New York businessmen—enriched by the burgeoning American stock market—entered an aggressive competition to build the boat selected for the upcoming Cup defense. The trend of increasingly large, ornate, and advanced yachts culminated in 1930, when four J-class boats competed in a series of trials to select the American entry. Starling Burgess's Enterprise won easily and in the Cup race handily defeated the technologically inferior Sham-rock V from Britain. Yachting—particularly the grandeur of J-class boat racing—would continue as a popular sport for the wealthy even through the Depression, fading only with the onset of World War II.