Steve Wozniak is the most famous Segway polo player in the world. After all, the sport's world cup -- yes, there is a World Cup of Segway Polo -- is called the Woz Challenge Cup. The second most famous player may well be Victor Miller.
Who is Victor Miller, you ask? Seriously?
Miller wrote Friday the 13th. The first one. The good one. He wrote it in 1979 and says "I'm still dining out on it." He also spent 25 years writing for soap operas like General Hospital and won three daytime Emmys for his work on All My Children.
He's been playing Segway polo from the beginning. With the seventh annual Woz Challenge Cup starting today in Stockholm, we caught up with Miller to talk about the sport's good ol' days, which in Silicon Valley means 2004.
The Bay Area Segway Enthusiasts Group started chasing balls with mallets in July 2004, after a couple of computer cats at Apple came up with a simple equation: Segway + polo = awesome. They didn't realize the Minnesota Vikings had come to the same conclusion the year before and staged an exhibition match during a halftime show, but no matter. The Bay Area geeks created the craze.
"It was for guys who had a Segway and were bored," said Miller, who is 72 and still riding.
Segway polo is like regular polo but played on Segways. Two teams of five players attempt to put a Nerf ball through the opposing team's goal. Goals are 8 feet wide and 5 feet high, placed at either end of a field 200 feet long and 128 feet wide. A regulation match consists of four eight-minute periods, or chukkas.
Of all the rules, the most important seems to be don't collide with another player as you zip around the pitch at up to 12.5 mph. Head-on collisions are a major faux pas. Although it might be difficult to watch Segway polo with a straight face, Miller said his biggest problem is managing his anger. It seems he's just a bit competitive.
"I find I get really mad when they score on me," he said, admitting that he's had some heated arguments on the field of play. "You were wondering where Mrs. Voorhees came from? That's where."
The Enthusiasts get together on the first and third Sunday of each month in Sunnyvale, a short scoot from Apple's galactic headquarters in Cupertino. They'll play for a couple of hours "or until somebody's batteries go dead, whichever happens first," Miller said.
From such humble beginnings a global sport was born. These days you'll find teams in Sweden, Germany, Austria, Finland, New Zealand, France, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Barbados and Lebanon. There's a global sanctioning body called the International Segway Polo Association, which drafts the rules and organizes the annual world cup. Fourteen teams from nine countries will spend four days competing for the cup. Germany and Barbados are the favored teams, having squared off for the championship last year.
As you'd expect, the skill of the players and quality of the competition has grown with the sport.
"I predicted that as soon as a young coordinated kid learns how to play Segway polo, they're going to hand us our asses," Miller said. "And that's exactly what happened."
Miller still plays, though. He's got not one, but two Segways. "I thought my wife would like it," he said of the second Segway, "but I was wrong." So he often cruises alongside his 11-year-old grandson. Part of the game's appeal, he said, is it allows people of all ages and levels of athleticism to compete at the same speed.
"It is the most fun I have had outside of my family," he said.
