SOUTH FLORIDA IS IN THE BIG LEAGUES AT LAST, everyone knows that. We’ve got the Dolphins, the Heat, the Marlins, and next fall hockey skates into town. We have three racetracks, major golf and tennis tournaments, even our own Grand Prix car race.
So go ahead and guess. What South Florida sporting event draws the most fans?
Wrong. It’s none of the above. Our No. 1 sports attraction is — prepare yourself — jai alai.
From November of 1991 to November of 1992 — the jai alai year — nearly 750,000 spectators went to Dania to watch and to wager on the fast-moving Basque basket game. That is greater than the number of people who saw the Dolphins, the Hurricanes or the Heat.
South Florida has three jai-alai arenas, or frontons (the others are Miami and West Palm Beach), but the most popular stands in a reclaimed tomato field in Dania. It is, in fact, the most popular of the 12 frontons in the United States.
With players hurling the goatskin pelota 150 miles per hour or faster, jai alai is the fastest ballgame in the world. It was a demonstration sport at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and three of the four members of Spain’s gold medal- winning team played last winter in Dania. One of the greatest players in the history of the game, Joey Cornblit, grew up in Miami and is still playing in Dania at the top of his form.
If jai alai is such a great sport, then why don’t we know more about it? Well, it’s strange, it’s Spanish, it’s played in a gambling hall by guys wearing baskets on their hands. We don’t grow up playing it in school or watching it on TV. Unless you like to bet or are a hard-core fanatic, most of us don’t give jai alai a second thought.
But maybe we should pay attention, for in the last five years attendance and wagering have fallen so fast that people are asking if jai alai is about to die. It may be disappearing, it may be an odd foreign game, but jai alai is still a bright, exotic part of South Florida culture. Sure, it’s different — but it’s ours.
LIKE EVERY SPORT, JAI ALAI HAS ITS own peculiar sounds, motions and rituals. The players march out before the start of each game, face the audience and raise their huge, clawlike cestas in a quaint, corny salute. When the game begins, the house lights are dimmed, and you hear over and over again the sound of jai alai — the sharp clack of the hard goatskin ball hitting the granite wall. If you get close enough to the court, or cancha, you hear the squeak of the players’ sneakers and the whistling of air through the woven reeds of their cestas.
Jai alai is a fast, graceful sport infinitely more interesting than dog racing, more vivid and full of action than a horse race. It is the only parimutuel sport in which it is legal to bet on human beings.
It has been played in Miami since 1924 and is now in its 40th season in Dania. With its speed, its foreign accent, its lure of quick money, jai alai somehow fits the Florida character. In this sport, at least, South Florida was in the big leagues long before the Dolphins and the Marlins.
Frankly, betting is the chief attraction of jai alai for many fans. But it is much harder to handicap than a horse race: The ball can take a funny bounce, and people simply are not as predictable as animals. In jai alai, a longshot has a decent chance of winning.
A woman once won $87,000 in Dania from a $2 bet. When another woman won a $70,000 payout, she demanded her winnings in cash and then packed the money in a suitcase. Then there was the high roller who “bet the board” on a single game, wagering $256,000 on every combination. He took home $600,000, the largest payout in Dania history.
The huge neon sign announcing “Dania Jai Alai” is still the town landmark, but its light has begun to dim. Even though spectators placed more than $60 million in bets last year, the people who run Dania Jai Alai are worried about the future of their sport. Attendance is down 10 percent this year, having fallen 30 percent in the last five years. Two frontons in Florida have closed, leaving only eight. The bloom has left parimutuel sports, ever since the Florida Lottery took all the skill and swagger out of gambling.
In the ’50s and ’60s, when South Florida was still contentedly minor-league, a glittering, well-dressed crowd flocked to the Dania Jai Alai Palace. It had the atmosphere of an exotic nightclub.
“When I came here,” recalls Les Fellerman, who has worked at Dania Jai Alai for 25 years, “a gentleman had to wear a jacket. It was much more formal. The tellers wore green vests.”
A liveried butler greeted the public at the door and carried drinks on a tray to luminaries in the Royal Box. The lounge had chandeliers, and a full-time organist and singer entertained between games. Celebrities drove up from Miami Beach for a taste of something different.
A photographer stood ready to snap glossy black-and-white pictures of the stars of a more graceful age. The young Debbie Reynolds came to Dania, and so did Steve and Eydie, Polly Bergen, Vincent Price, Jack Paar, Danny Kaye, Lawrence Welk, Joe Garagiola, Yogi Berra, F. Lee Bailey, Hubert Humphrey, Kate Smith and Jayne Mansfield. Buddy Hackett frequently came and loved to clown with the players. Gordon and Sheila MacRae were regulars, and Ted Mack of Amateur Hour fame stopped by so often, you’d have thought he was the greeter.
“It was always packed,” recalls Fellerman. “There was lots of money around then, plenty of money.”
Odds were figured by men with pencils in those long-ago days before computers. Spectators could give their bets to young women on the floor, never leaving their seats. Some windows required a minimum bet of $50, and it wasn’t unusual for someone to drop $100 or more on a single game.
“The money flowed, really,” says Fellerman, now the assistant mutuel manager.
There is nothing at all shabby about the Dania fronton: It is bright and clean, the seats are upholstered, and you can still buy a ticket for the Royal Box. But some of the luster has faded. Gene Hackman comes in from time to time, but he wears a sweatshirt, sits by himself and makes it clear he wants to be left alone. A few celebrities show up now and then — Jerry Lewis, Billy Crystal, Louie Anderson, boxer Razor Ruddock — but the high rollers have left jai alai behind.
“It’s gotten to be the poor man’s — I guess I should say, the average man’s game,” laments Les Fellerman. “Before, it was the rich man’s game.”
JAI ALAI IS A SIMPLE SPORT THAT IS deceptively hard to play. The basic elements are a basket, a ball and a wall, but as in baseball or tennis, the variations and subtleties are endless. People who have played other sports — football, basketball, baseball — often say jai alai is the most challenging game of all.
The quickest way to gain respect for jai alai players is to try it yourself. First off, you have to learn how to handle a cesta, the curved basket used to catch and throw the ball. It is about three feet long and is made of long, thin reeds woven over a frame of Spanish chestnut from the Pyrenees Mountains. By tradition, it is worn on the right hand, even by players who are naturally left-handed.
You quickly learn that throwing a ball with a basket is an unnatural act. It is not like tennis or baseball or any sport an American knows; you keep your entire arm rigid, take aim 45 degrees above or to the side of your target, then let the ball fly. And maybe it dribbles out of the basket, bounces on the floor and rolls to the wall.
You try again, whipping the awkward wicker scoop across your body, twisting your hips and shoulders with tendon-popping torque, and when you finally slam the ball off the wall with that solid clack! — well, then you begin to see why some people fall in love with this odd game.
All the stories about the speed and danger of jai alai are true. The ball has been clocked as fast as 185 miles per hour. Through the years, a few players have been maimed or killed on the court, though not at Dania. It is common for players to throw the ball 150 miles per hour — hard enough to shatter bulletproof glass. (The fastest documented pitch in baseball is 100.9 miles per hour, by Nolan Ryan.)
The ball itself, or pelota, seems to glow with a life of its own. It is smaller and harder than a baseball, more lively than a golf ball. During a game the ball heats up, bouncing faster and farther. After an hour or so, it feels as warm as fresh bread.
Each pelota is handmade, with a rubber core wrapped in nylon thread, covered with two layers of cured goatskin. A seam is sewn into the outer skin, in the same curving pattern as on a baseball. Two ballmakers work at Dania, stitching together each pelota by hand. It is all they do.
For 17 years Julio Anchia has sat surrounded by his scales, weights, needles, thread, skins, knives and nails. He sips from a cup of Cuban coffee, making a pelota of perfect density, roundness and bounce. Each ball must weight precisely 128 grams. His patience and skill are why a ball costs $150.
Julio Anchia was a profesional jai-alai player for 15 years; he speaks good English, but his heart has never left the Basque region of his birth. He walks barefoot across a floor littered with tiny cobbler’s nails, but his feet are so brown and leathery he doesn’t notice.
“I am a fisherman,” he explains. “In my country, I never wore shoes.”
For thousands of years the Basques have lived in the Pyrenees Mountains along the border of Spain and France and on the coast of the Bay of Biscay. About 850,000 Basques live in Spain today, with another 150,000 in France. They are a people unto themselves.
The Basques have traditionally earned their living from farming, sheepherding and fishing, but they are also known for their fierce independence. They have repelled all invaders since the times of the Visigoths, Franks and Normans. To this day, they retain their own cultural customs and a language unrelated to any other known on Earth.
The sport we call jai alai is called pelota vasca in Spain — Basque ball. It evolved from handball, which is as old as the ancient Greeks. The term “jai alai” means “merry festival” in the Basque language, and the game’s origins go back as far as the 15th century, when young men bounced stones off church walls. Boys start playing at 6 or 7, and jai alai is still played outdoors in many Basque villages.
In the 19th century, when it became possible to make a ball with a rubber core, jai alai was transformed into a fast, highly athletic sport. Players used leather gloves, sticks, paddles and woven baskets to catch and propel the ball before the first modern cesta was used in Buenos Aires in 1888.
Basques took their sport with them as they roamed the world, and by the early part of this century jai alai was played in Cuba, South America, the Philippines and even Shanghai, China. It came to America with the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, and by 1924 it was a parimutuel sport in Miami.
Players from other nations have begun to excel at jai alai, but it is still dominated by Basques — 35 of the 42 players on the Dania roster grew up in Spain or France.
But the best player of all may be Joey Cornblit, a brash Miamian who turned professional before he graduated from high school. Now 37, Joey — jai alai players use just a single name — is one of the greatest players in the history of the sport. He brought new excitement to the game with his aggressive play and his dramatic “kill shots” that are impossible to return.
Jai alai is played with such speed, strength and split-second cunning, it is hard for the casual observer to see its subtleties. Players can control the spin, bounce and placement of their shots as surely as a baseball pitcher. The pelota must be caught and thrown back to the front wall in one swift motion, without a bobble, without letting it hit more than once on a floor twice as long as a basketball court. Players dive to the floor or make acrobatic leaps along a wall to catch a ball flying 150 miles per hour. A player competes in five games a day, running about a mile in each game.
Jai alai is still a sport for betting though, and wherever there are gamblers there is always the question of tampering. But with eight teams competing in every game, gamblers would have to bribe nearly all the players to arrange a fix.
Players receive incentive payments for first-, second- and third-place finishes. Journeyman players make around $35,000, but with salaries and bonuses top players can earn well over $100,000 a year.
“Our concern is to win,” says Joey. “That is our only concern.”
THERE IS A COMFORTING STEADINESS to jai alai in Dania. It goes beyond the clack of the ball, the cesta salute and the computerized whirr of the cash registers. It has something to do with the smell of cheap cigars, the popcorn, pizza and beer, the faces that turn up day after day.
There’s the little old lady who can barely peer over the counter but unleashes a withering stream of invectives at anyone who has the gall to cut in front of her. There’s the man who earns his living by betting on jai alai, netting $500 to $1,000 a week from $2 bets. Then there’s the “voodoo man,” who drops to his knees, slaps the floor and gibbers in an unknown tongue.
About 400 people work at Dania Jai Alai, making it the city’s largest private employer. There are 42 players, two ballmakers, two basket repairmen, one trainer, one master chef, several computer operators, dozens of food workers and tellers. Some people have used their jobs to pay their way through law or medical school.
The deep-voiced announcer, Pete Hekimian, came to work as a teller and two years later, for reasons he still doesn’t understand, was elevated to the announcer’s roost. In the six years he has worked at Dania, he found time to earn a degree in English from Florida International University. He wants to be a high-school teacher.
Every day another man sits in an office, watching the games and writing an impossible series of numbers on yellow pads. He is Ondarres — just the one name — and as the players’ manager, he determines the matchups for every game at Dania Jai Alai. Ondarres had a 29-year career as a player, winning the world jai alai championship three times. During a rare day off (play runs Tuesday through Saturday), he is on the court, teaching the younger players the finer points of the game.
He travels to Spain, France and Mexico every year, searching for the best young players in the world. Long before the Spanish Olympians won their gold medals, Ondarres had them signed to play in Dania.
“In my opinion,” he says, perhaps too modestly, “we offer some of the best jai alai anywhere.”
Then, with the sincere, wistful tone of a man who has devoted his life to one thing, he adds, “It’s a beautiful sport.”
IT REALLY IS A BEAUTIFUL SPORT. THE players wear colored jerseys, white pants and a traditional red sash for a belt. They run and throw against a green wall. The game has danger, excitement and breathtaking grace. But beauty is not enough.
Dania Jai Alai spends about $1 million a year on advertising, and its television commercials were recently honored as the best broadcast ads in Broward County. But the people just aren’t coming out anymore.
Five years ago more than 1 million people came to Dania Jai Alai, placing $90 million in bets. It is still the healthiest, most popular fronton in the United States, but the attendance and betting totals have shrunk by a third and continue to fall.
The quick, sad decline of jai alai began in 1988 with a crippling 1/2-year player strike, the longest strike in the history of professional sports. Players set up picket lines, strike-breakers were hired, angry words were said. Today the level of play is as strong as ever, but more than a quarter of the old fans never came back.
Now, with the Florida Marlins playing 81 games at Joe Robbie Stadium this summer, with the state lottery five years old, those fans may be lost forever. No one can say what will happen next. Will there be a last-minute rally, a stirring rush toward recovery and survival? Or will jai alai, which has always been something of a novelty, continue to wither and die away altogether?
There is something vivid, strong and graceful about this ancient sport from an ancient land. It brings us color and dash and maybe a touch of Old World honor.
If jai alai really is dying, then we must know we are losing more than a game, more than just an elaborate form of gambling. We are losing a little of our culture, a little of our past, a little of our soul.
— MATT SCHUDEL is a Sunshine staff writer.
