Sue Sally Hale, polo player: born Los Angeles 1937; married 1957 Alex Hale (two sons, three daughters; marriage dissolved 1976); died Indio, California 29 April 2003.

Sue Sally Hale belonged with Joan of Arc and George Eliot (not to mention many pantomime romantic leads) in the select company of women who had to pretend to be men in order to succeed. Her chosen field however was not warfare, literature or the stage – but the exotic sport of polo.

Hale had her first horse at the age of three. From her childhood, where she rode her pony Blue in Pacific Palisades, behind Santa Monica and watched the men practising on the polo grounds of the Riviera Country Club, she had wanted nothing else but to play herself.

Today the main requirements for playing polo are ability and a deep pocket, not gender. But in the southern California of the 1950s, the sport was rigidly men-only.

At her local club, the male members were impressed by her enthusiasm and evident talent, and took her under their wing. Even so, to play in tournaments, she had to disguise herself as a man – tucking her blonde hair under her helmet, flattening her chest with tape and using mascara to give herself a moustache. She gave her name as S. Jones, using the surname of her father Grover Jones, a Hollywood screenwriter who had died when Hale was only four.

Immediately the last chukka was over, the stocky and determined player who on the field had made a big impression with colleagues and opponents alike would mysteriously disappear – to resurface in her proper sex at the post-game party.

The farce continued, in one form or another, for almost 20 years, until her fellow players and colleagues, led by her close friend Henry Trione, decided that enough was enough. They wrote to the US Polo Association demanding that women be permitted to play in tournaments, threatening to reveal that one in fact had been since the early 1950s. "You either put her in, or we sue," Trione told officials. The Association caved in. In 1972 Hale received a package containing the membership cards for her club, and the very first one was hers. "It was the greatest moment in my sports life," she would later say.

Today 590 of the USPA's 3,600 members are women – among them Hale's daughter Sunny, who is the top ranked female player in the country with a handicap of five (players are graded by the number of goals they are expected to score in a game, with the highest handicap set at 10). Her mother achieved a two rating, remarkable enough in her day. In the words of Polo Magazine, which later named her one of the 20 "Legends of Polo", she "could ride a horse like a Comanche and hit the ball like a Mack truck".

Her own feelings she summed up in typically earthy style. The greatest thing in life, she once told the Los Angeles Times, "is going down the field with seven head of horses broadside, getting bumped by 900 pounds of horse and man, just holding that line steady for two seconds to make that shot. God, I love the game."

Hale continued to play competitively almost until the end. Since 1995 she had run an unpretentious 10-acre ranch, part farm and part polo coaching school in the hills where she had grown up. She was a vigorous campaigner against Los Angeles urban sprawl and also indulged her less strenuous hobbies of painting, sculpting and writing poetry. One poem, entitled simply, "Polo", closed with the lines:

The Ultimate goal in which to believe

Is to pass from this Life out where we

achieve

On the field of Honor, that's covered

with grass

On top of a Horse with a Ball to Thrash.

It was her anthem, and might serve as her epitaph.

Rupert Cornwell