With 9 years of experience under their belt, the birthplace of Starbucks and Urban Bike Polo has a stunning amount of skill stored in their muscle memory. That’s the thing that makes this coast so much different from the East. EVERYone is good at this game. Not just a few marquee players. Everyone. On the East, we’re building to something just as great. In the past two years, Ottawa, Boston, Philly, DC, Richmond, New York and all those others have started traveling and sharing all our skills. We’re like the savages to the enlightened West Coasters. Brutal, relentless savages of course, but it wouldn’t be to our disadvantage if the West were to explore the East and bring with them their horses, weaponry, white women, and diseases. Is this metaphor going too far? Fiona doesn’t think so. And I think you catch my drift. We can and will learn a lot from each other.
I don’t want to give the impression that players from the West Coast are inherently superior to anything on the East Coast or that the East Coast plays an uncivilized game of Polo. That’s just not true. All of the best teams from both sides of the country could throw down against each other in spectacular ways. We’ve already seen that in Toronto, when East Vancouver’s “Balls Deep” beat NYC’s “Doug and the Dalrymples” (or whatever they were unofficially called that time), only to be beaten in a tournament ending rematch a day later.
Balls Deep went on to win this weekend’s Tour De Polo II in an epic, 11 point final match with Seattle’s best - Leon, Seabass, and Soren (probably mispelled your name. sorry). East Van seemed to have the game locked up with an 8-2 lead when Seabass turned on the heat, bringing it back to a 9-9 tie. It was a dramatic push, and it was almost enough to top one of the best teams in Bike Polo. But not quite enough. In the end, after two days and 124 games of polo, the unsurmountable abilities of the lumberjack-sized Canadians prevailed.
Playing against Balls Deep again brought back some horrible memories of them dismantling my team 5-0 in the Quarterfinals of the Worlds. Rory does this thing where he swerves around you real fast and scores effortlessly. I really hate that. It worked on us in Toronto, and there was no shortage of flashbacks this weekend when he played my team, “Kill Kill Hate Hate Murder Murder Mutilate”.
It was easy to lose to East Vancouver’s best team. It was all the other second-best teams from all the cities that were a bit more difficult to lose to. And there are a lot of second best teams out here. That’s the advantage to playing with people who have been honing their skills for the better part of a decade. You’ve got a lot to learn from. We’re already seeing it in New York - when new people come to play, they’re picking up the game much faster than they were a year and a half ago.
It was in 2003 when Seattle hosted the Cycle Messenger World Championships. That was the year Messman and his crew introduced their new version of this old sport to the rest of their world. The bug spread like a virus. It was their intention to grow the sport by introducing it at the Worlds five years ago. And it worked. In the past few years particularly, things have been exploding. Seattle was extremely excited to have Fiona and me out there representing New York City. They’ve heard a lot, and everyone asked us how things compare. I couldn’t honestly say that New York or Philly or Richmond or Ottawa could squash Seattle or Vancouver or Portland. Because it wouldn’t be that easy. But it would be amazing. And everyone can’t wait until we can all play together. From the sounds of things, it looks like there will be at least two teams from the West for Los Marcos Madness…. It will be interesting…