FOR HORSE PEOPLE • ABOUT HORSE PEOPLE
SIDELINES SEPTEMBER 2013 73
Samantha and her poodle Foto (joined here by polo pony
Phantom) traveled the country covering stories for Sidelines.
winter, I had the grand aspiration to start a polo newspaper. I
knew nothing about publishing, writing, business or polo, but I had
a credit card and the will to succeed. But when I walked into The
Tackeria, I discovered “Volume One, Issue One” of a little polo
newspaper called
The Polo Posts
.
I asked Tony Coppola, who still owns The Tackeria, who
published the paper and he pointed to barn one and said to speak
with C. Maybe Runberg. I walked up to her, grabbed the pony
she was bathing and said, “Hey, let me hold that pony for you. I’m
Sam and you are doing what I wanted to do. Can I help you do
your newspaper? I will work for free just to learn.” It was a done
deal that day. After three years of working for Maybe, we finally
partnered and, after some trials, tribulations and good and bad
experiences, Maybe retired. In 1988, I started a new newspaper
called
Sidelines
– 25 years ago in September.
From Newspaper To Magazine
Sidelines
was my passport to this exciting new world of polo but
it wasn’t long before I recognized a much bigger industry. Gene
Misch was holding horse shows on the other side of the polo
stadium and soon half of the newspaper was dedicated to polo
and the other half to hunter/jumper news. Dressage coverage was
to follow about seven years later and, eventually, the Rolex Three-
Day Event turned us on to eventing.
We published several renditions of
Sidelines
over the years until
we settled on today’s slick monthly magazine. The first edition of
hunter/jumper coverage was added as a separate section and it
took some years before all the polo sections weren’t thrown away
on the show grounds and the hunter/jumper sections weren’t
thrown away in the polo stadium.
Finally, we tried a tabloid with the first half covering polo and
the other half covering hunter/jumper and running upside down.
When we printed our first edition of an upside down/right side up
tabloid, I received panicked calls from readers exclaiming, “Oh my
gosh, the printer has screwed up and printed you upside down.”
Well, the plan worked! We had their attention!!
Years later, it was a leap of faith to jump from a biweekly
newsprint publication where our lead time was only three days
to a monthly magazine where our lead time was a whole three
months.
The Adventure Begins
The first year I moved from
The Polo Posts
to start
Sidelines
I
hit the road in my new Honda CRX and traveled 15,000 miles to
visit 30 polo clubs from April till September. I drove from Florida
to Montreal. I hit New Jersey and Detroit along the way to sell
my first big ad contracts so I would have the funds to begin in
September. Thankfully, Bill Ylvisaker introduced me to two of the
Palm Beach Polo and Country Club sponsors that winter, Leica
Camera and Cadillac, and they both invited me their offices while
I was in town. Armed with two contracts, a credit card, a poorly
written story and some good candid phototography of my travels
that summer, I started
Sidelines
!
I also have to thank my four-legged animal family for their
companionship throughout my 15 years of traveling the country.
Foto, my five-pound party mix poodle, started
Sidelines
with me
and accompanied me through 10 years of traveling the country
playing polo and gathering
Sidelines
news. Foto was welcomed
into hundreds of homes and earned her own column, Foto’s
Corner. She also earned her place on the masthead as public
relations director the day Mrs. C.V. Whitney stood up in the
stadium at the U.S. Open in Lexington, Kentucky, holding little
Foto in the air, exclaiming, “Who belongs to this adorable little
dog?”
Cassiopeia was a white spotted half pygmy goat I adopted
from a rescue farm on a polo trip to Huntsville, Alabama. Though
she was meant to keep my horse Kody calm in the trailer, she
ended up riding in the car and accompanying me across the
country attending everything from horse shows to polo games to
art openings. Cassiopeia was even invited to stay in the beautiful
antique clad home of Deborah and Glen Vermoch in Salt Lake
City, Utah, where she slept on a bed with a white linen duvet.
Kody, my beautiful homebred bay mare, carried me around the
Continued on page 74
Samantha stepped in at the Delegates Cup at Gulfstream Polo
Club at the last minute to fill in for an injured player. Samantha,
wearing jeans, competed on a borrowed pony with a borrowed
helmet.
