Bike-O Polo

Mount Washington bike polo players Dave Holland, left, Doug McCoach, Aaron Meisner and Michael Nicholson pedal after the ball during a game in Baltimore. (Mark Finkenstaedt - For The Washington Post)

Lou Lopez of Charlottesville, who started playing as a teenager in the 1970s, admits, "The most difficult thing for a group to learn, for when you start to play in groups, is how to keep from running into each other." But the Canadian Coalition of Cycle Polo Web page says that bike polo "helps develop excellent bike handling and control," and indeed, though when you're watching a game it's hard not to wince in near-constant anticipation of a bone-crunching pileup, somehow the riders almost never collide. Dedicated bike polo players also insist that injury is rare.

"People say, 'Oh, bicycle polo, that sounds dangerous,' and I say, 'Compared to what?' "says Bill Matheson of South Carolina, another member of the 2004 international champion U.S. team (and in fact a two-time champion -- he played for the winning Canadians in 2003). Matheson, who as a fellow teenager started a team with Lopez in the early 1970s (he took a horse polo clinic, "and some of the better polo players at the club suggested that if I didn't have any horses, I should play bike polo") attests to a surprisingly low casualty rate in the game: "I've had a lot of falls in bike polo, and I've never gotten hurt. I've been playing off and on for 30 years now, and I've seen one kid break his arm and one guy break his thumb when he landed right on it."

To that end, minimal blood loss as well as fair play appear to be the chief objects of the official rules, which outlaw body checking, carrying the ball, rough play, intimidation, putting a foot down (you may, however, steady yourself with your mallet), or touching the ball more than three times consecutively. In particular, the rules have much to say on the subject of a rider's right of way, and not interfering with it, and who has it when multiple players are hurtling toward the ball, though it's hard to fathom how exactly in the thick of it all you're supposed to manage to calculate which one among you can lay claim to the smallest angle to the line of the ball.

And so it is. Even when it comes to formal, refereed play, "right of way violations (real, imagined, deliberate and unconscious) occasion the most foul calls (correct or not) or non-calls (correct or not)," admits Mullen, of the American Bicycle Polo Association, in an e-mail. On the other hand, he says, "the long arguments give the players a chance to rest, tune their bikes, grab a bite, take a nap. In serious matches, 30 minutes of playing time can stretch to 2 1/2 hours or more."

FREE-FORM BIKE POLO

One way, of course, to dispense with such tedious distractions from play is to dispense with most of the rules, which is the guiding principle for the Axles of Evil, bike polo players out of Portland, Ore. "We generally don't like rules," says the Axles' Web site. "We play rough."

Possibly because most of the founding Axles were bike messengers, people for whom a forward roll over the hood of a car is all in a day's work, blood and mayhem are no particular object.

"We just call it bike hockey, and that gets the message across," says Axles regular Kenichi Nakamura, though he's quick to add, "We've had some pretty good crashes, but no one has gotten seriously injured."

The Axles play most regularly on an old, fenced-in, hard-surface tennis court, which adds a certain claustrophobic intensity to the games. Body blocking is allowed, as is throwing your mallet at the ball ("just don't kill anyone"), riding opponents into the fence, stealing and generally interfering with the opposing players' game. You can't put a foot down though. Winner is the first to five points. "We don't have any chukkers or any of that," Nakamura says. "Our games last about 10 minutes."

To purists, this stripped-down, amped-up take on bike polo could arguably be called a different game altogether. "It's more akin to playing pickup basketball or street hockey," agrees Bill Dozer, "minister of propaganda" for the Axles of Evil, and originally from the District himself.

To Matheson, who's a vice president of the International Bicycle Polo Federation and a tireless enthusiast who would like to see more people playing everywhere, this kind of ad hoc hybridizing is also a major stumbling block to the spread of bike polo. "It is kind of tough to get people to want to go anywhere and play against [other] people if they don't have the same rules," he points out.

Still, the Axles' version -- which the Portland players originally picked up "from some cats in Seattle," Dozer says -- seems to be enjoying a viral spread through the bike messenger culture, passed from home town to home town via regional and national messenger cycle competitions. This spring, when the Portland messengers play host to the North American Cycle Courier Championships, they'll also be hosting the "official" North American championships of their own style of bike polo.

As befits their independent spirit, the Axles of Evil favor homemade mallets built from ski poles and plastic-pipe or wooden-block heads, a street-hockey ball and, not surprisingly, beater bikes. "Playing our way, you definitely go through bike parts a lot," Nakamura says. "I can put together a polo bike for under $20."

In this regard, however, the Axles are on common ground with bike polo players everywhere. Broken spokes, bent (aka "potato chipped" or "tacoed") rims and a degree of inevitable equipment abuse being standard features of the game -- official and unofficial versions alike -- a bike polo match is not the place to show off your new carbon-fiber-and-titanium baby.

"I got that one out of a dumpster," says Aaron Meisner in Mount Washington, pointing to one of the bicycles in the thick of the fray. Also in his stable: a $20 two-wheeled steed off Craigslist, some yard-sale specials, the one he found abandoned in a parking garage and bestowed upon brother Dan, and the one Dan bought for $5 in a thrift shop. If you want to go for the official gear-up, add a basic mallet ($25 from Boxwood Bicycle Polo Co.), a ball ($10) and specialized handlebars ($10 -- or make them yourself, as the Mount Washington players do) to facilitate one-handed steering and free mallet play, and you've got a sport with an entry price point in the mid-two figures.