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A Lawless Sport Takes Root in a Chinatown Pit
Instead of ponies, they ride stripped down bikes tough enough to withstand the occasional wreck. Instead of grass, they get a face full of concrete when they bite it. Instead of wood, their mallets are sawed-off golf clubs or ski poles bolted to lengths of plumbing pipe. Instead of Bloody Maries, spectators sip Colt 45 malt liquor out of black plastic bags.
They’re urban bike polo players, and if you happen to pass them on your way through Chinatown on a Sunday, you might be more bemused than impressed. The six players circling the blacktop pit at Broome and Chrystie Streets don’t move as quickly as the soccer players on the nearby fields or as elegantly as the old men doing Tai Chi. The game looks like a halting mating ritual observed by a pack of shy, ungainly creatures.
But take a seat on an empty bench, put your feet up on the concrete wall, and watch: within a minute you’ll have picked the pros out from the amateurs. Some of these guys, when they get possession of the ball, have the ability to slow down the tempo so that they can do things like dribble between their front and back wheels, center it to a teammate in striking position or hold their bike steady with one hand while they poise, wind up and whack the ball with their mallet into a three-foot wide goal. When you take into account all the moving parts – ball, bike, body, mallet, teammates, defense – it’s a masterful display of control.
“It feels good to score a goal,” says Alfred Bobe, a sprightly, hyper-aggressive bike messenger on a brakeless track bike, “because you have to score with this part of the mallet [points to the head], which is near goddamn impossible, so when you score it’s like, Yes!”
If there’s one player who’s head and shoulders above the others, it’s Doug Dalrymple – both literally (he’s very big and blonde) and skill-wise. Dalrymple won’t admit as much; when I ask who’s the best, the two bike messengers within hearing distance point at him while he tactfully diverts the question.
Some people are goal scorers, Dalrymple says, while others might be overlooked because their talent is for passing or blocking. And “some people have bikes they can beat up and some people have bikes they want to be nice to, so that determines how aggressive they can be.”
“A sensible polo player does not play on his work bike,” says Bill Dozer, the self-proclaimed “godfather of polo.” “Your weekend activities should not interfere with your ability to make money Monday through Friday.”
About half the Chinatown regulars are bike messengers by trade; the other half are “fakingers” or “complete posingers,” as one player puts it – in other words, they look like they could be bike messengers but they do things like string violins or work at city-run nonprofits. They’ve got the tattoos, the piercings, the little bike caps and the keys hanging from carabineers hooked onto belt loops. They’re a “bit intimidating,” says Yorgo Tloupas, a newcomer from London; they’ve got the sex appeal that has marketers falling over themselves to sponsor tournaments.
“A lot of companies are into marketing to us now,” says Jon Birdseye, riding a red and silver track bike he put together himself. “They’ll give us messenger bags, bike frames – valuable prizes, but prizes most of us don’t need. It kind of legitimizes it, but that’s a good and a bad thing.”
Bike polo has been around for over a century, but its New York incarnation started in earnest in Chinatown last summer. This is the genesis story, as told by one player: “We just hang out doing bike stuff, and then some dude is like let’s play bike polo, and then more dudes show up.”
Because it’s still relatively new, the collective learning curve is steep. “The level of play is getting better,” says Brendan Enright, a recent arrival in the city from Indiana who’s been playing for three months. “Everybody. You can see it.”
A lot of catching up remains to be done, though, if New York wants to compete with the West Coast. “It’s a bunch of old school guys with nothing else to do,” says Bobe of the Seattle scene. “They’ve just been playing forever… They’re aggressive but polite. They will knock you off your bike but they won’t hurt you.”
In Portland, “they play for keeps and they play in a cage, so it’s much more Thunderdome,” says Dozer, who lived there for five years.
The equipment has grown more sophisticated in step with the play. “The mallets used to be brooms,” says Enright. Now the gearheads of the group are experimenting with handles made of Big Bertha drivers and uber-flexible bamboo. (Bobe’s bamboo mallet is autographed by Mess Man, a “righteous” Seattle legend. The industrial-strength PVC (poly-vinyl chloride) piping is obtained for the group by one guy, Paul, who gets it through his job.
“There’s a big DIY [Do It Yourself] ethic,” says Enright. “I am not a good mechanic with my bike. Some of the guys are welders and stuff. They take pity on me when they see parts falling off, my gears all messed up and stuff.”
“There’s no kind of head to this dragon. Everyone’s just friends,” says Corey Hilliard, a Philadelphia bike messenger who seems to split his time between cities.
“No fliers, no person to call, no real organization,” says Dalrymple, although somehow, he has recently emerged as the group’s unofficial spokesperson, interviewing with reporters from the Times and Jane magazine. “We don’t really have a permit. They don’t really bother us.”
Bobe, whose passion is surfing (his brother is a pro surfer), became a bike messenger nine years ago in search of “adrenaline satisfaction.” Seeing him fly through the goal cone in pursuit of a fast-moving ball, leap from his bike as it crashes into the back wall, re-mount and scream like a victorious matador, one might assume that bike polo gives him that satisfaction.
“No,” says Bobe. “This is just for fun. Just to spend some time with some bicycle enthusiasts. This is just an enclosed space. You don’t have the element of surprise. You can’t compare that to surfing, or being a messenger.”
Maybe not, but all the messengers seem to agree that bike polo is the best practice there is for being out on the streets.
“This game has done more for my handling in traffic than anything else.”
“It’s true! Traffic is nothing after this.”
More than a few layers of skin have been claimed by the pavement at Broome and Chrystie, but who knows? The skills sharpened here may have prevented an accident or three.
Out there, “your senses have to be full on,” says Bobe. “You can pay with your life.”
As sports go, urban style bike polo does not have many rules.
To score, you have to hit the ball through the goal with the end of the mallet. You can’t “shuffle” it in with the side of the mallet.
If you put your foot down, you have to “tap out” before you can reenter play. Tapping out means touching your mallet to a cone wedged between rungs of the railing that acts as the sideline.
“Like contact” – mallet-on-mallet or body-on-body – is allowed, but there is no grabbing with hands. Urban bike polo differs from the suburban version that is played on a field, with mountain bikes, in that it has no right-of-way rules. “Nothing says you can’t go in front of somebody, ride your bike into somebody,” says Dalrymple. “The rules are as few as possible,” although, he adds, “you’re not really encouraged to run into someone.”
Things will be a little more formal than usual at the much anticipated East Side Polo Invite, a tournament taking place at the end of April that will draw as many as 30 teams from around the country. “We’re designating a couple people that are going to spot infractions and try to assess little penalties,” says Hilliard, who will have a hand in organizing.
But at pick-up games, it’s not like there’s a ref to enforce these things.
When a mallet gets caught in the spokes of a bike wheel and a body hits the pavement, there’s no cry of “foul!,” no stoppage of play – just laughter from the spectators, and oftener than not, from the bleeding player himself.
The U.S. Bicycle Polo website cautions: “A grassy area 100 x 60 yards constitutes the USBPA official field, but you can play on almost any size or surface depending on availability. Just remember, falls do happen and grass is softer than asphalt or dirt.”
By utilitarian standards of happiness, wipeouts are for the best, as they give the waiting players and spectators something to heckle. The award for crowd pleaser of the day, however, would have to go to the drunk Hispanic man singing Guantanamero who took a piss on a park bench, then turned around with his penis hanging out of his pants and casually resumed watching the game and cheering: “Pusalo! Vamos Italia!” (Bobe was wearing a sweater with the Italian flag on it.)
“I was hoping not to get hurt until like two, at least,” says Brian Wang, pressing gauze to his bleeding ankle. He’s planning to get high tops this week – he’s thinking Converse All Stars – to prevent against what is becoming a recurring injury.
It’s almost a privilege these days, to bleed. That “you get to fall a little bit, get a few bruises” is a draw for Enright. It means you did something today.
“Some people wreck a lot,” says Dalrymple. “They’re pretty much nuts. There’s this one guy, I love playing with him because he’s somewhat dangerous and aggressive. He goes to the ball and tries to make the ball move. Some people do circles around it.”
No one has gone to the hospital from the Chinatown court – yet. “If you just watch the average speed and imagine wrecking your bike at that speed, you’re not going to get hurt too bad,” explains Dalrymple.
The best polo bikes tend have easy gear ratios, which allows for quick acceleration but not very fast top speed. The New York crowd mostly rides what are known as fixed gear bikes, which don’t coast. “The kids around here, they like ‘em,” says Dozer, because it gives them “better control over speed.” That might explain how all six players on the court can sprint for a ball and then suddenly pull up, weave a bit and avoid each other by centimeters before circling out.
Small frames are a plus, because you’re more likely to clear the bike if you jump off. And polo bikes are generally assembled from old, replaceable parts, so that wrecking your bike does not mean wrecking your wallet. On one bike, tweaked by its lefty owner, both hand brakes are accessible from the right handlebar, so that the player’s dominant arm is free to wield the mallet.
Only one player last Sunday was wearing a helmet. Others wore an irregular assortment of armor that included knee pads, a hockey elbow pad, shin guards, high socks, and gloves. The spokes of Dalrymple’s front wheel were protected, sort of, by a cardboard shield decorated with marker and the word “DEAD.”
There have been serious injuries, though, the kind that make you step back and say: shit. “My friend on the West Coast,” Dalrymple starts, then changes his mind. “I don’t want to tell that story. He doesn’t play polo anymore.”
The friend in question is Bill Dozer, the previously mentioned self-titled “godfather of polo.” Dozer is more than happy to talk about anything, be it the relative merits of the two halves of “Grindhouse” or the “horseshit I did last summer” that had him fighting for his life.
In the first few minutes of the first game of the 2006 West Side Invite in Portland (where, if you’ll remember, “they play for keeps”), Dozer T-boned into another bike, flew “ass over teakettle” over his handlebars and landed on the other bike’s handlebars. Damage included a separated sternum, three broken ribs, a severed artery, a collapsed lung, three liters of lost blood, and perhaps a permanently morbid outlook: Dozer now throws around ominous terms like “kidney-punch handlebars.”
At 30, he’s officially retired. “Sure, I wish I could play,” he shrugs. “I love it. But that’s, you know, it’s a career-ender. That’s kind of just the way it is. I ain’t got shit to prove to anybody anymore.” He still comes out, though, to “yell at people, make sure they know the rules.”
I lick the blood off my knuckles as I walk home, still sweaty and a little embarrassed. I did not fully understand what “fixed gear” meant before I borrowed Brian Wang’s bike. One thing it means is when you peddle backwards, you stop – and if you weren’t expecting that, you might even fall, and then the front wheel might get misaligned with the stem, and you might not understand why you are unable to bike straight until a spectator yells: “You might want to fix that! Put the wheel between your knees and straighten the handlebars! ‘Ere ya go!”
They’re urban bike polo players, and if you happen to pass them on your way through Chinatown on a Sunday, you might be more bemused than impressed. The six players circling the blacktop pit at Broome and Chrystie Streets don’t move as quickly as the soccer players on the nearby fields or as elegantly as the old men doing Tai Chi. The game looks like a halting mating ritual observed by a pack of shy, ungainly creatures.
But take a seat on an empty bench, put your feet up on the concrete wall, and watch: within a minute you’ll have picked the pros out from the amateurs. Some of these guys, when they get possession of the ball, have the ability to slow down the tempo so that they can do things like dribble between their front and back wheels, center it to a teammate in striking position or hold their bike steady with one hand while they poise, wind up and whack the ball with their mallet into a three-foot wide goal. When you take into account all the moving parts – ball, bike, body, mallet, teammates, defense – it’s a masterful display of control.
“It feels good to score a goal,” says Alfred Bobe, a sprightly, hyper-aggressive bike messenger on a brakeless track bike, “because you have to score with this part of the mallet [points to the head], which is near goddamn impossible, so when you score it’s like, Yes!”
If there’s one player who’s head and shoulders above the others, it’s Doug Dalrymple – both literally (he’s very big and blonde) and skill-wise. Dalrymple won’t admit as much; when I ask who’s the best, the two bike messengers within hearing distance point at him while he tactfully diverts the question.
Some people are goal scorers, Dalrymple says, while others might be overlooked because their talent is for passing or blocking. And “some people have bikes they can beat up and some people have bikes they want to be nice to, so that determines how aggressive they can be.”
“A sensible polo player does not play on his work bike,” says Bill Dozer, the self-proclaimed “godfather of polo.” “Your weekend activities should not interfere with your ability to make money Monday through Friday.”
About half the Chinatown regulars are bike messengers by trade; the other half are “fakingers” or “complete posingers,” as one player puts it – in other words, they look like they could be bike messengers but they do things like string violins or work at city-run nonprofits. They’ve got the tattoos, the piercings, the little bike caps and the keys hanging from carabineers hooked onto belt loops. They’re a “bit intimidating,” says Yorgo Tloupas, a newcomer from London; they’ve got the sex appeal that has marketers falling over themselves to sponsor tournaments.
“A lot of companies are into marketing to us now,” says Jon Birdseye, riding a red and silver track bike he put together himself. “They’ll give us messenger bags, bike frames – valuable prizes, but prizes most of us don’t need. It kind of legitimizes it, but that’s a good and a bad thing.”
Bike polo has been around for over a century, but its New York incarnation started in earnest in Chinatown last summer. This is the genesis story, as told by one player: “We just hang out doing bike stuff, and then some dude is like let’s play bike polo, and then more dudes show up.”
Because it’s still relatively new, the collective learning curve is steep. “The level of play is getting better,” says Brendan Enright, a recent arrival in the city from Indiana who’s been playing for three months. “Everybody. You can see it.”
A lot of catching up remains to be done, though, if New York wants to compete with the West Coast. “It’s a bunch of old school guys with nothing else to do,” says Bobe of the Seattle scene. “They’ve just been playing forever… They’re aggressive but polite. They will knock you off your bike but they won’t hurt you.”
In Portland, “they play for keeps and they play in a cage, so it’s much more Thunderdome,” says Dozer, who lived there for five years.
The equipment has grown more sophisticated in step with the play. “The mallets used to be brooms,” says Enright. Now the gearheads of the group are experimenting with handles made of Big Bertha drivers and uber-flexible bamboo. (Bobe’s bamboo mallet is autographed by Mess Man, a “righteous” Seattle legend. The industrial-strength PVC (poly-vinyl chloride) piping is obtained for the group by one guy, Paul, who gets it through his job.
“There’s a big DIY [Do It Yourself] ethic,” says Enright. “I am not a good mechanic with my bike. Some of the guys are welders and stuff. They take pity on me when they see parts falling off, my gears all messed up and stuff.”
“There’s no kind of head to this dragon. Everyone’s just friends,” says Corey Hilliard, a Philadelphia bike messenger who seems to split his time between cities.
“No fliers, no person to call, no real organization,” says Dalrymple, although somehow, he has recently emerged as the group’s unofficial spokesperson, interviewing with reporters from the Times and Jane magazine. “We don’t really have a permit. They don’t really bother us.”
Bobe, whose passion is surfing (his brother is a pro surfer), became a bike messenger nine years ago in search of “adrenaline satisfaction.” Seeing him fly through the goal cone in pursuit of a fast-moving ball, leap from his bike as it crashes into the back wall, re-mount and scream like a victorious matador, one might assume that bike polo gives him that satisfaction.
“No,” says Bobe. “This is just for fun. Just to spend some time with some bicycle enthusiasts. This is just an enclosed space. You don’t have the element of surprise. You can’t compare that to surfing, or being a messenger.”
Maybe not, but all the messengers seem to agree that bike polo is the best practice there is for being out on the streets.
“This game has done more for my handling in traffic than anything else.”
“It’s true! Traffic is nothing after this.”
More than a few layers of skin have been claimed by the pavement at Broome and Chrystie, but who knows? The skills sharpened here may have prevented an accident or three.
Out there, “your senses have to be full on,” says Bobe. “You can pay with your life.”
As sports go, urban style bike polo does not have many rules.
To score, you have to hit the ball through the goal with the end of the mallet. You can’t “shuffle” it in with the side of the mallet.
If you put your foot down, you have to “tap out” before you can reenter play. Tapping out means touching your mallet to a cone wedged between rungs of the railing that acts as the sideline.
“Like contact” – mallet-on-mallet or body-on-body – is allowed, but there is no grabbing with hands. Urban bike polo differs from the suburban version that is played on a field, with mountain bikes, in that it has no right-of-way rules. “Nothing says you can’t go in front of somebody, ride your bike into somebody,” says Dalrymple. “The rules are as few as possible,” although, he adds, “you’re not really encouraged to run into someone.”
Things will be a little more formal than usual at the much anticipated East Side Polo Invite, a tournament taking place at the end of April that will draw as many as 30 teams from around the country. “We’re designating a couple people that are going to spot infractions and try to assess little penalties,” says Hilliard, who will have a hand in organizing.
But at pick-up games, it’s not like there’s a ref to enforce these things.
When a mallet gets caught in the spokes of a bike wheel and a body hits the pavement, there’s no cry of “foul!,” no stoppage of play – just laughter from the spectators, and oftener than not, from the bleeding player himself.
The U.S. Bicycle Polo website cautions: “A grassy area 100 x 60 yards constitutes the USBPA official field, but you can play on almost any size or surface depending on availability. Just remember, falls do happen and grass is softer than asphalt or dirt.”
By utilitarian standards of happiness, wipeouts are for the best, as they give the waiting players and spectators something to heckle. The award for crowd pleaser of the day, however, would have to go to the drunk Hispanic man singing Guantanamero who took a piss on a park bench, then turned around with his penis hanging out of his pants and casually resumed watching the game and cheering: “Pusalo! Vamos Italia!” (Bobe was wearing a sweater with the Italian flag on it.)
“I was hoping not to get hurt until like two, at least,” says Brian Wang, pressing gauze to his bleeding ankle. He’s planning to get high tops this week – he’s thinking Converse All Stars – to prevent against what is becoming a recurring injury.
It’s almost a privilege these days, to bleed. That “you get to fall a little bit, get a few bruises” is a draw for Enright. It means you did something today.
“Some people wreck a lot,” says Dalrymple. “They’re pretty much nuts. There’s this one guy, I love playing with him because he’s somewhat dangerous and aggressive. He goes to the ball and tries to make the ball move. Some people do circles around it.”
No one has gone to the hospital from the Chinatown court – yet. “If you just watch the average speed and imagine wrecking your bike at that speed, you’re not going to get hurt too bad,” explains Dalrymple.
The best polo bikes tend have easy gear ratios, which allows for quick acceleration but not very fast top speed. The New York crowd mostly rides what are known as fixed gear bikes, which don’t coast. “The kids around here, they like ‘em,” says Dozer, because it gives them “better control over speed.” That might explain how all six players on the court can sprint for a ball and then suddenly pull up, weave a bit and avoid each other by centimeters before circling out.
Small frames are a plus, because you’re more likely to clear the bike if you jump off. And polo bikes are generally assembled from old, replaceable parts, so that wrecking your bike does not mean wrecking your wallet. On one bike, tweaked by its lefty owner, both hand brakes are accessible from the right handlebar, so that the player’s dominant arm is free to wield the mallet.
Only one player last Sunday was wearing a helmet. Others wore an irregular assortment of armor that included knee pads, a hockey elbow pad, shin guards, high socks, and gloves. The spokes of Dalrymple’s front wheel were protected, sort of, by a cardboard shield decorated with marker and the word “DEAD.”
There have been serious injuries, though, the kind that make you step back and say: shit. “My friend on the West Coast,” Dalrymple starts, then changes his mind. “I don’t want to tell that story. He doesn’t play polo anymore.”
The friend in question is Bill Dozer, the previously mentioned self-titled “godfather of polo.” Dozer is more than happy to talk about anything, be it the relative merits of the two halves of “Grindhouse” or the “horseshit I did last summer” that had him fighting for his life.
In the first few minutes of the first game of the 2006 West Side Invite in Portland (where, if you’ll remember, “they play for keeps”), Dozer T-boned into another bike, flew “ass over teakettle” over his handlebars and landed on the other bike’s handlebars. Damage included a separated sternum, three broken ribs, a severed artery, a collapsed lung, three liters of lost blood, and perhaps a permanently morbid outlook: Dozer now throws around ominous terms like “kidney-punch handlebars.”
At 30, he’s officially retired. “Sure, I wish I could play,” he shrugs. “I love it. But that’s, you know, it’s a career-ender. That’s kind of just the way it is. I ain’t got shit to prove to anybody anymore.” He still comes out, though, to “yell at people, make sure they know the rules.”
I lick the blood off my knuckles as I walk home, still sweaty and a little embarrassed. I did not fully understand what “fixed gear” meant before I borrowed Brian Wang’s bike. One thing it means is when you peddle backwards, you stop – and if you weren’t expecting that, you might even fall, and then the front wheel might get misaligned with the stem, and you might not understand why you are unable to bike straight until a spectator yells: “You might want to fix that! Put the wheel between your knees and straighten the handlebars! ‘Ere ya go!”
They were nice about it.
