"Little Beirut" Vs. "Urban" Vs. "Hardcourt"

let’s just call it bike polo.

ok, i guess i should expound on that, especially cause i have a reputation for speaking my mind that i have to live up to.

i think that there are actually way a lot more than two variations. from what i can tell from watching what most people refer to as “official” or “traditional” polo, there are French rules, US rules, Indian rules, etc, and when they get together for tournaments they have to work hard to conform to one set of rules. the same is true for what people are calling “hardcourt”, “urban”, etc.

but locally, everyone says “bike polo”. when there are out of towners for tournaments etc it’s sometimes worth specifying “small ball”, “hardcourt”, etc, but most of the time, people already know what style of play to expect based on how they found out. if not, it’s a pretty easy thing to find out.

i actually proposed on the wikipedia discussion page earlier today that we fold together the bike polo and urban bike polo pages together–the “cycle polo” page is dominated with “hardcourt” references at this point anyway.

ideally our game will become big enough that when someone says “bike polo”, everyone will just assume it’s hardcourt/small ball/little beirut style. We should do our best to turn the grass/traditional game into the equivalent of the banana board or the betamax cassette.

That’s lame, Mr. Fixed Gear. There’s no benefit to us to detract from other styles of play. As to promoting our style of play (not that it’s so uniform we can call it one) I think that the paperwork for an umbrella organization is being filed by Jared in Seattle under the name: “Urban Bike Polo Association”, but more on that in another topic or when we all meet up at the worlds and NACCCs. Sorry Doug.

Personally, I just call it “bike polo” and it doesn’t matter to me if I’m playing on grass or cement, I go both ways.

Bike Polo is more then sufficient for naming purposes. I find the urban naming pointless and elitist. I would have a hard time associating with an organization that takes the moniker “Urban Bike Polo Association”.

Also can we stop trying to pretend that one version of polo is better then others. It is starting to really get out of control these days.

“extreme urban street hockey on bikes” sounds pretty awsome i think .

clinty, last year in The Pit when we had conflict with the stickball kids, they called it “fagg0t bike golf”
“UBPA” boo
lucky, you can goad menace about metric, but mrfixedgear can’t bust on BIG ball??
and jonny, no one here is pretending.

i call it bike polo

and i like the word “amazing”

what with “little beirut”? after a Lebanese city…. i understand the other 3 ; bike polo, urban , or hardcourt. but i don’t the first.
titles are titles people still know what your talking about. Personally its all bike polo, with 2 types grass(which is more closer to real polo) and hardcourt (which is closer to hockey)

Glad we are not pretending anymore. I think we are also not pretending about coming to DC this weekend.

The way i see it is that there is two kinds of bike polo. Grass and Hardcourt. I like the hardcourt game and will always refer to it as such, you’ll never hear me refer to it as urban anything. If i go to a town of a thousand and play some polo there does it become rural bike polo? “Urban” is a bullshit hipster term.

Who coined the term hardcourt anyway?

Doug your amazing. I play bike polo.

Imagine playing on a grass field and how big that is. Now imagine playing on an enclosed basket ball court.

Those are two different games. Hell they’re almost a different sport. They shouldn’t share the same name.

Also, I like saying “Little Beirut” but rarely call it that in conversation, because I don’t know what it means, and I don’t want to sound stupid.

321polo

we’ve been known to go all out and call it ‘urban hardcourt bike polo’ in vancouver. i figure the urban bit isn’t really all that necessary – i don’t think south jersey counts as urban, but from what i gather they play the same game there. calling it hardcourt makes a hell of a lot of sense though, for obvious reasons.

“Little Beirut” is Portland Oregon’s nickname.

Portland is the best Bike Polo city on the west coast. When you say your playing “Little Beirut”, your saying your playing Portland style.

Bill Dozer played polo in Portland Oregon before moving to NYC. Bill Dozer is the father of NYC Bike Polo, so its no surprise you guys often say “Little Beirut”.

http://www.axlesofevil.org/ The “Axles of Evil” is what the Portland team often goes by. There is a bit of their history in the “Read” link.

SKOL!

Eilif Knutson Corvallis OR.

I dunno why Jared went with “Urban” as opposed to other options. I do know that the obvious association names based on just “bike polo” have been taken by older or existing international grass game groups. USBPA, BPofAA, etc.

I personally agree that it’s unnecessary and misleading. In Chicago where we play both grass and hardcourt, we just say “bike polo” and list a location. The surface is implied. We say “Little Beirut” to refer to a rule set, not a court.

How about we drop the polo all together and start calling it “Bike Hockey”? Unless the country club association is one you guys are counting on for social legitimacy.

I’m cool with bike hockey. I kind of always wanted to call it that anyway. It’s so much more like hockey than polo.

I’m sentimentally attached to fagg0t bike golf though I rarely refer to bike polo by any other name then just polo. I find any hockey reference to be a massive turn off. Seriously. Hockey just isn’t sexy at all (Adam, breathe and count to 5).

this is the way i feel as well. hardcourt games vary across just north america from number one soccer balls to lacrosse sticks to shuffled goals that count. saying it is hardcourt doesn’t actually end up saying anything anyway, as there are many variants of strictly ‘hardcourt’ bike polo.

and this urban thing just sounds trendy and lame.

the truth is, it is almost most accurate to call what most of us play as ‘little beirut’, because by and large those are the rules that both coasts plus ottawa have played with from the beginning.

‘little beirut’ means hardcourt, three-on-three, goals off the ends of mallets, orange hockey balls, foot downs, mallet on mallet, bike on bike, and body on body. there are local variants, but the keys are in those simple guidelines that differentiate it from all other bike polo. change even one of those things and the game is something completely different. my guess is that 90%+ hardcourt polo players are playing with hockey balls and mallets now, so there’s no real need to differentiate ‘little beirut’ from the rest of hardcourt polo.

maybe number one soccer ball polo should should call itself call itself number one soccer ball polo, but i think “bike polo” is sufficient for what is played in new york, seattle, portland, corvallis, chicago, ottawa, dc, east van, san francisco, boston, phillly, london, berlin, victoria, melbourne, manchester, hannover, calgary, apparently milwaukee now, bozeman, madison, corvallis, sacto, columbus, new haven, tallahassee, oxford, dublin, st louis, baltimore, eugene, lafayette, cleveland, jersey, richmond, zurich, newport, ann arbour, and all the other places we haven’t heard about yet.

and i’m not even sure what cyclo-polo *is*. and don’t get me started about bike hockey, that’s just about the stupidest thing i’ve ever heard. i’d rather be called fagg0t bike-golf.

but mostly i agree with kev and that we just call it bike polo.

see y’all in toronto, a home-court for us canucks, no matter how far removed from the centre of the universe…

bullsh*t

Of course I have something to say about this.
For the most part we all play “little beirut”. Ottawa’s game is straight out of Portland. Thank you Axles of Evil. Up until the North Side last year we circled out. The tap out was implemented to create a simular style to the other cities we were playing with. For the most part the game is the same. Call it whatever. It will always be bike polo.