Dangerous Auto Polo Was Popular Century Ago
Ron Hamilton’s Shelby County History
People have always been ingenious — and daring — when it comes to creating sports and games. The love of competition is part of human nature and many people are attracted to races, contests and sports of all kinds.
When automobiles were invented during the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was only a matter of time before people used them in new sporting events. Auto racing promoters began running the Indy 500 in 1911. Certainly one of the oddest, riskiest and most colorful sports was "auto polo," a contest so dangerous that it was finally banned in several states.
Auto polo is hard to describe, but it apparently was just what it sounds like. It was a polo game played with automobiles instead of polo ponies. The bizarre sport was concocted in 1912 by an outgoing, flamboyant and successful dirt-track racing promoter and Ford Model "T" dealer named Ralph Hankinson of Topeka. This strange new sport quickly attracted big crowds to state and county fairs around the entire Midwest.
Auto polo enthusiasts, mechanics and sports drivers stripped old Ford Model T’s of everything except the running gear and the frame. Each car was manned by two people, a driver behind the steering wheel and a mallet-wielding striker on the car’s running board. A basketball was used as the object ball, or "polo ball."
Auto polo games were made up of teams with an equal number of cars. The contest began when the basketball, or polo ball, was placed in the middle of the playing field. On a signal from the starter, drivers in the stripped-down Model T’s drove in a circle around each other and charged the ball, while strikers with wooden mallets attempted to whack the large basketball through a wide goal post. Playing fields varied in size depending on the space available, but the distance between the goals ranged from 50 to 300 yards. The width of the field was only slightly less than the total length.
In 1913, Hankinson succeeded in organizing a series of auto-polo games in Topeka between American and British teams. Soon, other promoters across the country recognized that the fast pace of auto polo kept audiences entertained during long breaks in an otherwise slow dirt racing program at state and county fairs.
The action drew huge crowds because the game was very exciting, and sometimes very deadly. The car drivers were held inside their car seats with leather belts, which were known to occasionally break. In fact, most participants in the sport could expect to overturn on several occasions during the course of a game.
The sport appealed to thrill-hungry crowds similar to the way demolition derbies, figure-8 races and thrill shows entertained audiences, and still do. Auto polo quickly spread like wildfire across dirt race tracks and fairgrounds across the country. It was especially popular in the nation’s breadbasket states like Kansas, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana. The sport even made its way east to New York’s Madison Square Garden.
As the polo players and drivers grew more experienced, talented and aggressive, vehicle rollovers became more commonplace. Roll bars, rounded roll cages and cross bracing were added to protect the safety of drivers and to aid an overturned car in doing a complete roll and landing on its wheels again.
But those safety precautions didn’t change the fact that auto polo was still an incredibly dangerous sport. So many people were crippled, injured and killed that several states passed laws banning it altogether. National and state governments urged Ford dealerships across the country to stop promoting the sport. Auto polo finally disappeared when the nation entered into the First World War in 1917.