Bike Polo: Mallets 'N Mullets

In many ways, New York City is like a steel frame. Theoretically, it’s repairable, but in practice that’s too expensive so everyone just lets it rust and fall apart. Also, the streets are full of horizontal dropouts (though this type is usually panhandling for drug money while lying on cardboard). And, most importantly, as it gets older it’s going soft.

That’s right, I said it. New York is getting softer than a retired pro’s midriff. Once upon a time when people thought of New York they thought of deranged messengers putting their lives on the line in order to deliver relatively unimportant pieces of paper to people in pleated pants. But that image has effectively been de-mystified by the fixed-gear craze as people all over the world slip on that image as casually as you slip on a sweater in a drafty room. Even the bike thieves are becoming more civil—now they actually wait for you to get off your bike and lock it up before they steal it from you. And with the advent of bike polo the de-clawing of urban cycling is almost complete.

And it’s not just that it’s a horse away from this:

Or a pool away from this:

It’s not even the fact that it’s just hacky sack with bikes and sticks.

It’s that it’s too genteel. Riding languidly around a park in a fashion mullet and swatting at a ball with detached bemusement to the strains of indie rock is not going to put New York back on the map as an underground cycling force to be reckoned with. Nor is it going to inspire anyone to make another quasi-gritty laughable Hollywood feature like "Quicksilver." It's not even going to convince Specialized to come out with a line of zertz-infused carbon mallets and a bike called the "Polo Pony." No, all it's going to do is get us laughed at by people in Portland who probably play it better, are coddled by ample bike lanes, and race cyclocross in dresses. Hell, even the people in Dallas are doing it with more aggression and bodily harm!

That's why I believe it's of the utmost importance that people in New York leave this frivolous pastime to the rest of the world and focus on creating something new for people to copy.