Marco Polo and Water Polo

ACCESS TO A POOL, lake, pond, creek, river, stream, ocean, or garden hose is critical on a hot summer day. Contests are always fun: swimming stroke races (on your mark, get set, go!), diving, and seeing who can make up the funniest jumps. Cannonballs are great fun, as you run off the diving board, hurl into the air, grab onto your legs, and make a huge splash. Underwater tricks like handstands and multiple back flips are also a nice way to cool off, as are attempts to mimic the intricacies of synchronized swimming. On a rainy day, you can watch old movies by water-ballet star Esther Williams for inspiration.

With water games, the main challenge is usually not the game itself, at least once you’re on your way to mastering swimming—it’s your nose, and how to keep water from rushing into it. You have three choices:

1. Breathe out sharply through your nose as you jump or duck underwater. The air coming out of your nose will keep water out.
2. Use one hand to hold your nose.
3. Find yourself an old-fashioned nose plug, the kind attached to the front of a rubber necklace. Clip your nose shut.

Thus prepared, below are a couple of aquatic games for those who can get to a pool or other slow-moving body of water.

MARCO POLO

The famed explorer Marco Polo was seventeen when he left Venice, Italy, to join his dad and uncle on a horseback journey to China. He did not return home for twenty-four years. While traveling, he befriended the Emperor Kublai Khan and was one of the first Western travelers of the Silk Road. He was fascinated by China’s use of paper money and its intricate postal delivery system, innovations that far outstripped Europe’s development at the time.

How Marco Polo’s name got attached the internationally known pool game, no one knows, but here are the rules.

You need at least three kids, and everyone starts in the water. One person is It, and her goal is to tag the other kids. She closes her eyes, thus blinded (or you can use your handy bandana for a blindfold). Then she counts to five, or whatever number you all agree on. To try to find the other kids without seeing them, It must listen and sense where they are. Whenever she wants, she yells “Marco.” Everyone in the game must immediately respond “Polo.” The girl who is It uses the sounds of the other kids’ movements and voices to find and tag someone. Whomever she tags becomes the new It.

VARIATIONS

Now, there are some alterations you can employ to make Marco Polo even more amusing and challenging. If you choose to, you can allow “fish out of water.” This means the non-It kids can get out of the pool. However, at any time, It can yell “fish out of water” and if someone is out of the pool, that person automatically becomes the new It. If no one is out of the water, the other players often yell “no.” (Hint: This can help It reorient and find them, too.)

You can also allow “mermaid on the rocks,” which is similar to “fish out of water.” If someone is a mermaid on the rocks, she is sitting on the ledge of the pool or the lakeshore with only her feet in the water. Again, if It yells “mermaid on the rocks,” any mermaid becomes the new It. For either of these out-of-the-water variations, if It calls for fish or mermaids and there are none, she must do the start-of-game countdown again.

Another fun addition is “alligator eyes,” which allows It to call out “alligator eyes” (or “submarine,” if you prefer) and then swim underwater with eyes open for one breath. Usually It is allowed to use this only once. We’ve heard of some places where It is allowed to go underwater and look around any time, but cannot move until she is above water with eyes closed or blindfold on again. We haven’t played this one, but you may want to try it.

Other Marco Polo variations are popular in different places throughout the globe. In Argentina, kids play a version where It has to say the name of whoever she tags. If she is right, the tagged person becomes It, but if she is wrong, she remains It and starts her countdown again. In California, they play “Sharks and Minnows” (called “Silent Witness” other places), which means there is no call and respond, just the sounds of kids moving in the water.

WATER POLO

While Marco Polo can thank the real Marco Polo for its name. water polo’s comes from the game’s rubber ball, which came from India, where the word for ball is pulu, hence polo.

Water polo was invented in England in the 1870s, though a similar kind of game may have been played in rivers in Africa, and in flooded rice paddies in China, many centuries before. While water polo claimed to resemble rugby, in practice it was more akin to underwater wrestling, with players hitting and ducking each other underwater with great regularity. Players would protect the ball by sticking it in their swimsuit and swimming underwater toward the goal. A much-loved but extremely dangerous water polo feat had one player jumping off the backs of teammates, and flying through the air, ball in hand, toward the opposing goal.

Good thing the more civilized “Scottish” rules replaced the former free-for-all. The new rules instituted fouls for pushing and hitting, declared that the ball had to stay above water (no more bathing-suit tricks!), and stated that only a player holding the ball can be tackled (thus lowering the number of players who ended the game in the emergency room).

HOW TO PLAY

A water polo team has six field swimmers and a goalie. Teammates pass the ball and keep it from the other side, until one of them can lob it into the goal and score. To move forward in water polo you swim with your head out of water, since you’ll need to see where the ball is. To backstroke, you sit in the water, use your arms to make small short strokes, and use the eggbeater kick to stay up and moving: as you sit in the water, bend your knees, and circle each leg toward the other, like an eggbeater.

Rules:

♦ You can touch the ball with your hands—though with only one hand at a time, which means you’ll catch the ball and pass it quickly.

♦ Don’t touch the bottom of the pool. This sport is about constant motion, no rest, and never touching bottom.

♦ No pushing, pulling, hitting, or holding on to the other players—that’s a foul. Fouls also are called if you hold the ball under water, touch it with two hands, or hold onto it longer than 35 seconds; or if you touch bottom, push off the side of the pool, or use bad language.

While Marco Polo will never be an Olympic sport, water polo is. Male Olympians have played water polo since 1900. Ever since the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, women’s water polo has been on the roster, too, and there’s a terrific story behind its entry. After a decade or two of polite behind-the-scenes negotiation with the International Olympic Committee, the Australian women’s national water polo team pushed the issue. The upcoming Olympics were on their turf, after all, and they wanted to compete. In 1998, members of the Olympic leadership were set to arrive at the Sydney airport, in town for a planning visit. Led by their goalkeeper Liz Weekes—she’s called the team’s “glamour girl” because she’s also a model—the Aussie women water polo players put on their swimsuits and caps and strode through the Sydney airport to meet them, and, very much in the public eye, they asked again to be included, and met with success.

Better yet, after fighting so hard to be included, the Australian women’s team won the gold medal, with player Yvette Higgins scoring the winning goal during the last second of the championship game, to the applause of fans who filled the stadium.