Word: alai
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...game is jai alai, pronounced "hi lie" and meaning, roughly, "merry festival." It is a kind of jet-propelled handball that probably originated with the Aztecs, traveled to Spain with Cortes, and was reintroduced to the New World by the Basques, who claim it as their native sport. The object is simple enough: players wearing basketlike cestas heave a ball against a wall until someone misses. But ah, the details. The court is about 200 ft. long; the ball is so hard (rubber core wound with nylon string, covered with goatskin) and goes so fast (up to 175 m.p.h.) that...
...Come On, Choo Choo!" Florida's six jai alai frontons tempt fans with drinks, dinners, dames-and enough pageantry to make Nero jealous. At the world's biggest (capacity: 6,000) and costliest ($4,500,000) fronton in suburban Miami, customers do not even have to leave their upholstered seats to get taken to the cleaners-pretty girls in green and gold uniforms prance up and down the aisles collecting bets...
...than 50 million people attended horse tracks, bet $3.6 billion on how the nags would finish, and thereby contributed some $288 million to the treasuries of the 24 states that get a cut of the pari-mutuel proceeds. This, plus dog racing in seven states, Florida's jai alai and Nevada's wide-open casinos, pushed the gambling revenues even higher...
...Albert Cronin, 45, silver-haired, carping Crichton who left his $46.80-a-week Kensington Palace post after 25 days because of the bohemian and meddlesome ways of Master Tony Armstrong-Jones, wrote some embarrassing memoirs and migrated to Florida as $300-a-week butler-host of the Dania Jai-Alai Palace; and May Groom, 50, grandmotherly shebeen queen of a London pub; he for the first time, she for the second; in London...
...Cronin could scarcely care less, at least for the moment. Last week he was in the U.S., appearing on Jack Paar's TV show, and wending his leisurely way to Florida, where he is promised another palace job: as a $17,000-a-year host at a jai alai palace in Dania, a tourist center north of Miami...