Ruki Baillieu is in Auckland to play for the Veuve Clicquot team in the BMW New Zealand Polo Open at Clevedon tomorrow. Photo / Sarah Ivey
Ruki gets the groupies! Tony said. So of course I thought: How fabulous! We've only been here five minutes and already we were on to the groupies. Getting on to the groupies is what is required, surely, when one is about to interview an "international polo legend" . The polo legend is not Tony - although everyone in Polo Land knows who he is - who raised the groupies by way of explaining why he thinks he might get another dog, when he already has three: An enormous one, a medium-sized one, and a tiny one. The enormous one is Ted and he is a German Shepherd and he follows Tony about wherever he goes, unlike "Harry, or Jack; they make their own arrangements." He'd like another Ted. He needs something to hang around and adore him, I said. "He's attention-deprived," said Ruki. Tony said:"When you get to my stage of life ... " He has to have dog groupies. "Sad life, isn't it?" said Tony, meaning it not at all.
We were at Tony's place to meet Ruki, who is Jack "Ruki" Baillieu, the Australian polo player, who is almost always known as Ruki (a childhood nickname) and who is "the international polo legend". He is supposed to have glamour and, possibly, groupies. One lives in hope. Tony is Tony Van Den Brink, who is in chickens and property and lives here at Karaka on his 160ha, which are worth about $17 million. His back lawn is a proper-sized polo field. He is the president of the Auckland Polo Club and as a result is the chap behind the BMW New Zealand Polo Open at Clevedon tomorrow - in which Ruki is playing for the Veuve Clicquot team.
I'm rather keen on swank and bubbles so I was looking forward to a little outing to Polo Land, which as everybody knows is all swank and bubbles.
So much for that. I saw a three-quarters-empty bottle plonked on a wall in the stable block but that was it. The international polo legend said, as we were leaving, "Have you ever done a polo interview before?" I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and choose to believe that he was genuinely interested, rather than that he genuinely thought I was a complete idiot.
I have, as it happens. I once interviewed Monsieur Hermes at the polo, and sucked up like mad, in print, in the hope that I'd get a handbag, but, nope, not even a measly scarf. "So you didn't hose him?" said the polo player. I will next time. "And this is your next time, is it?" he said. Well, he didn't even have a handbag, did he? We didn't even get a glass of champagne. "Would you like a cup of tea?" he said, as we were about to drive off.
He is from the really quite famous but quite private Australian family, the Baillieus, who are not too impoverished either. Like all very rich people, he was about as expansive on the family dosh as he was with the champagne. The family farm is in the foothills of the Grampians, in Victoria, and so his family are farmers but also have other "interests", in property and stock broking. I'd read that his parents helped him out a bit with his first ponies, but that he paid them back, in full. But they're rich! "Ha. Um. That was the deal that I did with my dad and he helped me out. He's a great bloke." $387 million is what the family are worth, according to one of those rich lists. That's the entire clan, presumably, but still.
"You know what those things are like," he said, meaning those rich list things.
He said, about growing up rich, and in answer to a question about what effect he thinks it might have had on the person he's become, that: "I don't think having money should change anything, you know. That's the unfortunate thing about a lot of these people who have money, they have no extra rights to anyone else, do they? The only thing is opportunity, I think. But it doesn't give you a right to be rude, or snobby." He didn't seem to be too snobby.
"I can work on it a bit!"
What he is like is just as you'd imagine an Aussie joker from a farm would be. He said Tony's place "wasn't too bad". He leapt a gate. He doesn't have posh teeth. He was wearing a T-shirt with a dachshund on the front of it when we arrived, but he took that off and put the sponsor's polo shirt on. I was wanting to work up the glamour and, hint, hint. Does he drink champagne? "I do. I've been drinking champagne this morning, so you've got to mention Veuve Clicquot." He's good at PR; it's part of his job. But really! The glamour was sadly lacking. He is supposed to be blond and dashing and he is blondish but his hair looked as though he'd washed it by dipping it in a horse trough. His white polo pants were covered in grass stains; his sponsor's shirt had what looked like cobwebs on it. He could have scrubbed up a bit. "I've been rolling around on grass!" Some ad for fancy bubbles he is. "I've been up since 5.30 this morning, working hard!" He'd been up since 5.30am, possibly, racing around (and falling off; he cut his hand up but hadn't bothered to put a sticking plaster on it) on little motorbikes with a weatherman from the telly. He'd been drinking champagne, possibly.
He does what he's told, to a point. "This is all Tony's doing. I didn't read the fine print when he asked me to come over. I'm roughing it."
He's staying in the guest wing of Tony's house, so that was one of his jokes. I wonder if he's sarcastic to his patrons. Probably. It sounds a funny sort of relationship, that of patron and player, but it is probably a fairly robust relationship. Patrons are the people who pick up the not inconsiderable bills. His patrons tend to be friends. He also has some friends much nobbier than him, a couple of Princes, for example. Has he got William and Harry's cellphone numbers? "They're not on speed dial." Can I have the numbers? "Yeah. Which one would you like? Harry's, I'm sure." I'm sure too. I said I didn't want the balding one's number but he thought I said "boring". "He's not boring! But Harry has got a bit more of a twinkle, hasn't he?"
His patron in Auckland is Tony's son, Steve, but he was hesitant about telling me that because "a lot of people do it for the fun of the sport and you've got to be careful. Well, sometimes people don't want to be known. You get a very large spectrum. You get those who would love to be named in every second sentence of a media article and some who just don't want any [mention.]"
He played "with" (which is polo-speak for "for") James and Kerry Packer, who "was an interesting guy. He's the guy who would, you know, come up to you and push you around verbally. So if you were at all soft or sensitive, I think he could rub you up the wrong way." Is he at all soft or sensitive? "I can be. Pretty seldomly."
No, he's supposed to have "mongrel grit", whatever that is. He doesn't mind that, whatever it is. He'd rather be described as a mongrel than posh. He might have been a bit posh, given his background, but he said: "Do I come across as posh?"
He went to a posh school, Geelong Grammar - whose alumni include his mates' dad, Prince Charles, Kerry Packer, Rupert Murdoch, and a King of Malaysia - but the poshness obviously failed to rub off on him. "I made a speech at about 19 and someone said to my parents: 'Jeez, that was money well spent, wasn't it?"' That's a handy story for denying any front, and he really doesn't have any, but he is no yokel. He is clever and articulate and has an arid Australian wit. When the photographer said we needed a horse for the picture, but just its head was required, he said: "I'll just go and shoot one." He is often described as "a charming devil on horseback", which I just about managed to get out without making sicking up noises. He thinks that's as silly as I do. "Perhaps you could be more creative," he said.
Still, how much of a devil is he? There are those groupies, for a start. He says there are people who follow players and go to polo, in England, every week. "It has fans. I don't know if you want to call them groupies. There's a thing in polo called '7 Up'." What does that mean? He said he was sure I'd figure it out, later. I didn't notice until later that he'd neatly side-stepped the question.
Anyway, he's got a girlfriend and they've been together for three years, which is his longest relationship. "Er, yes." He's 36 and has led a gypsyish if ritzy-ish life for 15 years, travelling the world, playing polo, chasing his ambition of becoming a 10-goal player.
He's is a 7-goal player - the top ranking is that 10, and there are only six of those in the world. (I managed to figure out the 7 Up reference.)
He doesn't have a house and the longest he is anywhere is three months, so he leads a restless sort of life and three years ago he decided to quit. He went home to his parents' farm and didn't get on a horse for a year, but he yearned to.
He thought he wanted a more rounded life, doing "normal things". But he found life on the farm isolated - it is 25 minutes from the nearest town which has a pub and a chemist and a dairy.
"It's very sort of ... lonely." So he went back to playing polo, although he has given up on what was an all-consuming passion: Chasing that 10-goal ranking.
"You realise there are other things in life." Was he trying to convince himself, or me? I wondered. What things? "You know, going skiing, playing football." Those are more sports things. "Cultural things. Art. Going to museums." Does he do cultural things? "Not very often!"
He'd like to get married, one day, so what he really wants to do is have a more settled life and you can see that as sociable and restless as he is, and as flash as his suitcase undoubtedly is, that he might hanker for not having to live out of it.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he does do cultural things, if not every week. He does a spectacularly lousy job of being a posh playboy (at least these days, who knows about in the past?) polo jock. Why, I said, a little desperately, is polo sexy? "I think it's very sexy!" Yes, but why is it? "Guys running around, hitting a ball; physical sport on an animal." And why is that sexy? "Do you want to replace the white pants with a man-kini? Would that do it for you?"
I have no idea whether he's a charming devil on a horse. (I wanted to get that in one more time to pay him back for the lack of fizz.) I do know he's a cheeky bugger off a horse, which is much more fun than boring old charm.
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