hey everyone! welcome to The Flying 6, i’m happy to have you. first off i’d like to introduce myself. my name is Gracie Brush, i was born & raised in Yakima, WA, the self proclaimed “Palm Springs of Washington”. At age 16 my family moved from there to Haskell, Oklahoma. between homes we stayed with my grandpa (b-ba) in southern California for about 9 months.
a kitchen view from our WA home
I’m a third generation polo player on my moms side. Around age 10, mom started playing competitively again after mainly raising, training & selling polo horses for years. At 11, i played my first tournament game.
mom on her TB gelding “Cowboy”
polo is my upbringing, but so is living the ranch life. along with raising polo ponies my family also comes from the cattle industry. as a kid in Washington we had about 150 mother cows which we ran with our broodmares.
coming from two very different sides of the equestrian spectrum, i have a passion in both. my brand, The Flying 6, has been made to accommodate to both worlds.
me & my cousin circa 2015. the last gathering before the herd was sold
what i’d most like to talk about today is my well known & loved mare, Cantina. Cantina is a 13 y/o Argentine Thoroughbred playing horse. we got Cantina when i was 13, she was only 7. Cantina was way too much horse for me on the field, but i loved her. She hated to stick & ball, she would switch leads mid swing.. practice was & still is a complete waste of her time. but because of that, she made me work hard. she made me good.
Cantina belonged to my parents & was leased to professionals in the PNW to play, sometimes for a weekend & sometimes for months at a time. she got the nickname “The Machine” by our local professional players.
my very first ride on Cantina
after a couple years of leasing, i got a little better. i matured into my own riding. Cantina started to get depressed. her coat was bleached, she was unhappy & losing weight. we decided to keep her at home for a while & let her recoup- this is when we clicked.
Cantina has taught me the game of the big dogs. sure, i could push the ball around & follow the play, but she put me right in the middle of it. i had to learn to “get out of her way” as my mom would tell me. let Cantina play & you’ll play the best polo you could ever imagine yourself playing.
a few months down the road, Cantina was given to me for Christmas. since then we have played in the USPA NYTS program, tons of small tournaments & lots of practice (her favorite). Cantina pushed me from being a rider to a horseman. she gave me the kind of horse i want all of my future prospects to be- a Machine.
