“It’s about how I joined the polo crowd. By accident.” That was Hunter S. Thompson’s way of describing “Polo is my life.” The title comes from a friend of Hunter’s who was known not only known for being “a polo person” but also for having a violent husband and having many domestic-violence calls come from her house. In his gentlemanly way, Thompson asked her if she wanted to go to Australia for a while with him. But she declined: “You don’t understand. Polo is my life. I can’t run away with you. Who would take care of my ponies?” (You can see more in Hunter S. Thompson’s 1998 interview with Charlie Rose.)

After a lot of scrambling around, I managed to get an elusive print-copy of the Rolling Stone article “Polo is my life” and get it onto the damn computer. What I’m leaving you with is pure written-fury by Hunter S. Thompson as he attempts to cover the U.S. Open while being more focused on chasing the ghosts of his lifelong muses: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby and the American Dream.

(The original scan is also available here: Polo Is My Life — PDF 3.9MB I also have a super high quality version, but you’ll have to contact me for that.)

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Polo is my life: Fear and Loathing in Horse Country

by Hunter S. Thompson

Queer for Power, Slave to Speed . . . Adventures in the Pony Business

“Arms, my only ornament — my only rest, the fight.”
-Cervantes, DON QUIXOTE

Whooping It Up With the Horse People: Trapped in a World of Beasts … The Genius of Genghis Khan and the Beauty of Sweet Belinda … On Fire With the Polo Fever …

Polo meant nothing to me when I was young. It was just another sport for the idle rich -golf on horseback – and on most days I had better things to do than hang around in a flimsy blue-striped tent on a soggy field far out on the River Road and drink gin with teenage girls. But that was the old days, and I have learned a lot since then. I still like to drink gin with teenage girls on a Sunday afternoon in horse country, and I have developed a natural, friendly feeling for the game.

Which is odd because I don’t play polo and I hate horses. They are dangerously stupid beasts with brains the size of cue balls and hoofs that can crush your whole foot into bone splinters just by accidentally stepping on your toe. Some will do it on purpose. I have been on extremely mean and stupid horses that clearly wanted to hurt me. I have been run against trees by the bastards, I have been scraped against barbed-wire fences and bitten on the back of the head for no reason. . . .

At the age of 5, I got trapped in a stall for 45 minutes with a huge horse named Buddy, who went suddenly crazy and kicked himself to death with terrible shrieking noises while I huddled in the urine-soaked straw right under his hoofs.

My uncle Lawless, a kindly dairy farmer, was flogging the brute across the eyes with a 2-by-4 and trying to get a strangle rope around his neck, but the horse was too crazy to deal with. Finally, in desperation, he ran back to the house and got a double-barreled 10-gauge shotgun – which he jammed repeatedly against the horse’s lips and teeth until the beast angrily bit down on the weapon and caused both barrels to fire at once.

“So much for that one,” he said as he dragged me out from under the dead animal’s body. I was covered with blood and hot, steaming excrement. The brute had evacuated its bowels at the moment of death. . . .

No one seemed to know why it happened. “It was a suicide,” the vet said later, but nobody believed him. Uncle Lawless loved animals, and he was never able to reconcile murdering that horse with his basic Christian beliefs. He sold his farm and went into the real-estate business in southern Indiana, and finally he went insane.

The main problem with horses is that they are too big to argue with when they’re angry – or even bitchy, for that matter, and highbred horses are notorious for their bitchiness. Which might be cute or fey in a smaller animal, but when a beast that weighs 1,200 pounds goes crazy with some kind of stupid pique or jealousy in a room not much bigger than the handicapped stall in the Denver airport men’s room, bad things will happen to anybody who tries to argue with it: fractured skulls, broken legs, split kidneys, spine damage and permanent paralysis. The kick of a horse at close range, a hoof flicked out in anger, is like being whacked in the shins with a baseball bat. It rips flesh and shatters human bones. You will go straight to some rural Emergency Room, and you will be in a cast by nightfall… if you’re lucky. The unlucky will limp for the rest of their lives.

Another little-known fact about horses is that the shape of their eyeballs makes them see human beings as six times their actual size and two or three times closer than they actually are. The multiples vary from horse to horse due to gene differentials, age and eyeball size, but guaranteed pain awaits those who fail to grasp this bizarre truth of nature. Imagine how you would relate to your dog if you thought it was six times bigger than it actually is.

On some days you find too much queerness in your Life. It happens suddenly — or at least it seems that way. But in truth it is like a boil bursting in an eruption of foul juices that were there all along and then suddenly erupted for many eyes to see.

And so it happened in the summer of ’94 that I found myself happily wandering the back roads of the professional polo circuit, looking for weirdness and action It was dumb, but so what? Dumb is a nice way to travel in some neighborhoods, and on some days, just looking for action is almost as good as finding it. “Be careful what you wish for,” a beautiful woman once told me, “because your wish just might come true.”

“Well, maybe so,” I thought. But some things are too important to give up in this life, and I was not about to quit wishing or dreaming or even hallucinating just because some high-strung calculating polo beauty said it might not be good for my health. When I want advice like that, I will call the White House or the nearest police station.

“I had other reasons for getting in the polo business — and if not all of them were sane, they were at least very interesting. Ho, ho. There is an ancient Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.”

In any case, I spent many scorching long afternoons last summer driving around the mountains in my old 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado convertible, looking for signs of people who might be engaged in some off-duty polo action — a practice drill in one place, an unscheduled game in another — back and forth in the sun along dusty narrow roads, across high-mountain pastures with humming electric fences and the occasional tin-roof animal shed every two or three miles, but on weekday afternoons there was rarely any sign of human life.

Only animals, filthy stupid animals. And the rotten blazing sun. The thirst, the anger, the crippling sense of helpless bovine dumbness when you pass the same deserted barn for the third time in 40 minutes and then suddenly run out of gas on a rutted uphill grade overlooking nothing. . . . The nasty rush of fear when the 5,200-pound Cadillac loses its power brakes and steering as it rolls backward down the hill and almost off a cliff.

I was looking for my homeboys, the Aspen Polo team, which was rumored to be on its way to Long Island to compete in what some people said was the Super Bowl of polo, the high-goal U.S. Open. There was even talk of winning, prevailing, beating the best in the world on their own turf and galloping off with the prize.

I must have been bored last summer, because I became oddly fixated with the idea. As a betting proposition, it was not as goofy as it sounded. Aspen Polo turned out to be a gang of big-time polo mercenaries who looked good enough on paper to beat anybody in the world. Doug Matthews, the mysterious aircraft-industry tycoon from Atlanta, had stunned the polo world by brazenly hiring both of the legendary Gracida brothers, Memo and Carlos, to play on the same team, along with a 23-year-old hot rod out of South Carolina named Tiger Kneece, whose lame six-goal rating was rumored to be suspiciously low.

The Gracida brothers from Mexico were both world-class 10 goalers. Yes. It was not a bad bet at all — and when I learned several weeks later that the tournament

was already Fixed, our bet looked even better.

It was exciting news, and when I heard it, I felt powerful. A surge of rabid home-team-loyalty went through me, and I immediately called my old friend Ralph Stead-man, the famous horse scholar, and told him to get here at once. “This is our kind of story,” I told him. “Naked women and fast horses, just like the Derby — yes, sir, Ralph, this is the one we’ve been waiting for.”

“Oh, god,” he said. “Not horses again. I won’t do it.”

“Yes, you will, Ralph. There is fun in this thing and huge money. We will make a killing. Yes, we are gamblers, and now is the time to gamble. I have a wonderful long shot that cant miss, especially at 14-L . . . What? Yes, it’s a polo tournament. Polo! That’s horses, Ralph — people with sticks on horseback — very violent, very visual, but essentially cruel and strange….

“Prince Charles is a polo person, so is Wilt Chamberlain, and so am I, Ralph, and so are you. We are polo people now, and soon we will be rich from our winnings. Trust me, old sport, this is it I We can bet our whole advance and multiply it by 14 times. Fourteen times!”