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Show p Polo's ' -1' MAN OF TWO DECADES Hitchcock Tops Polo Competition Over Two Decades By DILLON GRAHAM NEW YORK, Jan. IT The Thlr-tiea Thlr-tiea are (one. Looking back over that 10-year stretch we wonder who were the most outstanding athletes, which stars dominated the varloui sports. Who were sports' Men of the Decade T Most of us recall re-call the twenties, the preceding decade often called the Golden Age of Sports, The twenties produced some Hitchcock 1 .'; ' .". ' 1 - '' -'I v m-a ytmiA - ! ml z u i Tommy Hitchcock i( No. 1 la twe decade. OI DIIIOTTI Jonee greatest athletes. Those were booming times and everything was supercolossal. Record Rec-ord gates poured tnio arenas In almost every branch of athletics. Let's push the curtain of time back to let us see again the '20s and '30s. Let's take them sport by sport, choose our Man of the Thirties Thir-ties and then compare him with those heroes of the Golden Age. Double Decoder Consider polo. Of all those great athletes of the twenties Dempsey, Jones, Tilden, Nurml, Ruth, Weiss' muller. Grange only Tommy Hitchcock held on to dominate his game during the thirties. The hard, lean Long Islander la the Man of the Decade in polo this decade, last decade or any other decade. He is the greatest polo player of all time. Hitchcock, he of the Iron forearms fore-arms and the wrists of steel, was the world's best In the early twenties twen-ties and as the forties march in he Is still No. 1. This smart and daring poloist was an established figure as far back as 1914, before the headlines had taken Dempsey, Tilden or Ruth Into their black type. Those aces burst across the sports horizon with amazing feats and since have sailed Into the past Hitchcock, at 40, still Is going strong. Polo Isn t a game that the masses cuddle to. So perhaps you don't realize just what a 10-goal rating means. Well, its baseball equivalent equiva-lent is a .400 hitter or a pitcher who Is a 40-game winner. In golf a fellow who shot consistently in the GO'S In the national open championship cham-pionship would be about the same In his game aa a 10-goal man In polo. le-Q Rating Ten-goal players are rare. Thy are the perfect players. There have been only a dozen or to in American polo history. Maybe you'll understand just how tremendous tremen-dous Hitchcock was, and is, if you consider that he has won 10-goal rating in 18 of the last 21 years. - Tommy revol utionlzed polo, changing the offense from passing to power. He brought the punch of a Dempsey or a Ruth Into the chukker game. It was a dozen years ago that the Americans, playing play-ing a tine Argentine quartet, found themselves taking a sound shellacking. shel-lacking. So Hitchcock benched several aces of the passing game, substituted a crew of hard hitters and said: "To hell with defense; slug that apple." They hit long, hard and often, discarding the old short pass style, and a new manner of polo was born. It's a faster, rougher, more thrilling game now, and the kingpin king-pin of all Its aces Is still Tommy Hitchcock. |