Pucho is a sorrel-colored gelding with a white stripe down his face, big haunches and bulging leg muscles. He’s all power.

Brasita is small, dark and feminine. Notice her well-formed knees and fetlocks as she coyly paws the shavings on the floor. The mare’s got great moves.

“With her, you try get a little more sneaky,” polo sensation Nacho Figueras explained on a recent sunny afternoon in Bridgehampton. He was giving me a tour of the pipe-and-sheet-metal stables where the Black Watch Team “ponies,” as polo horses are often called, will be living for the next two months. “But with [Pucho], you try to make a play where you hit the ball and run.”

Mr. Figueras, 32, gestured at a sign above the stall of another pretty horse. (The bare-bones mobile horse lodgings located at the southeasterly corner of the Two Trees Farm, at 849 Hayground Road, which during the summer months is leased to the Bridgehampton Polo Club, does at least allow its visiting world-class athlete the dignity of an engraved plastic nameplate.)

Polo season in the Hamptons has arrived. The inaugural Mercedes-Benz Polo Challenge match last Saturday made it official. The high-goal tournament was founded in 1995 by longtime patrons Peter Brant, the publishing tycoon, and Neil Hirsch, who founded Telerate, a financial information service, which he sold for 1.5 billion in 1990 and who owns Mr. Figueras’ beloved Black Watch team—Mr. Hirsch and Mr. Figueras are 50-50 partners in whatever proceeds may befall the Black Watch brand—and the match has since become one of the sport’s most sought-after trophies. For a time, it was also the clock around which other Hamptons polo-related activities were set. Mr. Figueras is changing all that.

The Manhattan Classic exhibition match that took place on Governor’s Island May 30 and featured a galloping, and later Champagne-spewing, Prince Harry—that was Nacho.

“I worked 18 months to get that thing going,” he said. “We did the first one May 2008 and then 12 months later the second”—which benefited hugely from the presence of Nacho’s personal friend Prince Harry, on only his second American visit.

“The most satisfying thing was the general admission,” he went on. “Five thousand people came in for free to cheer us on. They had a great day with their families and their kids, and that’s the truth about the sport.”

 

TO PLAY POLO yourself is very expensive. Mr. Hirsch said that keeping Black Watch afloat runs him a “couple million dollars” a year. But Nacho argues that it’s far more accessible on those grounds than Formula One racing, which regularly draws viewers to television and massive crowds to racetracks.

At present, Nacho says Americans don’t understand polo as a sport as much as they do as a brand. “Polo Ralph Lauren is bigger than the sport here,” he offered.

Mr. Figueras, who’s done a fair amount of modeling for the company over the years and was recently tapped to be the face of Ralph Lauren fragrances, is in a position to beat them and join them. When he smolders at you from the pages of glossy magazines on horseback, or glancing over the back of a white sofa with a blue bottle of cologne floating all Photoshoppy in the foreground, or competing on the field in as many tournaments as he and his team can muster, he’s popularizing both the fragrance and his own sport.

He believes polo has had a huge year. There was the success of his own Manhattan Classic, and two new tournaments have popped up in the month of June, the Courage Cup in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C., and London Polo in the Park.

But the year’s biggest media hit for the sport of polo had to have been the tragedy that befell this year’s U.S. Open, before which the horses belonging to Black Watch’s opposing team began suddenly dropping like flies. It’s what Mr. Figueras calls the worst day of his life.

“We were getting ready to play at the stadium, and I was putting on my boots, and my manager came to tell me,” he recalled. “So we went to look, and I got all my guys, and we went to help the other team as all their horses were sick. We brought over all of our things to try and hydrate them, but they all just started falling down. We were just trying to save them, but there was nothing we could do.

Naturally, what followed was a media feeding frenzy that cast the whole thing as a vendetta being repaid on the owner of the team, Venezuelan multimillionaire Victor Vargas, a frequent presence at Bridgehampton Polo Club and a consummate gentleman, according to Nacho.

“In a cynical way, it did bring attention to the sport,” he offered. “It allowed us to show how much we loved our horses, though. At the moment, we were not on opposing teams; we were all working together.”

(He says nobody in his circle believes the horse-poisoning was sabotage: just a very bad pharmaceutical error.)

Mr. Figueras’ first Hamptons season was the summer of 1999 and, incredibly, almost upon arrival, Mr. Figueras sucked the air out of whatever room there was for polo celebrity. Rumors flew that he was being squired around by Rita Schrager. (“Total bullshit,” he says.)

Then, at a cocktail party the following year, socialite Susan Berch introduced him to photographer Bruce Weber, who thought he would be perfect for Ralph Lauren. Mr. Lauren agreed: Meet Nacho the model!

Of course, Mr. Figueras is not even in contention among the top polo players in the world: His best ranking was 7-goal; there are at least 20 10-goal players. But with all the Hamptons kismet surrounding him, and his dark good looks, it was very quickly and definitively decided: As far as New York was concerned, Nacho Figueras was the face of polo.

Where others might have seen the opportunity for some wild times, Jacuzzi-hopping and shooting Web-ready video of “the moment,” Mr. Figueras had a much more sinister vision: To create, around himself, and Ralph Lauren, and in his social circles, a brand for polo that would make it an exhibition sport for the masses.

 

BACK AT THE STABLES, Mr. Figueras was ready to get a move on. He called out to his 9-year-old son Hilario to finish up making casas with the bundles of shavings. Now the tangy man-essence trailing off of the fragrance ambassador was duking it out with the smell of horse manure in the air, resulting in a new and exciting olfactory experience.

Looking over the stables, he noted that his dream was to one day win a championship with horses of his own breed. He envisions a family business that can be handed down to his son.

“There are no guarantees, but when you retire, the story continues,” he says.

Four or five years ago, he started embryo-breeding on his ranch outside Buenos Aires. This year he had 47 foals and fillies, and next year he may get 67. All told, he’s got 250 horses on the ranch, so every time he goes to the farm, “I’m like, ‘Wow!’”

Mr. Figueras himself was born in Buenos Aires. He says his father was not a wealthy man but had a wheat farm with a few horses. His father finally agreed to let Nacho, then 15, move out to the farm to focus on polo. Nacho’s main steed back then was called Lentil. Hilario is currently learning the game on Lentil’s son.

He envisions a day when polo could ignite a spark, like the one that inflamed his own modest upbringing, in an “inner-city” kid from the Bronx or Brooklyn or Houston or Atlanta. Indeed, Mr. Figueras has played polo all across America. He’s been talking to Work-to-Ride—a charity that puts inner-city kids on farms and teaches them horsemanship in exchange for farm work and agreements about finishing school—about getting the kids involved in an exhibition match.

It’s a noble dream, and not a totally ridiculous one, either, considering the deep roots of polo in New York.

In the ’30s, they used to have to schedule special trains to accommodate the masses going out to watch polo in—of all places—Meadowbrook.

But there is no train to billionaire hedge fund manager-slash-collector of luxury homes around the world Louis Bacon’s secluded Southampton estate for a “pick-up game” of polo. On the drive to one of these, Nacho ticks off the other private fields—a polo field requires 12 acres—in the area. Joe DiMenna, patron of the team Equuleus, has two fields; Michael Borrico has a small field in East Hampton, where the Certified boys hone their game. Then there are two at Bridgehampton Polo, and Southampton Polo Club has three more.

“Right now I’m in talks to do Manhattan Polo Classic but to do it all over, like in Abu Dhabi and China,” Nacho was saying, as the car bumped along on the seemingly endless driveway to Mr. Bacon’s polo grounds. “Like the Harlem Globetrotters but for polo.”

At the beautiful, sprawling fields, a surprisingly good crowd has turned up. Among them is Rich Rothschild of the Rothschilds, and established art collector and billion-heir Adam Lindemann, who at one point had a 5-goal ranking; in between switching horses, he told me that one of the wonderful things about polo is that it’s such a small world. He personally knew the artisan who made his boots. Same goes for the guy who repairs his mallets.

He also repeated a favorite dictum of polo enthusiasts.

“I’ve known at least six people who have died playing polo,” he told me. “It’s very much like cavalry going into battle with bayonets drawn.”

Having heard a lot of this kind of thing, I’d asked Nacho on the way over if he didn’t think Polo was a bit dangerous for mass consumption.

“It’s extremely dangerous,” he said, and went on to describe how, when he was 17, he took a ball to the eye and was in the hospital for six days. Hilario says something from the backseat, in Spanish.

“Ah, si,” says the father. “I also broke my wrist the week before my wedding.”

editorial@observer.com