Time Out: Robert D'loren

A financier with a penchant for polo is the stuff of clichés, yet Robert W. D'Loren loves it, nonetheless—but not because it is the favored pursuit of the wealthy. Instead, he lives for the cold-water splash in the face of what he sees as the pinnacle of athletic competition.

"It's the ultimate adrenaline rush," says D'Loren, president/COO of C.A.K. Universal Credit Corp. in New York City. "I've done it all—jumped out of planes, raced cars, flown gliders. There is nothing more exciting than polo. Fear, power, greed: It's all rolled up into one sport."

D'Loren's firm, like his passion for polo, is unique. "C.A.K." are the initials of Charlie A. Koppelman, the former head of EMI's North American operations, who serves as chairman/CEO. Theirs is a 3-year-old boutique investment bank that helps companies use their intellectual property assets to raise money. Clients have included TVT Records, SESAC, and Bill Blass.

An avid horseman, D'Loren was turned on to polo by a friend and business partner in 1992. "It's the only sport where you're thinking for yourself and another animal," he explains. "It's you, the animal, the other players. And every one of the horses has a different personality and a different skill set."

Meadowbrook, America's oldest and most-storied polo club, is a few miles from D'Loren's Long Island, N.Y., home. Polo has also taken him to Argentina, where, alongside soccer, the sport reigns supreme. When America was itself "more of an agrarian society" 100 or so years ago, it was even popular here, he says: "There was a polo field—the Polo Grounds [also the name for the famous baseball stadium nearby]—in Manhattan, and 50,000 people would show up to a match."

Action on the 300-by-160-yard field is intense, requiring a change of horses every 7-minute period, or "chukker"—the word defining each of six periods in a polo contest. It is also not cheap, with annual costs for horses, gear, and travel running into the tens of thousands of dollars.

And it is dangerous. A spill two years ago—"I kind of tossed and tumbled for 30 feet or so," D'Loren recalls, though he broke no bones—helped convince him to stop playing and spend more time with his family.

Yet sports are never far away for him, his wife—whom he met in a pool ("She swam for Ohio, I swam for NYU")—and children. "The first word my son spoke, before 'Mommy' and 'Daddy,' " D'Loren says with a grin, "was 'goal.' "

MATTHEW BENZ