Polo is called the sport of kings — but in America, it ran on Texas cow ponies.

In this episode of Wise About Texas, host Ken Wise traces the interesting but often ignored history of Texas polo, beginning with cavalry drills in sixth-century B.C. Persia and ending on a ranch in Kendall County. The game reached the United States in the 1870s when New York Herald owner James Gordon Bennett brought mallets home from England — but the horses he needed were not in New York or London. They were in Texas.

By 1885 San Antonio was the headquarters of polo pony development in the United States, with Vanderbilts and Belmonts buying Hill Country mustangs bred in Llano, Kendall, Gillespie, McCulloch and San Saba counties. In July 1883, a group of retired British officers played the first public polo game in Texas at San Pedro Springs Park in San Antonio; three days later, a group of unimpressed local cowboys formed the Cowboys Polo Club and challenged them to a match.

And in 1904, on the Moss Ranch near Llano, a foreman’s son named Cecil Smith was born who would grow up to be called by the New York Times the best polo player who ever lived — a working cowboy who held polo’s highest rating of ten goals for twenty-five consecutive years, who beat the East Coast establishment at the 1933 World Series of Polo in Chicago after being knocked unconscious and waving off the ambulance, and who led an all-Texas team that swept every major tournament in England in 1938, including the King’s Coronation Cup.

Saddle up, grab your polo mallet, and get Wise About Texas.

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