A friend of mine had this idea a few years ago. We thought it would be a great way to promote the sport and to put polo in front of a lot more people in an unexpected place: the romance novel. There's a lot of people that care about those kinds of stories, especially women, and it would help people to know what the polo life is all about. It's not just what you see in the newspapers or on Pretty Woman. There's a lot more to it: the time spent in the barn, how much we love the horses, the relationship with the horses and with the family, etc.

The military played polo. Polo, really, started as a game to train for war.

I'm honored and I think the relationship with Ralph Lauren brand has been so long because it goes beyond the face or the guy. I don't feel that I'm a model at all, because I'm not. I'm a professional polo player that endorses a clothing company.

In the beggining of I was getting all this feedback from people saying, "What are you doing? What is this?" But I thought to myself, "This is a great opportunity. This is a perfect bridge to help me achieve my dream and my vision of polo becoming a bigger, more visible sport." So I used the money that I was getting from modeling to buy better horses and to become a better player. So I really believed that if I could elevate my game and show that I was serious about it, then the work I was doing with Ralph Lauren would become that bridge that I was looking for to take the sport further.

Prince Harry is a great guy, very competitive; he's been playing polo all his life. Riding is in his blood. His grandmother loves horses, his grandfather played polo, his father played polo, his brother plays polo, so it's in his blood. He likes to play hard, we joke about it and it's great.

When polo is used as a platform to give back, then it becomes much more beautiful, I think.

One out of four kids in Lesotho has AIDS, and the idea of the charity is to help the children first fight the stigma of living with HIV and then teach them how to live with it and survive and get an education so all these children can have a normal life. When you're changing the life of so many kids - one out of four is a big number - you change the direction of an entire nation.