In Part Five of this excerpt from the new book Equine ER, spring comes for Selena, a Bluegrass polo pony who was found critically injured in a field, and who struggled over many months to heal from devastating injuries.

Now picture the father: It is May and Frank Proto drives down from New York to take his daughter home from college for the summer and to see Selena at the hospital barn. The horse is continuing to recover but she’ll likely never play polo again. She’ll be shipped back up to New York when she’s ready. Frank Proto once dreamed of being a horse doc, as he puts it. (His daughter tells me one of the reasons he’s not is because he couldn’t stand to put horses down.) Now he’s a county legislator and bank vice president. He has thick gray hair and green eyes, wears a corduroy jacket and smokes a pipe. He has an ease about him; he’s probably a great party guest. He played polo in college at Cornell under “Doc” Roberts, the well-known veterinary professor and notoriously tough polo coach who died in 2005 at 89. Roberts once pinned an overly aggressive player against the boards in a Madison Square Garden match not soon forgotten by anyone who was there.

Selena before the trauma that changed her life.

I ask Frank what kind of person plays polo, the game Gonzalo Pieres, the Argentine player, once said “should be played with hot blood and a cool head.”

 “To play polo,” Frank says, “you have to be a little nuts. Who in their right mind would get on a pony going 45 miles an hour waving a stick?” We’re in his silver truck, his daughter is driving, he’s shotgun, I’m in the back. We’re en route to see Selena. The power steering went out on Frank’s drive down from New York, and he keeps telling his daughter to slow down on the narrow country roads. “And we didn’t even have the helmets you guys have now,” he says. “We had these leather helmets that looked like something out of an old Ronald Reagan war movie.”

A great polo horse, Frank says, is gutsy. “Size is important but not key; they shouldn’t be more than 16 hands and should be smart, quick learners. They have to want to play. Winning depends as much on the horse as it does on you.”

As we drive on, Frank tells me his daughter got her first polo lesson at age twelve, when she weighed forty pounds soaking wet. They got her up on Speedy, now passed away, who in his prime was one of Cornell’s top polo ponies. Selena was bought the following year and Mia started to play seriously. In talking about the sport once, Mia told me, “It’s a rush. In a car, if you’re going 40 to 45 miles an hour … it doesn’t seem very fast, but when you’re on the back of a horse, you’re flying. The ground is a blur. When I play, I don’t hear the crowd. I can only hear the horses, and the people I’m playing with. It’s like being in your own world, flying around completely unprotected, about an inch from death.”

We finally arrive at the hospital barn to see Selena.

Thursday: How did Selena look?

The reviews have started to come in for Equine ER, the new book by Leslie Guttman published by Blood-Horse's Eclipse Press. Maryjean Wall, one of the country's most noted turf writers, wrote this in a review on her blog, "... (Guttman) weaves engaging tales in telling of the heroic lengths to which veterinarians and horse owners go in trying to save sick and injured equines ... we highly recommend it." To order Equine ER, click here. Thank you for visiting this blog.