 Hello there! This is Jimmy Powers coming your way with another story from The Tumult and the Shouting. Hi there! This is Jimmy Powers coming your way transcribed with another story from the Grantland Rice autobiography The Tumult and the Shouting. Granny called today's story The Two Horsemen, Hitchcock and Milburn, and I'd like to tell it to you in first 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 Devereaux Milburn. Of the two, Devere 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 and Hitchcock for the first time at Hurlingham, 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 Eskidrill, 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 polo although he had any number of stitches holding him together as well as several mended bone fractures. Like an old bull moose, he'd been through the wars. We played a lot of golf together and when he was my partner I used to caution him not to swing too hard or he'd start falling apart. I always feared a bone or a ligament would drop out, but you couldn't stop him. There was one thing in particular about Dev Milburn I always agreed with. It was his philosophy of competitive sport. The philosophy of many coaches is that winning is all that counts. The will to win, all that matters. That is a lot of nonsense, Milburn used to say. It is the battle, the contest that counts, not the score. If two meet, one must win and one must lose, but they can both have a great afternoon. Milburn and Hitchcock were the forerunners of modern polo. In the older days, when Harry Payne Whitney was the U.S. captain, polo was largely a matter of finesse. The ball was hit for someone else to handle. It was worked forward towards the opposing goal in short takes. Harry Payne Whitney was a master at this art. He would help stick handle the ball five or sixty yards down the field. But when Tommy Hitchcock came along, his idea was, to heck with all this, we'll get the fifty yards with one wallop. I don't remember many conversations with Hitchcock. Years later we'd often sit together and say little, but we were always comfortable in each other's company. In some ways, he reminded me of a piece of rock. There was one conversation, however, I won't forget. Soon after World War II had broken out, I saw in the newspapers that Tommy Hitchcock, the famous polo player, was soon leaving to enlist as a flier. He had been shot down at the age of eighteen while in the Lafayette Eskidrill during the previous war and had later escaped. He was now forty-three years old. I went to see him in downtown New York. There was no particular reason for my doing so except my admiration and affection for a man I thought was going to die. Well, Hitchcock said, I'm glad to see you, Granny, but what's the story? I understand you're going back on the flying corps, I said. What's wrong with that? He said. Nothing, I exclaimed, except you've done your part and you're not a youngster anymore. I don't want to see you commit suicide. Hitchcock smiled. I'm only forty-three, he said. That is still young. I feel sure I'm as young as a man of twenty-four. I'm in fine condition. My reflexes are perfect. I can play polo as well as I could ten or twelve years ago or twenty years ago. Don't you think you've done enough for your country? I asked. He looked at me and said, can you ever do enough for your country? Yes, I said, when you've passed the peak of usefulness. I haven't even reached that peak, he said rather violently. I'm just coming to my peak. He looked at, young looking and strong, a forty-three that looked twenty-five. We shook hands, I said, so long. As I turned to leave, he said, what difference does it make now or later on? I'm not worrying, don't you? He smiled as I left and as I walked away, I thought of a piece of verse of mine that fitted Hitchcock like a glove. Whether it's heaven or whether it's hell or whether it's merely sleep or whether it's something in between where ghosts of the half-gods creep. Since it comes but once and it comes to all on the one fixed certain date, why drink of the dregs till the cup arrives on the gray date set by fate? I realized Tommy Hitchcock truly didn't care. In April forty-three, I read that a P-51 Mustang he had been testing suddenly hurtled high from the heavens to the earth below. A very game and gallant gentleman had left our circle, one of the many others, but not any other Tommy Hitchcock or Devereaux Milburn polo players. They had all the gameness and courage of Dempsey and Tunny, Cobb and Hagen, Tilden, Nagursky and Thorpe. They fought for the love of fighting, for the clash of battle, for the give and take of the competition. Not for the puny bobble that goes to the victor, but for the thrill of the actual game. Death to them was just an incident. With us today is the son of one of polo's all-time ten-goalers, Devereaux Milburn. Dev Milburn Jr., in his book The Tumul and the Shouting, Granny Rice credits your late father with many things. Among these was Devereaux Milburn's philosophy of competitive sport. His conviction on that it is the battle, the contest that counts, not the score. And apparently the rougher the going, the better your dad liked it. Well, Jimmy, my father's been dead since 1942. At that time I was 25 years old and I suppose I was interested in sports from the earliest possible time that one can be interested in sports. And I would say that Granny summed it up pretty well. That competition was the lifeblood of my father and there was nothing that he enjoyed more. There was no activity that we could ever indulge in as kids which wasn't immediately turned into some kind of a competition. And I noted in the book, and of course I've been familiar with it all my life, those lines of Granny Rice. And I know that they were my father's favorite lines of any poem that has ever been written. And just to quote them, 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. It didn't matter what the game was or what the business at hand was, the competition was what my father liked more than anything and on which he thrived. It could be international polo, but it could just as easily be a morning polo game or a round of golf just with me. I never played him for any money, even a dollar and a half, but we never had to. And we played up until the time of his death for the family championship. And I always considered that I was considerably better golfer than he was, but I couldn't beat him even at the end of his life and he was 30 or 40 years older than I. I recall one particular line in Granny's chapter, the two horsemen, Tommy Hitchcock and Dev Melbourne, better than any other. Here it is. As two of polo's all-time 10 goalers, Dev Melbourne was a trifle more conservative than his sidekick, Tommy Hitchcock. Tommy would charge headlong into a two-pronged raging rhinoceros if the critter blocked his path. Melbourne would first ask it to move. Well, Jimmy, I noticed that when I read Granny's article on my father and Tommy Hitchcock and it was sort of amused me at the time. I think he was referring more to my father's all-around personality and method of going about things. I don't think he was referring to the way he played polo. I think there are many men around today who played in those days when he was at his best, and I think if you asked them, you'd find that he very rarely asked them to move first. He was very much inclined to move them just the same way Tommy was. Dev, did you ever mush around any of those show-packed Long Island courses in the dead of winter with your father and Granny Rice? Well, Jimmy, it seems to me as though I spent my entire youth playing golf, either in the rain or in the snow, or when nobody else was playing golf. When the rain would be coming down, so the course would be just snow white with water, then my father would say, well, it's just been 11 drops. Let's go out and play some golf. And I know that Granny used to come down and play with him, and of course we kids always look forward to that because they'd come home, bring Granny home for lunch, or we'd play with them. And of course it would just be one story right after the other long into the afternoon, and if it wasn't too cold, we'd go out and play again. Dev Milburn, what are your hobbies sports-wise? Well, I'm still playing polo, and I play here mostly on weekends. I do some riding during the week, but I don't play much during the week, but play every Sunday, and other than that, I play an awful lot of golf still. Dev Milburn Jr., our thanks to you for an interesting interview. And that brings to a close today's story from the tumult and the shouting. Now this is Jimmy Powers transcribed saying, so long until next time.