The Churchill Series – Apr. 20, 2007

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

Yesterday we talked about Churchill’s love of polo, a sport he played into his fifties. I said he was an excellent player who from his early twenties on played with a significant handicap: limited range of motion of his right arm. There’s a photo here in which you can see on his right arm a halter-like device he used to make sure in the excitement of a match he didn’t over extend the limited reach he could safely make with his right arm.

How then, with that handicap, did he remain an excellent polo player for thirty years?

I’ll answer that question in just a moment. Bur first, from My Early Life, is Churchill’s own description of how he sustained the injury that limited his use of his right arm. He has just arrived with his regiment in Bombay Harbor. He’s disembarking from the ship that brought the regiment to India:

It took about a quarter of an hour to reach the quays of the Sassoon Dock. Glad I was to be there; for the lively motion of the skiff to which I and two friends had committed ourselves was fast becoming our main preoccupation.

We came along side of a great stone wall with dripping steps and iron rings for hand-holds. The boat rose and fell four or five feet with the surges. I put out my hand and grasped at a ring; but before I could get my feet on the steps the boat swung away, giving my right shoulder a sharp and peculiar wrench. …

Quite an exceptional strain is required to tear the capsule which holds the shoulder joint together; but once the deed is done, a terrible liability remains. Although my shoulder did not actually go out, I had sustained an injury which was to cripple me a t polo, to prevent me from ever playing tennis, and to be a grave embarrassment in moments of peril, violence and effort.

Churchill was an excellent polo player because of his extraordinary riding skills which earned him outstanding marks as cadet at Sandhurst and the admiration of his peers for decades.

Because of his riding skills and his boldness, Churchill was always assigned to “mark” the other team’s best player. A critical part of polo strategy is interfering with where your opponent wants to go. Churchill, because of his riding skills and his boldness, was outstanding at taking on the other team’s best player and interfering with his riding to where wanted to go.

Polo is just a game, albeit a very challenging one. But don’t you agree Churchill’s determination to prevail over a handicap and his boldness in hard fought matches very likely had something to do with Churchill’s “riding off” Hitler in 1940? I do.

Have a nice weekend. Here in Carolina it will be beautiful. I hope it’s so, or at least tolerable, where you are.

John