Michael Tarnopol, who died Monday at 68, was a vice chairman of Bear, Stearns & Company, a hard-charging polo player, and a major benefactor of several institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania.

Tarnopol was a senior managing director and vice chairman of the investment banking division and was chairman of Bear, Stearns International Ltd.

“He set a tremendous standard for the bankers he worked with and trained,” the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Bear Stearns, James Cayne, said. “He was philanthropic to the nth degree.”

Tarnopol served as trustee and chairman of the development committee at Penn, where he spearheaded a multiyear campaign that raised more than $400 million. He also helped lead the university’s search for a new president, which culminated in the hiring last year of Amy Gutmann.

Tarnopol grew up in the Long Island suburbs. His parents split up before he was born and he was raised by his mother, whose family was in the textile business in Manhattan. After graduating with a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School at Penn in 1958, Tarnopol briefly played semiprofessional football. He tried to enter the family business by taking a job with Bloomingdale’s. After about six months, he swapped Seventh Avenue for Wall Street, joining Lehmann Brothers as a trainee.

At Lehmann, Tarnopol became a senior managing director and member of the board of directors, with responsibility for institutional sales and trading. In 1975, he joined Bear Stearns as head of the firm’s international department.

“Before that we were close competitors,” a Bear Stearns vice-chairman who helped recruit Tarnopol to the firm, John Rosenwald, said. “He was intense and high-energy – whether it was business deals, a golf game, polo games, or doing a favor for a friend.”

Tarnopol – “Mickey” to friends – kept a couple strings of polo ponies at paddocks in Connecticut and Florida. He played “high goal” polo, the top tier of the game, which is made up mostly of professional players. His success and dedication to the game were unusual, not only because the game is not well populated by middle-class Jewish kids from Long Island, but also because Tarnopol did not pick up a mallet until he was 42.

As a boy, though, he saw polo up close in Westbury, near his Rockville Center home. “I became a ‘hot walker,’ someone who walks horses to get them cool after they finish playing,” Tarnopol told the Wharton alumni magazine in 1999. After his daughter, Lisa, became a top junior equestrian at 15, Tarnopol experienced a newfound interest in horses, and began to play for a team sponsored by Rolex watches. Later, he formed a team sponsored by Revlon. Over two decades in the sport, Tarnopol’s teams won every major tournament in America except for the U.S. Open. The game was inscribed on his body in broken bones, concussions, and a detached retina.

“He had one horse he called Business,” Mr. Rosenwald said. “If he had a midweek polo game, he would have his assistant say, ‘He’s out on business.'”

Tarnopol had known Michael Milken for many years, but when both were diagnosed with prostate cancer, their friendship deepened. Tarnopol was a director of Milken’s CapCure foundation. He also was a director and benefactor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

During his lengthy illness, Tarnopol availed himself of Sloan-Kettering, and, against doctor’s orders, checked himself out during a hospitalization last summer to visit his grandsons at summer camp in Maine. He again defied doctors and checked himself out of Sloan-Kettering in April, to attend the opening of Wynn Las Vegas, the $2.7 billion, 2,700-room hotel built by his friend and client, Steve Wynn.

He buzzed around in an electric wheelchair, accompanied by his wife of 45 years, his college sweetheart, Lynne Lichtenstein. He continued to introduce her as “My first wife.”

Michael Tarnopol

Born July 31, 1936, in Long Beach, N.Y.; died May 23 at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of prostate cancer; survived by his wife, Lynne, his daughters, Lori and Lisa, and four grandchildren.