First auto-polo match

The first documented game of "automobile polo" was played sometime in July or August 1902, reportedly at the Ardsley Polo Club in Tarrytown, New York, USA. The game had been conceived by wealthy socialite and amateur athlete Joshua Crane Jr (USA), who demonstrated the basic rudiments of handling both a car and polo mallet at the Dedham Polo Club in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, in early July 1902.

The game followed the same basic rules as traditional polo played on horseback. Teams of players equipped with mallets tried to hit a ball through the opposing team's goal over a grass playing field about six times the size of a football (soccer) pitch.

Interest in this original version of auto polo seems to have petered out quickly. This may have been due to the prohibitive cost of early automobiles, though the polo clubs of early-20th-century New England were already very much the domain of the Gilded Age ultra-rich. More likely is that the game – which seems to have required one person to both drive and wield the mallet – was simply too difficult and dangerous to play. One contemporary report predicted that its popularity would wane once the "hospitals become congested with concussed millionaires".

The sport was revived, possibly entirely independently, in the early 1910s by car salesman and motor-racing promoter Ralph Hankinson in Kansas City, Missouri. The introduction of the Ford Model T in 1908 had significantly lowered the barriers to entry to all motor-sport, and these newer cars were capable of faster speeds and quicker turns than the upholstered, carriage-like vehicles of 1902.

Hankinson's key innovation was to have each vehicle crewed by a driver and a "malletman", splitting the tasks of operating the vehicle and striking the ball. Hankinson also specified that the cars be stripped down to just their sub-frame, with only a driver's seat, some footplates for the malletman and a simple roll-bar (as a concession to safety measures).

The game appears to have been played primarily in the form of exhibition matches, usually put on as entertainment at major events such as state fairs. There were a few games billed as serious competitive fixtures (including the first international match, which pitted teams of American and British players against each other in 1915), but it remained primarily a novelty. The popularity of auto polo seems to have begun to wane during the Great Depression, along with other similarly destructive entertainments (such as deliberate train-wrecking).