Polo, Anyone?

So we followed Tucker back to a big white tent on the east side of the field. It was cooler in there. They had free wine and champagne and strawberries and cream and little salmon sandwiches on brown bread and shrimp and creamy white things that tasted like they were supposed to be dessert.

This was a great tent.

We were talking with Tucker, who was giving us the lay of the land, and Mimi Falb, an accomplished horse rider who is interning on Capitol Hill; Caroline Poarch, a law student at American University; Alexia Rouquette, up from Miami, where she does high-end real estate; Ashton Randle, who lobbies for the DCI Group; Osmar Nunez, who owns the Mate bar in Georgetown; and Adaeze Igwe and Kene Ezemenari, Nigerians who work for the World Bank.

Lots of champagne and loud chatter.

Thwack , the sound of the ball when the players come close. Some people, they stand out in front of the tent and watch. One time, the Outback team scored a goal right before the end of the fourth "chukker" (period) to tie the match at 7. Two people clapped.

Maybe they went bananas over in the Ambassadors' tent. It was too far away to see.

"Whoo," said Igwe, flapping out her blouse a bit. It was getting hot now.

She was good-naturedly pretending not to care that the Nigerians didn't make the World Cup but the pesky Ghanaians did. She said the polo match isn't "hoity-toity" at all. But it has to be mentioned that she went to a posh boarding school in Connecticut where the school had a polo team, and Ezemenari was giving her a sidelong glance.

"Maybe it is a little bit, but everybody is very nice," Ezemenari said. "It's a lovely day."

She's right. Polo is one of the world's oldest games, starting more than 2,000 years ago in Asia. It migrated to the West by way of the British Empire and requires a great deal of equestrian talent. The ponies make sudden stops and starts and sprints, all in pursuit of a ball that is to be whacked through a goal. It's beautiful to watch, more complicated than jump courses and perhaps not as spirited as speed-racing events in rodeo. Like thoroughbred racing, it is staggeringly expensive to play on a serious level; unlike racing, it is no longer very popular with people who can't afford to play it.

"I look at the economy based on polo," said Scott Riehl, a lawyer who often comes out to Great Meadow for twilight polo on Saturdays. "When the economy is down, people get out of polo. It's discretionary funds, no question."

An afternoon of high-society polo is also kind of like golf, in that it is one of the few events where men wear pants of pink and green and brown seersucker and various pastel shades. Women wear high heels, even on the grass. They leave tiny little dots in the ground, society cleat marks.