Sport: Merry Festival

To the majority of U. S. citizens, Hi-Li is the childish pastime of bouncing a rubber ball off the face of a wooden paddle. But those who have ever spent a night in Miami or Havana know that “high lie” is the way you pronounce the Cuban national game, spelled jai alai and played by scooping the ball in mid-air with shallow wicker baskets and hurling it against the walls of a long concrete court.

Last week, Boxing Tsar Mike Jacobs, Theatrical Producer Lee Shubert and Jai-Alai Promoter Richard Berenson pooled their backgrounds and bank accounts to introduce the Cuban national game to Broadway. With all the éclat of a Hollywood première, Promoters Jacobs, Shubert & Berenson transformed the famed old Hippodrome into a jai-alai fronton (at a cost of $100,000), exhibited 30 of the world’s top-notch jai-alaiers in a demonstration of what has been called the “fastest game in the world.”

Originally called pelota (ball) and played with the bare hand against church walls in the Basque country three centuries ago, the game gradually evolved until three concrete walls were used instead of one, and a cesta (wicker basket shaped like a pelican’s lower bill) was strapped onto the wrist to protect the hand from the sting of the fast-moving little pelota (hard as a golf ball and a little smaller than a baseball). Cubans imported the sport in 1900, called it jai alai for no other reason than that it was played at an arena in Havana called Fronton Jai Alai (Merry Festival Court).

Modern jai alai, as popularized by the Cubans,* is played on a concrete court about half the length of a football field, marked off to let the speeding players readily know where they are and to determine the boundaries of a fair serve (between the fault and pass line)—see diagram. Three walls are of concrete, the fourth is of wire netting to protect the spectators from a ball that travels 100 miles an hour. Object of the game is to scoop the ball (either in the air or on first bounce) as it bounds off the front wall, and, in a split second, return it so that it will be in a difficult position for the opposing player (or players) to catch. Points are scored in the same manner as tennis or handball. Winning score varies from seven points (singles) to 25 points (doubles).

Most spectacular maneuver of jai alai is the rebate (pronounced re-bó-tay): recovering the ball off the back wall in a wide sweeping arc that usually topples the player to the ground (see cut).

In the Hippodrome last week, the ancient rafters that once shook for Diver Annette Kellerman shook again with shouts of mucho and arriba, as a cosmopolitan audience, looking like a first-night opera crowd, crammed into tiers of red & gold chairs, witnessed as exciting a jai-alai program as they had ever seen in any Latin country. The program consisted of four games (three doubles and one singles), with entr’actes of Spanish fandangos to keep the spectators’ minds off the absence of betting—an integral part of the game’s popularity in other cities. Headliners were the “Four Aces”: Spaniards Piston, Segundo, Gabriel and Guillermo (jai-alaiers are known by only one name). Most publicized of the quartet was Piston, whose real name is Estanislao Maistegui, but was nicknamed Piston when he first started to play the game in his native San Sebastián. In a rough & tumble doubles game, in which the lead seesawed with almost as much rhythm as the bounding of the ball, the favorites Piston & Segundo were finally nosed out, 25-10-24.

Professional jai-alai players, whose stock in trade are skill, strength and stamina, usually learn the game at the age of 6, retire at 35 with a life pension. They live a dormitory life the year round, have a physical examination before each performance, never have dinner until midnight, rarely associate with other than their fellow jai-alaiers. Topnotchers like Piston earn about $2,000 a month, the average player earns about $250. Latins all, they belong to the Spanish Association (controlling jai-alai body), pay 5% of their earnings toward pensions for their old age, which many of them never reach.

* Also played in Mexico, all the South American countries, Southern France, Brussels, Shanghai, Tientsin, in addition to its birthplace, Spain. First introduced to the U. S. at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, it has been tried out within the past decade at Chicago and New Orleans with no great success, has been a No. 1 tourist attraction at Miami since 1924.