Mikee Romero on becoming Southeast Asia’s top polo player in 2025 and achieving global success

“Every time I go to Argentina, my level [of enthusiasm] goes up. You learn a lot, and you play with different groups. All the excellent horses are there. Millions of them, and we would ship our purchases to the US or UK for them to play the ‘highway’,” explains Romero

The Sport of Kings and Queens

Polo’s strategy revolves around respecting the “highway”, an imaginary line created by the ball’s movement, granting a right-of-way to the player advancing parallel to it, immediately after hitting the ball. Opponents must approach the ball from the side, not cut directly across its path. This mechanism maintains safety; failure to follow this rule is akin to causing a serious collision on a fast-moving track, resulting in a foul call.

Some would argue that polo is an elitist sport. An excellent horse that can help you last long in a match and make goals according to your handicap would cost around 200 to 300 thousand dollars, or even more. Argentina’s very own Adolfo Cambiaso of Poroto, currently the number one player, has a 10-goal handicap rating and reports to clone about 100 horses each year.

“Now all of his horses act the same. Even the individual ticks, it’s uncanny,” Romero says. But the Globalport owner and captain, whose stint at the Gauntlet of Polo last year catapulted him to the top spot in Southeast Asia, dares not to raise his mallet high as an indication of a call for foul when talking about other professional players’ cloning of horses. Instead, he sees this as a challenge to make his team, including himself, better organised and prepared in the long run.

Officially, he has a 1-goal handicap and has 15 polo horses under his command every match. But Romero can feel that through the years of playing and building a strong string of horses, he has improved a lot and could offer the team more.

For the 2026 season, he plans to forego the High Goal tournaments of the Gauntlet of Polo (CV Whitney, US Gold Cup and US Open) and play the equally prestigious 16-goal tournaments in Florida, namely Ylvi Sacre and Igel Heart, come January. Using the time to strategise better and organise his players and their respective strings and assisting crew, Romero delays the gratification of reaping the fruits of his labour.

It is a matter of not pushing each horse to its limit in every game, as Romero explains, when entering polo tournaments. Having a large pool of horses at bay can make a team reach the finals. Not to mention the physical and mental requirements for a player.

“While being at the mercy of your horses, you also have to be physically fit eight months prior. And then six months prior, you have to work on your stamina. I have to lose this much weight and start my ‘riding time’, or the months I have to spend mounting and changing horses,” he shares. “Personally, I have to improve my forward, my back and my turn. I think now I have become a stronger rider,” he continues.

While in Argentina, playing with his aspirants, he has nothing but admiration for the performance of Mariano and Facundo Obregón. “We’re a swift team, and we expect to win,” he says with much confidence.

No Pain, No Gain

Globalport made history as the first Filipino-owned team to reach the quarterfinals of the US Open. Romero himself achieved a personal milestone by becoming the first Filipino to score a goal in the Gauntlet of Polo. Despite reaching the semifinals in the CV Whitney Cup, the team faced challenges in the Gold Cup, where their horses became fatigued and flat, as Romero describes, leading to a poorer performance and a tenth-place finish. Ultimately, their strongest result was reaching the quarterfinals of the US Open and finishing fifth out of 12 teams overall in the 2025 series. Romero was then Southeast Asia’s number one player, surpassing Brunei’s Prince Abdul Mateen Bolkiah and Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha, heir to Thailand’s King Power empire.

“But your adrenaline rush, it hits differently,” Romero replies when asked why he loves polo amidst risks of danger and possible financial losses. “The euphoria you will feel after will linger all your life. Especially if you made a great goal, which was probably what? Lasted ten seconds?”

To prove his point, Romero relishes to this day his first and winning goal at the Manila Polo Club when he was starting playing polo professionally.

“Actually, you get it also from basketball. However, I’m too old already for that now. In polo, you use the four legs of the horse. Imagine? I feel that I keep getting better even in my fifties. I feel like it is a ‘second wind’ for my sporting career,” he says.

Whether offence or defence, the toll polo takes on one’s body is the same, as Romero explains. And yet what he receives from it is better reflexes and even the mental agility required in such a high-octane sport, where decisions have to be made in split seconds.

Growing up, he remembers his grandfather mounting horses when he would spend time in their house in Baguio. Eventually, he developed a passion for hiking and would continue this deep connection with nature and sports on the field by undertaking horseback riding lessons at D’Rossa.

“So my love for horses was really engraved in stone ever since. I said to myself, ‘once I make it in life, I’ll start playing polo’, because it’s not a joke to buy these horses,” he says.

Throughout his teenage years and young adulthood, Romero excelled in various sports. He was the national champion in jet ski racing in 2005 and a member of the national trap shooting team. He holds a 3rd dan black belt in arnis, the country’s national martial arts. And then there’s this incredible fish story. In 2007, his prized koi, High Note, won as grand champion at the 37th All-Japan National Fish Show, outshining over 3,000 entries—the first non-Japanese ever to win the revered Kokugyu award.

Romero also played varsity basketball for De La Salle University Green Archers. Although his UAAP career ended in 1991 after an ankle injury, he continued making an impact on the said sport by leading the amateur team Harbour Centre squad, which represented the company Harbour Centre Port Terminal, Inc. (HCPTI) to a record seven-straight titles in the Philippine Basketball League. Later, he launched NorthPort Batang Pier to join the Philippine Basketball Association. In 2007, he spearheaded the national basketball team to a gold medal finish at the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games.

“My grandmother used to tell me ‘You’re always a jack of all trades but a master of none’,” he recalls. At 53, Romero wishes to continue playing competitively for the next seven to ten years before he turns 60. “And hopefully, become a US Open champion,” he says.

The Path Forward

In understanding Romero’s point of view in life, one sees his sheer determination to be a better person every day. His eyes are fixed on the prize: himself, which is essential when one finds his purpose in life is to inspire others to do the same.

As a former 1-Pacman Party-list representative in the Congress, Romero has around 150 Republic Acts to his name, mainly focusing on alleviating poverty and reshaping public health, economics, education and national defence. Among these, the groundbreaking Eddie Garcia Law for protection of workers in film, television and entertainment hits him the closest, as the late veteran actor he named it after served as his doting stepfather since he was 13 years old. As a champion of the poor and defender of social justice, he institutionalised the temporary initiative 4Ps as a permanent one, ensuring long-term support for millions of indigent families. Today, he continues to serve the people as a reservist in the Air Force, with the rank of full colonel, commanding the entire troop of reservists in Northern Luzon.

“Being a reservist made me go to places that are rarely reached,” Romero says. “I’ve been to Mavulis Island in the north and then Mapun and Taganak in Tawi-Tawi… There really is a sense of fulfilment when you can serve others, and it’s addictive. Perhaps, my being nationalistic was brought about by my upbringing.”

Just last November 27, barely a year since his three-term service in the Congress culminated—which was capped off by being a Senior Deputy Speaker—Romero received the Philippine Choice Award for Outstanding Humanitarian and Community Service and was among the recipients of the 2025 Icons of Change Awards, an award given by the Icons of Change Organization, Federation of Associations of Private Schools and Administrators–NCR and the Rotary Club of Alabang Madrigal Business Park.

His personal life and, by extension, his business career also attest to his pursuit of excellence. He managed HCPTI in Manila and turned the company into one of the country’s busiest private ports. He also led the winning bid for the privatisation of the Manila North Harbour, transforming it into the country’s first modern port terminal under the Manila North Harbour Port Terminal, Inc. Later, he launched Globalport as an independent entity, pegging it at more than US$700 million in 2014 and now present and operating in the Visayas and Mindanao. Another Romero company, GlobalCity Mandaue Corporation, aims to transform a 131-hectare reclamation project in Cebu into a mega mixed-use township development.

These wins may easily put Romero at ease, but he does not sit on his laurels. He continues to make great strides by being proud of his family’s individual achievements:

His wife, Sheila, manages his port businesses for him and has her own charitable foundation dedicated to helping children battling cancer.

His eldest daughter, Milka, follows in his footsteps in sports and public service, owning and managing a women’s volleyball team, Capital1, in the Premier Volleyball League with her sister, Mandy, and applying her business acumen in the F&B industry, with over ten dining concepts across 22 branches. Solar energy entrepreneur Mandy, through Capital1, was recently appointed as the Department of Energy’s newest assistant secretary.

Romero’s sons, Santi and Steff, also show interest in sports, like their sisters, who were football players at Poveda in their younger years. Santi follows in his dad’s footsteps as a varsity player for the Green Archers. Meanwhile, nine-year-old Steff is exploring his talent in swimming competitions.

Asked if he instilled in his children the importance of pursuing sports, Romero ditches the idea, attributing it instead to the fact that they might have just seen how it transformed his life and continues to do so. Besides discipline, polo teaches Romero to remember his late son, Miguel Lorenzo, who passed away in 2017. In his memory, he named their family’s state-of-the-art polo field in Calatagan after him, and it served as one of the venues for the equestrian events during the 2019 SEA Games.

Looking back, Romero finds contentment and peace in all his life’s successes, especially those reaped from trials and heartaches. “When I graduated from college, my only mindset was, ‘I want to be a billionaire. I want to reach the Forbes List.’ I guess, and I would always say this, you throw your dreams as far as the stars, and you’ll never know, one day you might get it,” he says.

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