A Smashing Good Time : Polo: Benefit games held this weekend show that the sport is drawing a more multicultural field.

Madison Richardson scrutinizes his hand, which just got smacked on the polo field. An ear, nose and throat surgeon, he makes a living with his hands. But a few seconds later, he’s back at it, swinging his long, thin polo mallet, galloping around the indoor arena of the Equestrian Center in Burbank in one of the matches held this weekend as part of a charity event for the Boy Scouts.

As the game ends, Richardson, an amateur player for 20 years, trots off the field, leans over and bestows a kiss on the mane of his thoroughbred, Sundowner.

“I’ve raced cars, flown planes, everything,” says the 42-year-old Los Angeles resident, who has quickly donned a navy jacket, shirt and tie over his scruffy white polo pants and brown boots. Polo, he says, is different. “It has an element of danger and it requires a commitment.”

And then there is that strangely perfect relationship that the polo player develops with the horse--a kind of closeness you can’t have with a sports car, a kind of trust that convinces a horse to gallop all the way to the wall of a polo arena without skittishly balking.

“We think of our horses as more than vehicles,” Richardson says.

Richardson was part of a cadre of players, local and international, amateur and professional, who spent Friday and Saturday watching and playing in the third annual Legend’s Cup game at the Equestrian Center. The highlight came Saturday night in a match featuring the world’s best-ranked indoor players. Rankings go from minus 2 (for a beginner) to 10 for stratospheric, off-the-charts players. Most of the Legend’s Cup players carry a 9 rating.

The game, purportedly born 2,500 years ago in Persia, has long been known as a rich man’s sport--played by the likes of the Sultan of Brunei and Prince Charles. In the Hollywood of the 1930s and ‘40s, Spencer Tracey, Clark Gable and Darryl Zanuck played.

Today, devoted players are trying hard to change its image from one of a rich, white man’s sport.

“I think it’s important to have young people see it’s a multicultural sport,” says Richardson, who is black and has bought horses for several inner-city youngsters who learned to play polo.

“I don’t care how much money you have,” says Bruce Gaither, who runs the California Polo Club in View Park Terrace and plays professionally. “I have people come into my school who make $40,000. You think that’s rich?”

Gaither and others say people from a variety of incomes are taking up the sport. But still, the sport can be costly. In polo at its cheapest, one or two horses can cost $2,500 each and be boarded for $250 a month.

“There are only two things that can get you out of polo,” says polo promoter Randy Russell, who organized the Legend’s Cup. “Poverty or death.”

At the high end of the sport, amateurs maintain four or five horses to dozens of them, depending on how wealthy they are. Professional players often have 20 to 30 horses and bring around half a dozen different mounts to a match.

The annual Legend’s Cup is like an all-star game for indoor polo. Russell figured that the half-dozen players would bring about 45 horses between them for Saturday night’s main event.

In addition to money and devotion, polo’s grueling action requires horses with strong hearts, fearless attitudes, a tolerance for a mallet being swung back and forth over their heads, and a talent for turning and pivoting.

Unlike other sports, polo games often mix amateur and professional players. In fact, some professionals are paid to play on teams formed by wealthy amateurs.

The Legend’s Cup features some of the world’s best indoor players. The players are being paid $3,300 by the organizers to participate for two nights. They truck in their own horses at their own expense (although the Equestrian Center boards and cares for them for the two days). “There’s no baseball game where everyone chips in to go play,” says Tom Goodspeed.

Goodspeed, who carries a 9 rating, manages the Rancho Santa Fe Polo Club and runs a polo school with his wife, singer Juice Newton, who also plays the sport. They met when Goodspeed was working at the Equestrian Center and Newton had horses stabled there.

“I have probably spent more than I’ve ever been paid,” says Goodspeed, who keeps about 30 horses between his polo and riding school and for his own polo playing. He brought six shiny chestnut thoroughbreds for the game. Goodspeed started riding at 11. He started polo at 12. Since then he has played all around the world and on every island in Hawaii.

“I’m kind of the Nolan Ryan of polo,” Goodspeed, 42, says, speculating that his professional playing career may be nearing its end.

But not if Cathy Levin, a New York lawyer and polo player, can help it. She stands smiling quietly near Goodspeed’s horses.

“I’m Tom’s agent,” she says. And she has big plans for a low-key man in a sport whose champions generally do not get chosen to sell soft drinks and running shoes. “We’re talking to two major car companies, a menswear company and a credit card company.”

Most professional players do other things besides play polo for a living--they teach, breed polo ponies and run clubs.

Players have a love of horses, speed, agility and risk. “This is a contact sport,” says Glenn Holden, who was U.S. ambassador to Jamaica during the George Bush Administration.

Sometimes whole families become known on the polo circuit--such as 57-year-old Sue Sally Hale and two of her daughters, Stormie, who coaches USC’s polo teams, and Sunny, the highest-ranked woman polo player in the world.

On Saturday, Hale, who has a 3 rating, trotted out of the arena between chukkers in an afternoon game.

People love to tell the story of how she used to dress as a boy to play with men’s teams at Will Rogers State Park in the 1950s. “Yes, yes, yes,” she says, as she slips off one horse and onto another. “And I played three days before my children were born, and five days after.”

Hale, something of the grande dame of women polo players, runs two polo horse farms and schools, one in Indio and the other in Moorpark. “This kind of arena polo you can play for the price of golf,” she insists before heading back to her game.

“That’s one of Mom’s pet peeves,” says Stormie Hale. “She’s played with no money all her life.”