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F O R T H E F I R S T T I ME I N T H E U S P O L O
A S S O C I AT I O N ’ S H I S T O R Y, T H E S P O R T I S
B E I NG A P P R O A C H E D A S A B U S I NE S S
Summer is here, and the Florida high-goal
season is behind us, but there was a different
feel this year – the Wellington polo scene
was in a state of disarray.
Over the years, the high-goal polo
community has played under the umbrella
of a major club supported by an individual.
The Oak Brook Polo Club in Chicago relied
on the Butler family; Steve Gose subsidised
the game at his Retama Polo Center outside
San Antonio, Texas; and in Florida, it was
Tulsa oilman John Oxley with his Royal
Palm Polo Club in Boca Raton, and Bill
Ylvisaker, CEO of Gould Inc, who purchased
10,000 acres and developed Wellington and
Palm Beach Polo & Country Club.
With the demise of the high-goal game
at Palm Beach Polo and Country Club and
the Royal Palm Polo Club, the International
Polo Club (IPC) emerged under the funding
of John Goodman and a Goodman Trust.
A stadium was constructed and a clubhouse
built, and it served as the home for the
United States Polo Association’s Open
Championship for the last 14 years.
After a group headed by equestrian
promoter Mark Bellissimo purchased the
club in 2016, the landscape began to change.
The new owners assumed the balance of the
contract (until 2018) between the club and
the USPA to host the 26-goal CV Whitney
Cup, the Gold Cup and the US Open.
‘We have another year remaining on the
current contract with the club,’ said USPA
chairman Joe Meyer. ‘And we are currently
working on an extension of that.’
For the first time in the association’s
history, the sport is being approached as
a business, but not without ruffling feathers
in the local polo community. Today, the
major players on the Wellington polo scene
are Bob Jornayvaz, Marc and Melissa Ganzi,
and Bellissimo. Jornayvaz owns Valiente,
a 140-acre polo farm in Wellington with
four polo fields, a two-sided stadium
and the largest single equestrian barn in
the country at 78,000 sq ft. The Ganzis
expanded their polo holdings with the
purchase of Lyndon Lea’s Zacara Polo Farm;
and the lease of three more fields, giving
them a total of 11, including five at their
Grand Champions Polo Club.
Bellissimo’s success in the equestrian
community had been limited to the hunter/
jumper and dressage disciplines that he
expanded in Wellington before leading
a group in purchasing the Colorado Horse
Park and developing a major facility in
North Carolina. He appears to be poised to
attempt to make high-goal polo a profitable
entity after his recent purchase of the IPC.
C L U B S E A S O N
A full schedule of games was in place at
the IPC this winter, with familiar teams
and players for the season, but with an
abbreviated list of three 26-goal teams in the
opening tournament, the CV Whitney Cup.
Jornayvaz made an excited rush into the
high-goal game, hiring the top players and
setting out to capture every major polo
tournament in the world. Victories in
Wellington including the CV Whitney Cup,
the Gold Cup and the US Open were
followed by a trip to Spain where his
Valiente team swept the high-goal season
with wins in the Bronze, Silver and Gold
cups. Valiente hosted the first All-Pro polo
game in North America and a charity match
featuring Prince Harry and Nacho Figueras
in a festive, three-team round-robin affair.
The Ganzis developed an off-season
medium-goal league that eventually found
a home on five fields that they purchased
from Palm Beach Polo and Country Club’s
Glenn Straub. They added three more fields
to their inventory when they bought Zacara
Farm and leased an additional three fields.
Both Jornayvaz and the Ganzis were
attempting to purchase the 248-acre IPC
property but came up short.
Offering a full schedule of tournaments,
it appears that the Ganzis are shadowing
the efforts of the IPC in an effort to wrest
control of the high-goal games, but for now
it appears the current team owners prefer
to play before a stadium full of spectators.
Despite being longtime supporters of
the IPC programmes, neither Melissa nor
Marc Ganzi entered teams in the first
20-goal tournament of the season, The
Herbie Pennell Cup. And their absence saw
the 26-goal ranks shrink to just three teams
in the CV Whitney Cup, before a 26-goal
Audi team, which expanded the field to
four teams in the Gold Cup. Melissa Ganzi
joined the US Open field with a line-up that
included Rodrigo Andrade, Gonzalito Pieres
and Nico Pieres while her husband Marc
entered a foursome that fielded Nic Roldan,
Magoo Laprida and Alejandro Novillo
Astrada. Teo Calle’s Travieso entry expanded
the field to six teams.
