Bill Tauber is an insurance salesman who has become a champion in a sport usually associated with the rich and privileged, a pastime relished by kings and queens and a very famous prince of Wales.
For the last three years Tauber, 47, of Lake Forest has won first place in a national arena polo tournament. He has been playing polo as a hobby since he was a boy.
According to Polo Magazine, Tauber is the most successful amateur arena player in U.S. Arena Open history.
Last October, Tauber picked up a first-place trophy in the National Arena Open Polo Tournament in Somers, Conn., where his three-man team representing the Shallowbrook equestrian center in Somers beat the Yale team 23-13.
“This was my second three-peat,” Tauber said. “I also won three tournaments in a row in the 1980s.”
Tauber’s two teammates are professional polo players and nearly 30 years his junior. But Tauber is just as skillful and energetic as the pros he rides with. “I’ve always played as an amateur, and that was by design,” Tauber said. “I never wanted to make that full-time commitment to professional playing. I didn’t think I had the ability. It’s a tough life, and there’s not a lot of money in it.”
Those who have watched Tauber play believe he has the skills to play professionally if he wanted to.
Dave Eldredge, the coach of the Cornell University Polo Team in New York, has played with and against Tauber in championship tournaments. “Bill ranks right up there with the other players,” Eldredge said. “Bill has played for a lot of years and has a lot of experience. He has played a lot of high-quality polo and has done very well.”
Tauber plays arena polo, which is different from outdoor polo. The arena game is played on an indoor dirt field 300 feet by 100 feet, a space much smaller than the outdoor field, which is 300 yards by 150 yards and covered with grass. The indoor ball is an inflated bladder, about 4 1/2 inches in diameter, as compared to the outdoor ball, which is 3 1/2 inches and solid like a baseball.
The indoor game also is shorter and much faster. Outdoor is harder on the players and the horses and not as easy to watch for spectators because the space is so large.
“The arena game is really a stepchild of polo,” Tauber explained. “It was created to pass the winter months. That’s how the game was spawned. But it still has a stigma with outdoor polo players.”
Stigma or not, Tauber is passionate about playing indoor polo. He has a love for the game and an especially strong love for riding horses.
Tauber has been riding since the mid-1960s. As a boy, he did most of his riding on 40 acres of grassland his father, Dick, owned near Interstate Highway 94 and Bradley Road in Lake County. “When we first moved here, it was all open land and empty roads,” Tauber said. “I learned how to ride from my dad out there.”
Today, 34 acres of that land has been developed into an office and light industrial park called, appropriately, Polo Park. His father reserved six acres for the horses.
Tauber said his father encouraged him to play polo and had the money to make it possible. Dick Tauber, a retired car dealer and real estate developer, has had a lifelong love of horses passed on from his father and grandfather, who used to be in the draft-horse business in Chicago. The whole family rides horses, and for a short time, Tauber’s brother Barry played polo at Cornell University.
Tauber’s father also ran the polo club at the old Chicago Avenue National Guard Armory, now the site of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Dick Tauber remembers taking his son with him to polo tournaments at the armory and at the famous Oak Brook Polo Club. He put Bill to work grooming horses and walking them after workouts to cool them down.
Before long, Bill was playing polo like his dad. He started playing serious polo when he was 13, about the time he began attending Libertyville High School. Tauber also played a little baseball, but that didn’t hold his interest.
While Tauber was playing at the Oak Brook Polo Club, one of the sport’s premier players, Cecil Smith, offered to take him to Texas to train as a polo player. “He told me Bill has got the talent to be one of the better players in the world,” Dick Tauber recalled. “I thanked him for the compliment and told Bill about it. He asked me what I thought.”
Dick Tauber said he thought his son should get an education first and go to college. His son agreed. But he kept playing as an amateur and took lessons from polo greats Clarence Starks and Cyril Harrison.
Tauber went on to the University of Dubuque in Iowa, where he studied economics and political science and graduated in 1972. “I really didn’t know what I was going to do,” Tauber said.
He ended up in the insurance business, but his passion for polo continued. Tauber was talented, and he wanted to do more than just play for fun. He wanted to play competitively.
“Passive participation was not as physically rewarding as competition, which is more interesting and more fun,” Tauber said. “Just to play without practice or purpose didn’t make sense. I got tired of that quickly. Without any emotional return or strong sense of purpose, it isn’t worth it to me.”
Because of his competitive nature, Tauber said he does not usually play locally. He waits for the competitive tournaments. “There really is not competitive arena polo in the Midwest,” Tauber said.
Tauber said that even though he does not play full time, he tries to ride every day, except during the winter, when his horses have been moved to California to be in a warmer climate.
Good polo players must be good riders, Eldredge said. “And if you don’t have good-quality horses, you cannot play a good game. It’s akin to a NASCAR driver being in a street car,” he said.
And good horses, which can cost $20,000 and up, make polo expensive. “Polo is grounded in horses. Horses are the biggest part of the game,” Tauber said. “A lot of players may get on a lesser horse because it doesn’t cost as much. It costs a lot of money to compete.”
When he’s training for a tournament, Tauber puts his horses in a trailer and hauls them down the road to The Horse Farm, which has a 5/8-mile track where he can ride. Tauber sometimes plays at an arena club in Naperville and practices at an outdoor field in Wauconda called the Lakewood Acres Polo Club. He also practices his shots at Lakewood in what would be the equivalent of a baseball batting cage. He sits atop a wooden horse in a cage and hits the ball.
He trains hard. “I make myself and my horse work,” Tauber said. “We force ourselves to do what is not easy for us. There are a lot of dynamics with a horse. When you play, you’re working with your horse’s feet and legs. Horses are like people. They’re unpredictable. Some of them are more coordinated than others. A horse may not be able to perform as well as the rider, or sometimes they are better.”
The horse is the key to the game. “The horse comes first. The horse is doing all the work because it’s on the ground,” Tauber said. “It’s possibly the most demanding equine sport. The horse has got to do a lot of things that are unnatural. They make contact with each other, they have mallets swinging around them. It can be scary.”
Although Tauber has not played polo full time or spent much of his career running in some of polo’s elite circles, he knows the sport has a reputation.
“Polo was a rich man’s sport from the beginning,” he said. “I accept polo for what it is. It’s an exclusive game for rich people. I would not have gotten into it if it weren’t for my dad.”
His father agreed. “Polo does have an elitist image but not as much as you think,” Dick Tauber said. “If you watch the people who play it, you’ll see it isn’t so. People in it come from all walks of life. But it isn’t inexpensive.”
Dick Tauber has observed that outside interest in the sport is waning. He said arena polo used to draw lots of spectators in Chicago. “When I ran the armory, we had 4,000 seats and we filled those seats every Saturday night,” he said. “It was something for people to do. They loved watching the horses.”
Tauber is not sure how much longer he’ll continue playing. He has accomplished much as an amateur player, and his achievements are documented in the 1997 United States Polo Association Yearbook, the bible of the sport.
“I’m not under any illusions of being a top-end player,” Tauber said. “But I do compete consistently, and I do that by playinyg with better players. I think I’m at the end of my polo time. My competition days are winding down.”
THE INS AND OUTS OF THE GAME
Historians believe that polo was invented by the Persians about 2,000 years ago. The game became popular in India and was discovered by the English in the latter half of the 19th Century. The first documented polo game in the United States was played in an indoor arena in 1876. The game also is popular in South America, especially Argentina.
Today, indoor and outdoor polo are played competitively by professionals and through collegiate tournaments for men and women.
In polo, players on horseback use long mallets to try to drive a ball into the opponents’ goal, which is marked by two posts.
The game begins with the “bowling in” of the ball by an umpire on horseback. The action is continuous until a goal is scored, a foul is called or the ball is driven from the field of play. Each team consists of a forward, a center and a guard. But because of the constantly shifting nature of the game, the positions often do not matter.
Indoor polo was introduced in the United States primarily for winter play. Each team consists of three players. The standard arena is 300 feet long by 100 to 150 feet wide, with goal posts 10 feet apart. In smaller arenas, the posts must be at least 8 feet apart.
The ball is about 4 1/2 inches in diameter and weighs about 6 ounces. Inflated balls are used in national tournament play.
Indoor polo has four 7 1/2-minute chukkers, or periods, with a 10-minute interval between halves and 3-minute intervals between the other periods.
