KIND OF BLUE?
Here at the Hickory Hall Polo Club in Whitestown, polo players atop thoroughbreds thwack a ball around a 300-yard-long, 160-yardwide stretch of carefully groomed green grass. The sun dips in the August sky. Alongside the field, families and couples and college friends and real-estate agents who have rented out box seats for clients swill rosé and nosh on trays of cheeses and meats. This is the only outdoor polo club in the entire state of Indiana, one of just 250-some clubs nationwide. Around the world, the sport has long been the province of the wealthy, white, and privileged. They don’t call it the “sport of kings” for nothing. ¶ Survey the territory here, though, and a more nuanced scene unfolds. The grounds are not only peopled by the hoity toity, but the hoi polloi. They came in $20 a carload, passing an American flag on the gatepost at the entryway—less expensive than a drive-in movie for families. The crowd gathered is not as lily-white as you’d imagine; there are Black and brown families. There are Notre Dame and Indiana University tents where alumni sit in foldable cloth camping chairs. Elsewhere, other attendees have become slightly tipsy on PBR. Between chukkas, or periods, a single-prop plane flies over the field, dropping parachute-piloted packages of candy for battalions of children, who chase down the loot. ¶ In Whitestown, the “sport of kings” has become the sport of suburbanites. “It was always considered a very stuffy sport,” says Hickory Hall’s owner, Greg Chandler, as he sits in a leathery-smelling tack room in a barn just off the field an hour or so before the match begins.
“We don’t want anyone not to feel welcome at all. We’ve dressed it down. If you want to wear a hat and pretty dress, wear one. If you want to wear cutoffs and T-shirts, we don’t care.”
Chandler, whose father played the sport at Fort Benjamin Harrison back in the 1970s, bought the 30 acres here 20 years ago with the goal of democratizing the sport. He made it public, added in the candy drop, and made the matches charity events—a portion of the proceeds each night goes to a cause. Tonight, amid a national uprising opposing police brutality against people of color, the cause happens to be the IMPD Mounted Patrol. Over the last few years, average attendance has increased from a few hundred to more than a thousand on any given Friday night. Such is the attendance tonight.
The tableau, from a distance, certainly looks and feels like Trump Country. And the president did win here in Indiana’s 5th Congressional District in 2016, after all, by 11 points, trouncing Hillary Clinton 52 percent to 41 percent—by some 43,000 votes. But contents have shifted since then. Already, at least two internal polls commissioned by Democratic-affiliated groups have had former Vice President Joe Biden winning the district by 10 percentage points (in June) and 8 points (in August), meaning Trump’s support here could have eroded by as much as 21 points in just three-and-a-half years. Similarly, against the grain of expectations, spectators of all stripes, income levels,
