Héctor Zappala – Hits the Mallet on the Head

Héctor Zappala stands before a big flat screen TV in his new shop in Pueblo Polo, or Polo Town, a 45-minute drive from Buenos Aires. The upscale shopping mall, amidst pastures and paddocks, lies in the flat countryside of Argentina’s polo epicenter. It is said that three hundred polo playing fields can be found within a 10 km radius, and a TV channel, monitored very closely by Zappala, broadcasts polo round the clock.

“There, that’s one of my mallets,” he exclaims, pointing to a player cantering past the camera.

The polo stick has mint-colored tape wrapped around the base of the cane just above the mallet head – Zappala’s signature feature. Worldwide there are six manufacturers, four of which produce in Argentina. The world’s best polo player, Adolfo Cambiaso, orders his polo sticks from Zappala. And a Malaysian prince regularly travels to Argentina just to order his equipment from Zappala in person. The mallets look like over-sized hammers with a 130-cm-long, slim shaft.

“It’s pure craftsmanship” the master mallet maker says. “I can produce a million mallets, but no two will ever be exactly the same.”

Héctor Zappala’s parents came to Argentina from Italy to escape World War II. Polo? Nobody he knew played polo. But then Héctor, 25 years old at the time, got a job filing down wooden polo balls until they were round and smooth. Balls, only the balls; the maestro wouldn’t let him try his hand at the polo sticks. “But he let me watch,” Zappala recollects. When the master mallet maker died and nobody wanted to take over the business, Zappala decided to take his chance, some 30 years ago now. Zappala affectionately strokes the finished polo mallets – called “taco de polo” in Argentina – that are leaning against the wall next to him. “And then it drew me in.” Passion, Zappala says, is the foundation for success in life and in business.

From the start, Zappala instinctively made the right decisions. First he ensured that the new brand, Casa Zappala, became known to its target public. In order to do so, he traveled in his old Ford pickup, a F100, to the polo tournaments and introduced himself and his mallets. In those days, polo sticks were generally overall wood-colored, but Zappala gave his a unique touch: Polo sticks have long handles wrapped at the top with grip tape; however, at the base of Zappala’s mallets there’s an additional line of tape in a bright mint color. The young polo player Cambiaso liked the added touch and asked him for a further feature: Would he consider painting the hammer-like head of the mallet white? “Of course,” Zappala replied. He started asking every customer for their preferred colors and supplied this personal touch at no extra charge. Then he went out into the world to source the best rattan canes. His search took him to several Asian countries before he found the quality he was looking for in Indonesia.

Zappala doesn’t believe in advertising: «Really good products succeed by word of mouth.» Case in point: A Malaysian prince who comes back time and again to Zappala, although the latter knowingly flouts at least one rule of royal etiquette. «Nobody’s allowed to look the prince in the eye. But I can’t not look. I need to have eye contact. I have to understand what the customer wants!»

Those who visit Zappala at the manufacturing site are served maté tea, and sometime he even fires up the grill for a cookout. The barbecue is an enormous contraption by European standards, but nothing out of the ordinary in Argentina. Apparently Roger Federer, Tommy Lee Jones, and Pope Francis are also in possession of a Zappala polo mallet, «but they received these as gifts. They didn’t come to see me in the factory.»

Twice a year, Zappala and his son Jonatan travel to Bali for several days. “We go directly from the airport to the warehouse,” Zappala tells us. There, father and son test some 50,000 canes for their flexibility and stability. From dawn to dusk they appraise the liane-like canes by hand, one at a time. About 5,000 pieces pass the grade and are sent to Argentina.

Of canes and cigars

At the Casa Zappala factory, just 10 minutes by car from Pueblo Polo, hundreds of rattan canes lie stacked in the middle of the hall. Héctor Zappala’s large, light-colored eyes narrow as he picks up a new, unprocessed rattan cane, swings it about in the air, then gently bends it: Have the canes retained their flexibility and quality during their long trip from Indonesia to Argentina? Once the canes have arrived, the manufacturing process can start: First the canes are dried in the oven and the cigars, as the mallet heads are called, are cut. Zappala uses Argentinian tipu wood for this component. Next son Jonatan heats the dried canes over a gas flame to straighten them, then the two assistants wrap the grip tape and the signature mint tape around the canes and paint the cigars in bright colors. Zappala himself assembles the canes and cigars into mallets before they are varnished. Finally, the newly made mallets are set to dry in the warm sunlight in the back courtyard.

“A player will take about 12 mallets with him to a match,” Zappala tells us.

“They get knocked about pretty hard.” Tacos may break when stepped on by a polo pony or when hit by another player’s mallet at an awkward angle with extreme force: The mallet head can hit a polo ball at speeds of up to 250 km per hour. “But most of them can be fixed,” says Zappala, who has no worries about automation or sticks made of carbon or glass fiber. “That’s been tried so many times already.”

His greatest reward is when a player drops by after a match and tells him the mallets were perfect. “That makes me very happy,” Zappala says. “After all, I made the mallets. In a way, they’re a part of me.”