Man with a Hat is Back!
IRVINE, CA. I’m taking my first polo-related trip to California since before the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s oddly familiar: the early morning prep to get out the door (and forgetting important stuff no matter how many lists I make); the anxiety of getting to the airport on time; the sense of time suspended (complete with whooshing air circulation) on the flight (I chose not to get WiFi to be alone with my thoughts… and the 100 or so other folks on their way to LAX).
I am older now. My jaunts to Los Angeles or Berkeley or Lima or Budapest or Hialeah, FL or Londonville, NY have always been no frills. At 62 do I really want to navigate the greater Los Angeles public transportation network to find my way to Irvine? Why not just pay for an Uber (we’ll see).
Attending the Barbara Kalbus Invitational at UC-Irvine is too much to pass up. For my money—and it IS my money—the Kalbus Invite is the best college tournament of all (don’t get me wrong; the men have the MPSF Invitational which is an amazing confluence of talent and competition). Nothing beats getting out of New York City in February and going to 70º weather to be surfeited with great water polo.
And watch I will! Over a decade of covering polo I’ve learned it’s best to just sit in the stands and take in the spectacle. I used to think my opinion meant something (obviously I still do because I’m presenting it on this blog); now I just want to watch and consider and then question.
Some of my favorite experiences—and my best writing—have been the result of sitting with the parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents and crusty old observers. Just seeing what they see; listening to what they say.
I relish the opportunity to reconnect with the sport and the people who care most about it; in fact, it’s the passion of select polo fanatics which drew me to writing about water polo in the first place. That and the incredible athleticism polo players exhibit; no other sport (in my opinion) is as physical and challenging and fiercely competitive.
A note on this particular hat: I have no direct affiliation with Fordham University. In Randazzo family lore, my father pined to attend college at Rose Hill due to a romantic interest (not my mother), but my grandfather decreed he would only pay for a Brown education, cementing our family's Ivy League legacy. But that’s not why I choose this hat (which took three years and four visits to the school’s Lincoln Center campus to acquire; Covid and restrictive—selectively so, in my opinion—access policies prevent my purchase until this week, when a security officer took pity on my plea). With the demise of St. Francis water polo, the Rams are my go to NYC program. That, and I greatly admire the work that Bill Harris, Brian Bacharach and Iljia Djuretic have done to make Fordham the city’s best team—and one of the East’s top programs.