Word: alai
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...