The ep31 Polos Greatest

Hello there. This is Jimmy Powers coming your way with another story from The Toomalt and the Shouting. Hey there, this is Jimmy Powers coming your way transcribed with another story from the Grantland Rice Autobiography, The Toomalt and the Shouting.

Granny called today's story The To Horseman, Hitchcock and Milburn, and I'd like to tell it to you in first person. person. Back in the gloaming I wrote a piece of verse entitled, Alumnus football which closed with these two lines.

For when the one great scorer comes to mark against your name, he writes, not that you won or lost, but how you played the game. I can't imagine two competitors who lived these lines with fiercer abandon than two friends of mine now dead.

They were two polo players, both all time ten goalers. Their names were Tommy Hitchcock Jr. and Devro Milburn. Of the two, Dev Milburn was only a trifle more conservative. I believe Hitchcock would charge headlong into a two-pronged raging rhinoceros if the critter blocked his path.

Milburn would first ask it to move. I met Milburn in Hitchcock for the first time at Herlingum England in 1921 when I was covering polo, golf, and tennis for the New York Tribune. They were playing on the U.S. polo team with Watson Webb and Lewis Stoddard. Hitchcock and Milburn were fresh out of active war service.

Tommy had been shot down at the age of 18 as a flyer with the Lafayette Escadrill but had later escaped. Milburn had been a major on staff duty. At that time, I felt Milburn, roughly my age, was an old friend. I knew Hitchcock less well. He seemed very quiet and extremely reserved. Milburn was more loquacious. Later at the age of 57 he was still playing high-class