What are you doing Friday night?
If you are anything like me, then this an absurd question, considering today is merely Wednesday, and Friday night is eons away. I mean, there's still tonight, Thursday night, and Friday during the day to figure out. Friday night might as well be next year.
So if you have no clue what to do, I, in my sage ways, have figured out an answer to your faraway query. It involves tailgating, watching something that will most likely be entirely new and entertaining and best of all, it's for a good cause.
That's right -- you need to make a trip out to the Virginia Polo Arena. At 7 p.m. Friday, the Virginia Polo team is playing an inter-squad match to benefit the Huntington's Disease Foundation, a great foundation that recruits the best scientists in the world to research a cure for Huntington's disease, a fatal hereditary disease that afflicts about 30,000 Americans a year.
Tickets cost $2 for Virginia students, and directions to the Arena are free at www.student.virginia.edu/~polo.
Now, I don't just throw out Friday night recommendations without doing some background research. So for the majority of you who have never thought of polo as anything more than a Ralph Lauren clothing line, let me fill you in on what goes down at one of the best polo facilities in the Southeast.
I took in a scrimmage last Friday at the Virginia Polo Arena, and while I'm no expert, I understand the basic premise behind the sport. First of all, tailgating is a must. The way the polo arena is set up demands it. The arena is a dirt field that is about the size of a football field, with wooden walls encircling the field and goals on each end. Beyond the wooden walls is a wooden rail that encircles the entire arena, and when you buy your ticket, you are essentially buying a spot along that rail where you can park and set up your tailgate. It's as if Scott Stadium had no walls, and you could bring your tailgate right up to the action. Really, it's the best of both worlds.
As for the sport, polo is a three-on-three sport that can be best described as a mix between hockey and soccer -- on horseback. To start a match, the umpire throws the ball -- about the size of a mini-soccer ball -- onto the field the way a throw-in works in soccer. Once a player takes control of the ball, he whacks it towards his end of the field. After hitting the ball, the player has created an imaginary line from his horse to the ball, and the defense cannot cross into this path. Therefore, to defend the ball, the defender tries to throw off the player with ball by entangling his mallets, a move called "hooking." The defender can also try to knock the offensive player off his line by physically trying to move him, a maneuver called "riding off." The game is four periods -- called "chukkahs" -- and the squad who hits the ball into the goal the most wins.
So last Friday, I watched as the Cavaliers took on a traveling team from Scotland. Now, for starters, that sentence is just as cool as it sounds. Roughly 30 seconds into the match, one of the Scottish players got visibly upset and fiery -- carrying out all of my Braveheart perceptions of the Scottish -- after Virginia senior Robert Orthwein accidentally bumped the Scotsman on the head. The match continued on, and it went the Cavaliers' way for most of the evening, as a Virginia team of Orthwein, seniors LJ Lopez, Chevy Beh and freshman Trevor Dunlap sent the Scots packing 16-3.
This Friday, you will get to see those four, plus other talented Virginia players, as the club puts on their intra-squad exhibition. One of the most unique things about the polo team is that the entire club and facilities are student-run, except for the direction of coach Lou Lopez. That means that the 20-plus members of the club take care of the 70-plus horses that are at the Virginia Polo Center. The students feed the horses at 7 or 8 in the morning every day and exercise them in the afternoons and evenings. All the horses are donated by either polo enthusiasts or alumni. The club is entirely privately funded.
The team's main season is in the spring, when it will play teams from Yale to Colorado State. Virginia routinely finishes in the top three in the nation as a squad.
So as sports fans, I urge you to take advantage of one the University's hidden gems and catch this Friday's polo charity match. It'll be for a good cause, and you'll find you might just enjoy the sport of kings.
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