Silicon Valley has long accepted its role as inventor of technology’s Next Big Thing, but with that came a corresponding acceptance of certain shortcomings in the athletic arena. Until six years ago, when the pudgy and the pale climbed aboard tech’s nerdiest toy — the Segway personal transportation device — and attempted to create a little geek chic with Segway polo.
This silently thundering herd is led by Steve Wozniak, the valley’s Perpetual Big Thing, who has become the sport’s face — and bod — tilting at windmill shots for one of the most successful teams in the newly formed International Segway Polo Association. Not for nothing does this group’s initials start with ISP.
Woz and his Silicon Valley Aftershocks teammates were practicing last week in Sunnyvale for the sport’s championship tournament — the Woz Challenge Cup — which begins June 10 in Barbados. But even as they hurtled up and down the field at a top Segway speed of 12½ miles per hour, they were beating a retreat from the recent rise of Xtreme sports. With a median age just under 50, the ‘Shocks are unlikely contenders at the next X Games — though they could blaze a trail to the first Rascal Scooter Games.
Bellied up to the bar that controls his speeding Segway, Wozniak leaned forward and swung his polo mallet, driving a foam rubber ball toward goal posts at the far end of the field. He pitches his body at a rakish tilt over the prow of his rechargeable chariot, in defiance of Newton’s law of gravity, which states that an Apple co-founder leaning that far forward will eventually hit the ground. But he never does.
Standing guard in the center of the goal, Jeff Backes — whose Segway bears a blue handicapped parking placard — taunted Wozniak as he dribbled the ball from one end of the field to the other. “Come on, Woz!” Backes cried. “Bring it.”
Giving the ball a mighty whack, Wozniak watched as his shot dribbled to within a few feet of the goal — and then stopped. Complaining that his wrist strap slipped, he spun his Segway and went hurtling off to the other end, where he attempted to disrupt a shot by his wife, Janet Wozniak, by throwing his mallet at the ball. He did this despite a decree in the Segway polo rule book written specifically to stop him from doing this.
“As you can see,” says Woz’s Silicon Valley Aftershocks teammate, George Clark, “he will even cheat on his wife.”
“Only in Segway polo,” Woz clarifies.
A herd of nerds
“We’re all tech people, so the nerd quotient is pretty high,” says Stuart Moore, who helped devise the sport’s rules along with Aftershocks teammate Alex Ko. “We don’t kid ourselves that it’s this super-athletic endeavor. We just go out there and have a great time.”
There are occasional interlopers who don’t come from the tech sector. Victor Miller, 70, who popularized the slasher film as writer of the first “Friday the 13th” movie, suffered a broken pinkie playing Segway polo. And Wozniak, who is known for his slashing style of play, experienced a crippling injury for a computer geek, damaging his “pointer finger” in a handlebar collision.
“You don’t have to be a super-athlete for this sport,” Wozniak says, balancing on a red and silver Segway. “This falls into the category of things that not many people do, and I don’t want to be doing what every single person is doing. That’s a lot of my geekness.”
Think different. Play polo.
“The Segway is a great equalizer,” says George Clark, 38, whose only previous attempts at sports came in Thanksgiving Day football games, resulting in “stop-the-game type” injuries and “hospitalization.”
Though banging into an opponent’s Segway is prohibited, Clark has somehow managed to separate his ribs on the polo pitch. “Somebody who doesn’t work out a lot can play Segway polo,” he says. “As I tell my chiropractor, this is my main exercise.”
Cost barrier
The sport seeks to project a less elitist profile than the horseback version of polo, but because a new Segway can cost more than $5,000, some newcomers face what San Jose’s Backes, who plays for the Polo Bears, calls the “barrier to entry.” His team cannot afford to go to Barbados.
The Aftershocks have played in the Segway polo finals every year since 2006, when Wozniak came up with the idea of challenging other nerd herds from around the globe. But the ‘Shocks have won only one championship, and this year will go in as underdogs to the host Barbados Flyin’ Fish. The tournament pits eight teams, from points as distant as Germany and New Zealand, in machino a machino combat over three days.
Backes has used his Segway instead of a wheelchair since rupturing two discs in his back. Pointing to Aftershocks players, he says, “They’re all well off. If you work for a living, it’s a bit of a financial commitment taking a couple of weeks off to go play polo. There are people who just use these things to play polo. They don’t use them for anything else. I couldn’t justify that.”
But the tournament is traditionally a lively event. At the finals in Indianapolis two years ago, Woz got caught up in the moment — and his love of recurring numbers — and proposed to Janet in front of the other polo players at 8 p.m. on 8/8/08. “I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘I don’t want to wait. Let’s get married right here, right now.’ ” A minister they had planted in the crowd leapt up and married them at 8:08.
And now they are a two-Segway family. Not counting the other six Woz has stashed in the back of his Hummer.
Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004.
