Previous page:
Brant at
White Birch Farm in
Greenwich, CT.
This page:
from left:
Mariano
Aguerre, Gonzalo Pieres,
Hector Barrantes, and
Brant at Saratoga Polo
Association, winning the
1987 Palamountain Cup
with Anne Palamountain,
Will Farish, Mike Azzaro,
Memo Gracida and
Bill Farish.
Brant founded White Birch in 1979 and
started to climb the higher-goal rankings
rapidly, playing with legends such as
Gonzalo Pieres Sr, Hector Barrantes and
a then-unknown 16-year-old Mariano
Aguerre. ‘Every time we went out there, we
went to win – I thought that’s what my team
expected from me and that’s what I expected
from the guys that I played with,’ says Brant.
When asked to identify the main factor
in White Birch’s climb to dominance, Brant
credits their approach to selecting ponies.
‘We looked at things like the class of the
horse, conformation, breeding of the horse,
where it was raised, who the breaker was, all
of those things,’ he explains. ‘Other teams
could see that really made a difference and
they started to do the same thing.’
‘ E V E R Y T I ME W E W E N T O U T T H E R E , W E
W E N T T O W I N , I T H O U G H T T H AT ’ S WH AT
M Y T E A M E X P E C T E D F R OM ME ’
Many of the bloodlines that are in polo
today can be traced back to the horses
Barrantes bred during that time, many
of which he owned in partnership with
Brant. There is an endless list of these
horses that ended up playing on White
Birch and other teams around the world,
including the Argentine Open.
Brant played some of the sport’s top
ponies, including Levicu – the Best Playing
Pony of the Gold Cup in 1983, 1989 and 1990,
and an inductee into the Museum of Polo’s
Horses to Remember circle in 2006. He also
names Lechuza, one of Gonzalo Pieres’s
horses that eventually became a top
broodmare, and Rumba, who Brant
purchased as a four-year-old and played for
12 years until her retirement. ‘Rumba never
I started, I’ve always had great pleasure from
playing the sport,’ says Brant, who was once
the highest-rated amateur player in the US,
attaining a 7-goal handicap in 1989. ‘My
aim from the beginning was to take it very
seriously. I played nine months a year against
top competition all the time – and had good
coaching from players who had been playing
much longer than I had.’
Legend has it that Brant was introduced
to the sport after meeting the American polo
legend Tommy Glynn at the Fairfield County
Hunt Club one day. Which is sort of true.
Although Brant knew Glynn’s daughter
Sandy from his time in the racing world, it
was another figure who set up the meeting
between Glynn and Brant – Allen Jerkens –
a Hall of Fame thoroughbred-racehorse
trainer who saddled two horses that beat
the mighty Secretariat.
Glynn – a member of Harvard
University’s polo team in the 1920s – taught
Brant the finer points of the sport and
introduced him to other knowledgeable
figures, such as the world-renowned indoor
polo instructor and player Tom Goodspeed.
JOELLE WIGGINS, ANGELA PHAM, PHOTO COURTESY OF GREENWICH
POLO CLUB, DAVID LOMINSKA/POLOGRAPHICS.COM
hurlinghampolo.com
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