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POLO.  Netflix series, 5 episodes. 2024.

“POLO” is a five episode Netflix series that is part documentary and part reality show, featuring American and Argentinean players competing in the three most prestigious American polo events, culminating with the US Open held in Wellington, Florida.

POLO (their capitalization) has performed disastrously in the Netflix ratings.  The British reviewers universally give it a 2/5 rating, describing it as “boring” and “impossible to relate to”.  The Guardian called it “unintentionally hilarious”.  Virtually no one saw it: even journalists found it such an onerous task that they warned that “they saw it so that you don’t have to.”

POLO begins with a hypothesis: that polo is more family-oriented than is popularly assumed, a concept which has surely preoccupied no one else on Earth.  Who cares, truly, one way or the other? ((“Polo can take a toll on your family,” sighs one WAG (wife and girlfriend). What about garbage collecting? Any toll there?))

Argentinean player and Ralph Lauren model Nacho Figureas explains that “polo is a lifestyle: you eat, sleep and breathe polo.” This results in players who are less interesting as people than you might think.

The Americans are the underdogs.  The Argentineans, with their superstar model-handsome athletes, play with great competence, showing off magical passes and goals.  Historically, they have won trophy after trophy.  But it is the stories of the less-famous Americans that dominate most of this series.  

The polo takes place in a necessarily closed world, a frenzy of activity in front of a yawning American mouth.  The millionaires and their WAGs are spectators and participants, but certainly represent nothing that would qualify as actual society.  The days of the Whitneys and the Vanderbilts, “gentleman sportsmen” picking up a mallet, ended in the 1920s-1930s.  Polo shows up how meaningless the words “American aristocracy” are.  Polo is now a means of laundering American money into piss-elegance.

In comparison, in England, the spectators at the polo include legitimate titled aristocrats, along with British and foreign royalty.   The lineage of British polo, imported from the Raj in 1872, includes Lord Louis Mountbatten of Burma, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and Princes William and Harry.  The takings from wins were donated to charities.

Where British polo attracts corporate sponsors like Cartier, Rolex, Mercedes-Benz, and Moët-Chandon, American polo attracts some down-market ones.  One notable sponsor, Coca-Cola, sends quantities of cans, presumably to spray in the event of victory.  (Hence the name the “Coca-Cola Team”.) Where Brits say “chukka”, Americans say “chukker”. 

Much has been made of the identity of the series’s executive producers: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.   Prince Harry was a frequent competitor in his youth, playing in many friendly matches which generated $15M for his Lesotho-based HIV charity, Sentebale.  He was known for his aggressive play and talented horsemanship.

However, in May 2010, Prince Harry infamously rode out Drizzle, a 10 year old pony.  As Drizzle began to weaken, Harry rode her off the field to change horses, whereupon she immediately collapsed of a heart attack and died. 

PETA was onto that episode and began to campaign about the number of ponies throughout the sport who would drop dead on and off the field.  (Harry survived that incident through his Jack the Lad persona and the Palace PR team.)  

Increasingly, there are complaints that polo is intrinsically cruel to animals, with its high speeds (30-35 mph) and constant changes of direction, resulting in many broken ankles and legs. Polo ponies are trained for as long as five years (“making a pony”), learning to do the counter-intuitive, running toward chaos and not from  it.

(Incidentally, polo strikes human beings also who are occasionally killed in play.  Successful players are like medieval Wound Man diagrams, featuring broken eye sockets, noses, clavicles, arms, hands, wrists, fingers, and lumbar spines.  Then there are the pulled groins, pneumothorax and concussions.  Even over the course of this program, one player is put into a coma.  Human and horse ambulances are at the ready.  (He is soon helicoptered to hospital.))

Prior to this series, Meghan’s involvement with polo appeared in a video of her squeezing her way into the centre of the photo call for a victorious four-man team.  She then tried to snatch a prize as a prop from the nearest player and he, proving that the age of deference is coming to an end, refused to let it go.  Next she is Xed-out by a large silver trophy, brandished by hairy arms in front of her face. She squats to stay in the frame. She is the Yoko Ono of polo.

One needn’t be a prude to be struck by the sheer volume of profanity in this princely production.  The air stays blue, fuck by fuck, for almost all of the series. (In a bid for multiculturalism, a few “puta de madre”s are contributed by the Argentineans.)

Of course, polo itself is not without linguistic eccentricities: “unscheduled dismount” (i.e. catastrophic fall), “hooking”,  “being well-mounted” or “out-horsed”.  But it is the fucks that soon grab attention.

There is a different caliber of fucks between Britain and America.  Former New Yorker editor Tina Brown and novelist Martin Amis, both British, would join in conspiratorial fuck-offs in restaurants, faking an American accent, and would wail with laughter.  “Fook you.” “No, you fook you.”

In Britain, ‘fuck’ is the birthright of the upper classes, who can relax into a torrent of obscenities, precisely because they have nothing to prove.  Attending same sex schools also neuters obscenities because they have no sexual overtones.  From American mouthes, fuck is simply seen as vulgar, sexual, with lower class implications.

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Early on, we see the Ghost of Fucks Yet To Come.  Timmy Dutta is the 22-year-old son of an often grim Indian polo father. The father, Tim, runs Dutta Corp, which deals in the exceptionally stressful task of shipping live horses around the world.  Tim shouts inspirational phrases from the sidelines (“stop fucking around”, “stupid play”, and “hit the fucking ball”).  Not surprising, polo is often compared to hockey with horses.  Timmy’s idiomatically fascinating admission: “I take my season here very serious. Don’t go out. Don’t party. Champagne’s only for the podium-type vibes.  That ideology, right?”

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It is the large and charismatic Louis Devaleix who is the true fuck junkie.  Louis, 43, is the full-time owner of “a healthcare software company in the behavioural health space” and is also the patron of the “La Fe” (the Faith) team. His wife, Pamela Flanagan Devaleix, a lawyer and a winner of the US Open’s Women’s division herself, is heavily pregnant, and he has two divorces under his belt, both highly contentious.

Polo attracts ectomorphs, with long, slender muscles, but the sheer Herculean mass of Louis is something thing that sets him apart from the other players. Louis is a quarter pounder of a man, like a cartoon of an American. (His little boy nailed it: of all the superheroes, Daddy most resembles the Hulk, presumably in size and in personality.)

In polo, the patron is not only the owner of the team, but his ownership permits him to actually play on the team, alongside three professional athletes.  (Remarkably, the other three La Fe teammates manage to embrace while on horseback.) Louis is no billionaire bloatus on his team.  He is an okay part-time polo player, despite picking up the game at the antique age of 39. He is a truly fine fuckmeister and is presented as a likeable rogue (provided that the divorce testimony of his first two wives is false).

His opening parry is “fuck yeah, baby”, after an employee secures a business deal. When Timmy Dutta mentions that his mother has opinions about the line-up of the games, Louis teases him with, “what the fuck does your mother know?”

The admission that Louis doesn’t even know the names of his ponies is widely criticized in the polo reviews.  Polo players are horse lovers, or at least experts.  As everyone admits, the horse’s performance is 60-70% of the game. (No attention is given in this documentary to the ponies as individual athletes.  Neither is there a basic rundown of the pony’s training and breeding.  Thus, 60-70% of the subject matter is missing.)

While not quite the same caliber as David Mamet in “Glengarry, Glenn Ross”, Louis plays a mean fuck game himself, fitting the word into every few sentences.  Think Jordan Belfort in “The Wolf of Wall Street” loosed on the polo field.

Impressively, during a game of ping pong, he produces “fucking shit of your fucking mother” in French.

Disappointingly, the subtitles omit the occasional fuck, which is covered like a piano leg in the Victorian era.  One throwaway fuck is all consonants, so fast that it didn’t register, perhaps only detectable by a radar gun. Throughout his segment, Louis plugs away with his countless fucks.

“We have the best chemistry off the field, but it is not working, not fucking working,” he muses after a loss.  “I want to blow the fucking team up.”

Louis has a formidable command of fricatives. His fucks run the gamut.  They are angry, philosophical, disappointed, matter-of-fact.  Is this a gift or a tic? A feature or a bug? To be fair, not a single one of the dozens of fucks refers to the act of congress.  They are expletives, not obscenities, certainly passionate.  

Louis arrives uncharacteristically late to a match.  He castigates himself: “I was, like, fuck, who the fuck does that?”  (After being pulled over for speeding topless in a topless jeep, he moans “I am speeding.  Not going to make it.  Fuck.  I’m late.  That pisses me the fuck off.”)

After one loss, Louis attacks a drinks cooler and a bright pink marquee with a polo mallet. For a moment,  it seems like  the marquee might fatally collapse upon Louis, but it held up, one leg bent.  Later, he later sits erect on his mount and roars “fuuuuck” to the sky after missing a goal.

Louis Devaleix and his wife Pamela

Louis’s fucks can get downright romantic.  Nestling with his wife, Louis descants: “There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think about that we could have spent more time together.  And I’m sure it can be really fuckin’ lonely, and I am sorry for that.”

Polo players are designated by their handicap, which runs from -1 to 10 (the highest).  Louis’s handicap is 1, which makes his goal of beating either of the 10 handicap Adolfo or Poroto Cambiasos frankly delusional.

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Adolfo Cambiaso of La Dolphina team

The subplot involves the saga of the Cambiasos, evoking Goya’s painting “Cronus devouring his son”.  Father Adolfo Cambiaso was a longtime number one in the sport, and is universally regarded as the GOAT.  (“Fuck him”, comments Louis.) But his son, Poroto (aka Adolfo Cambiaso Jr), only 19 years old, is reckoned to be an even greater player than his father.  Like a pagent winner eclipsed by her prettier daughter, Adolfo is not completely pleased to have sired such a gifted sprog.  Adolfo, 49, who should be retiring about now, plays for Team Valiente and Poroto plays for La Dolfina, so their head-to-head competitions are psychologically charged.  “I am proud of my son, but I want to beat him”, admits Adolfo.

Eventually, the son’s La Dolfina team prevails over the father’s team at the US Open, leaving Adolfo muttering unhappily from underneath a towel.  This match would have been Adolfo’s tenth US Open. 

The missing story here, which is never even mentioned, involves the very controversial practice of cloning which Adolfo Cambiaso began with his two legendary horses, the late Dolfina Cuartetera (2000-2023) and Aiken Cura (1995-2007).  

Today, ponies given unsentimental names like Aiken Cura E01 romp to victory.  One photo features six Cuartetera clones, who spookily resemble their progenitor and all perform well on the field.  There are at least 300 cloned polo ponies in the world, costing only $120,000 each, raising a number of ethical and genetic issues.  (Supporting a polo team regularly cost $5-10 million a year, making cloned ponies a realistic option for some teams.) Adolfo is said to own some 1,000 horses, and is always acquiring more.

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In the end, it is sad to see Louis defeated.  “I’m tired of spending all the fuckin’ money.  I just can’t win,” he says, wiping a tear from his eye.

Elsewhere, he sobs: “Had my worst game.  Every play, you know, from the fucking beginning.  I feel like I’m complete…fucking garbage.”  

As he eventually considers, “Losing is fucking terrible.”

Louis may have written his epitaph: “We went into this game way too confident.  It fucked us.”

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For insights on the history of American polo, see:

D.C. Denison, “Polo Makes a Galloping Comeback.”  New York Times Magazine (15 March 1981).

You have probably never heard of a monkey spa before, but Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary in Sunderland, Ontario has a unique pair of assets: its charismatic monkeys and a lush, peaceful property consisting of 168 acres an hour and a half outside Toronto.  I spent an Open Day with forty-odd visitors, drunk on the deep greenness of the spotless land, listening to the wind twist through long grass.

Our mission was simian, but one couldn’t help but be pulled toward the healthy farm life, chatting over cookies with volunteers who confide monkey escapades under a pretty marquee.   Arriving at the property, I was met by barn cats and glimpsed a natural pond thick with frogs who would later announce themselves into the silent, private nights.  Later in the afternoon, a dozen cows wandered in a neighbouring field, parking themselves as objects of contemplation.  In the evening, the monkeys fall into ancient biorhythms and a deep sleep, hard to imagine from their chirping and mischief by day.

The feel is of a primate kindergarten.  Senior volunteer Rachelle Hansen checks in on the two olive baboons, to make sure that Pierre and Sweet Pea play nicely and each have a bouquet of flowers to eat.  Story Book Farm has advanced the cause of baboon diplomacy by putting the two neighbours, formerly separated by bars, into a shared enclosure with a new extension funded by donations.

The monkeys welcomed their visitors with there characteristic gestures, each possessed of a unique personality, just like human beings.  Despite the traumatic life stories of monkeys rescued from laboratory testing and roadside zoos, each resident of the sanctuary has made significant gains, responding to the patience of volunteers and an endless flow of tickles, treats, and gourmet fruit and vegetable salads. Spaghetti is an occasional favourite.

Pockets Warhol, overwhelmed by a crochet doppelganger. Photo: Charmaine Quinn

Pockets is an adorable white-capped Capuchin monkey whose latent artistic gifts were discovered by volunteer Charmaine Quinn, who offered him bright children’s paints and a canvas as enrichment. As it turned out, Pockets is the craziest artist since Salvador Dali. Capuchin monkeys as a species are a frequent choice in university behavioural psychology tests, due to their exceptional intelligence. Capuchins are the stars of primate economics, able to use plastic coins to exchange for treats in a range of experiments. In the wild, they carry rocks long distances to break open nuts, showing an impressive memory and skill in tool use.

As the outdoor tour moves from one enclosure to another, the resident monkey pops out on cue, each performing his own self-styled act for the guests.  Pockets fixed on a friendly grandmother, choosing a favourite visitor from each tour, and it would be hard not to feel flattered. Popping back indoors through a small barn window, he began to make a huge racket, throwing his toys and smacking the walls to get everyone’s full attention.  The effect was of Oscar the Grouch rustling around in his trashcan. Soon, Pockets darted back to his fans in the sunlight.  In the end, Pockets only has eyes for his “Muse”, Charmaine Quinn, with whom he appeared to be communicating telepathically.

For residents of downtown Toronto, where the occasional parks are thick with cigarette butts and broken beer bottles, Story Book Farm offers an afternoon of profound peace. The lawn is ready for a family picnic in the shade, behind the large Victorian house in which the staff run the charity.  

Inside, is a room which has been transformed into a gallery for the second stage of the Pockets Warhol Art Collective, wherein works by important contemporary artists (including Pockets) can be bought. New Yorker cover artist Anita Kunz curated the show, and works are available by major artists from Ralph Steadman (an American cartoonist famous for his longtime collaboration with Gonzo political writer Hunter S. Thompson of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to Sue Coe (a Briton known for her graphic art promoting animal rights).  Prices range from $25 to several thousand dollars, and the quality is surprising high, since Kunz called on many established, mid-career colleagues.  Familiar cover cartoonists from the New Yorker mix with figurative Canadian artists.  Many artists chose to produce a new, monkey-themed artwork for the show.

After a brush with financial catastrophe in 2015, executive director and resident photographer Daina Liepa joined up with an anonymous donor to save the sanctuary and its furry occupants. Liepa is an amusingly glamorous character who keeps the sanctuary going from day to day, whether mucking out enclosures or running silent auctions or doing the crucial PR work for the sanctuary.

Under Liepa’s stewardship, Story Book Farm has received both local and national newspaper and TV coverage. Before devoting herself to the Sanctuary, she had a successful career in advertising. For a Sanctuary holding a little over twenty souls, it punches above its weight in the elegance of its communications. Every media announcement and notice is done just so.

Liepa has overseen the increased size of the enclosures, with their extremely expensive fencing, and the beautification of the exterior spots of the sanctuary, bringing pots of flowers for the monkeys to think about.

No one is more famous than Darwin, better known as “the IKEA monkey”, who was found in a North York IKEA parking lot wearing a shearling coat, having escaped from the car of his illegal owner. The bizarre story went viral internationally, turning into a meme on social media. After legal wrangling, Darwin was turned over to the sanctuary, where he has flourished, forming a new family with other macaques.

Dotted throughout the enclosures are large, rugged Fisher-Price toys in primary colours, large enough to stand on, with knobs and buttons with which to fiddle.  Pockets has both a plastic car and a plastic pagoda.  Today’s dedicated sanctuaries and zoos put great effort into enrichment, which involves keeping the animals intellectually stimulated and emotionally sound.  At Story Book Farm, intricate toys, some purpose-built, are available and the monkeys work to find treats hidden in the grass and meals wrapped in bags. The sanctuary receives a treasury of toys as gifts from its many supporters, some hand-made puzzles of various sorts devised to keep the monkeys in thrall.

Some love nothing more than to stare at the monkey in the mirror, while others chirp out their life story to a favourite volunteer.  The volunteers dance attendance on the monkeys, rushing to keep them entertained. This is the crucial distinction between a sanctuary and a roadside zoo, in which monkeys are forcibly taught tricks and sealed in small cages.

Tortishell refugee from the entertainment industry, Mr. Jenkins, played Hamlet, dithering in the doorway of the barn. Sanctuary life means that primates get to choose whether to stay inside or outside, or to bathe in the summertime in plastic swimming pools.

None of the monkeys looks entirely real: their fur is so plush and their eyes so shiny that, in repose, they could be mistaken for stuffed animals. The lemurs, regarded an evil spirits in their native Madagascar, look like intergalactic visitors with their staring orange button eyes. Elderly spider monkey George throws Art Nouveau shapes, while hanging from the roof.  A single bench is parked suddenly in front of a row of enclosures, from which one could drift into reverie under a complete sun, contemplating with relaxed disbelief life as lived by celebrity monkeys.