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)

Among the top 10 reasons why bike polo is better than horse polo, according to the Bicycle Polo Association of America, is: "When you break a spoke, you don't have to shoot your bike."

JOINING THE GAME

So how hard is it, really, to learn how to play? In Mount Washington, John Douglas of Towson, trying bike polo for the first time, observes, "The hardest part is maneuvering and stopping and riding with one hand." But, he insists, "It's a pretty easy sport if you know how to ride a bike. You don't have to be Michael Jordan."

I know how to ride a bike. I'm definitely not Michael Jordan. In Richmond, where I live, I tracked down some local players and persuaded them to give me a quick lesson in the sport.

Mel Roach, Corey Smith, Andy Slabaugh and Jeff Paris, all mountain bikers, are the core members of a very loose group gathering for bike polo on Saturday mornings in the cold months.

The group has been playing since 1997; for much of that time, they thought they'd more or less invented the game themselves, and thus happily invented the rules to go with it. Foot down -- not okay. Kicking the ball, however, that's okay. Throwing a mallet to prevent a goal, also okay. Intimidation, yes; left-handed play, yes; field boundaries, none; right of way rules -- where's the fun in those?

They have handmade mallets with wooden blocks for heads and dowels or lacrosse sticks for shafts; beater bikes more beat even than the usual low standard; traffic cones for goal posts; a miniature toy soccer ball from Wal-Mart; and a playing field that makes Mount Washington's look like professionally manicured greens (the Richmond players have to heave their gear over a locked, six-foot-tall chain-link fence; when the grass gets too long, they quit for the year and go mountain biking and kite sailing). In the beginning, the Richmond bikers say, it was much bloodier. Paris ran into a pole once. Another player did a front flip over a bench at the side of the field. Things improved, they all agree, when they switched the brake levers to operate the rear rather than the front brake from the left hand -- a standard bike polo modification they figured out the hard way.

On the field, however, their acquired skill is obvious. Sprinting, turning, converging, somehow, they deftly move the ball around the field, feinting and passing, racing and stopping. They make it look -- not easy, certainly, or effortless, but surprisingly (mostly) graceful, and decidedly fun. In the absence of right of way rules, however, it also looks more hazardous than the Mount Washington game, though no blood was drawn except when Roach hit himself with his own mallet.

"Come on and give it a try," Roach offered, tapping the ball gently my way.

I swung, missed entirely, ran over the ball and promptly crashed. An auspicious start, not followed by any remarkable improvement.

"For people trying it for the first time, the biggest challenge is staying upright," Bill Matheson says. "The bike is more predictable than the horse, but it doesn't have its own sense of balance."

I'll say. In the middle of trying to pay attention to the ball and the mallet and fighting an instinctive urge to flee the pack of bikes bearing down upon me, remaining vertical was one challenge more than I could manage. Experienced players develop a neat skill for using the mallet for balance, leaning on it, pushing off from it, letting it take the place of the forbidden foot-down. For the newbie, it's just an unwieldy stick, likeliest to end up shoved through your own wheel, tripping you up or otherwise bringing about your own downfall.

"It's not the easiest thing when you start, but it's important not to be discouraged the first time," says Matheson, insisting "almost anyone can play."

"The first time you come out, you're going to be frustrated because you're dealing with so many new skills," says Mount Washington's Dan Meisner. "The second time, you get a feel for if you like it. If you come back for a third time, you're pretty much a lifetime player."

Caroline Kettlewell is a freelance writer and the author of two critically praised nonfiction books, including "Electric Dreams" (Carroll & Graf, 2004). She is a regular contributor to The Washington Post.