Tommy Lee Jones Is a Rated Competitive Polo Player

Ask most people to picture Tommy Lee Jones and they will see a federal marshal, a stone-faced agent in black, or a Texas sheriff who has seen too much. What almost nobody pictures is a man in polo whites, leaning off a galloping horse to take a swing at a small white ball. That second image is just as real as the first.

An Official Two-Goal Rating

Polo players are ranked on a handicap scale from -2 up to 10, and only a small handful of professionals in the world ever reach the top of it.

Tommy Lee Jones carries an official USPA 2-goal handicap, a rating issued by the United States Polo Association after years of competitive play.

It is a modest number next to the sport's elite, but it is a real, sanctioned rating, not an honorary title, and most people who pick up a mallet never earn one at all.

Breeding Ponies at San Saba

Jones plays the sport on his own terms and largely on his own horses.

He owns a 3,000-acre ranch in San Saba County, Texas, where part of the operation is dedicated to breeding and raising polo ponies from the ground up.

Rather than leasing seasoned horses the way many wealthy amateurs do, he raises and trains many of his own mounts on the property.

Two Teams, Fifty Horses

The ranch supports far more than a weekend hobby.

Jones personally funds two full polo teams, employing six professional players and maintaining a string of roughly fifty horses between them.

His San Saba team built a real competitive record through the 1990s, winning the USPA Western Challenge Cup in 1993 and reaching the Robert Skene Trophy consolation final in 2000.

Palm Beach at Sixty

Jones did not step back from top-level competition as he aged.

In 2007, at age 60, he took the field for his San Saba team in the Stanford U.S. Open at the International Polo Club Palm Beach, one of the sport's biggest American tournaments, lining up against players a third his age.

Cinema built its reputation on Tommy Lee Jones playing the toughest, most humorless men in the room.

Off camera, that same discipline goes into raising horses and staying rated in one of the hardest sports to take up as an adult.