Word: fronton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Saint-Jean-de-Luz, spectators ignored a broiling sun and crowded the town fronton, as the pelota court is called. Kids clambered in the branches of chest nut trees to get a better view. This was the biggest pelota game of all: the championship match between a team led by Basque Idol Jean Urruty and a team headed by his closest competitor, Spanish Champion Valentin Careaga...
Above the Bar. On regulation pelota courts, the fronton wall is 16 meters wide and ten meters high. The flat concrete floor is 70 meters long. After the pelota, a rubber-cored ball, is smacked against the wall, an opposition player must catch it and fire it back before it has bounced more than once. Points are lost by missing the ball, tossing it against the wall below an iron bar set one yard above the ground, or sending it sailing beyond the bounds of the concrete floor...
...Saint-Palais, Jean Urruty was already a promising pelotari. Sunday mornings, after Mass, his priest would take him to the local court for an hour-long workout at main nue. At 14, he quit school to become a carpenter's apprentice, but his heart was still at the fronton. French Tennis Champion Jean ("The Bounding Basque") Borotra, a fine pelotari himself, took the youngster under his wing, brought him to Paris and taught him tennis. Urruty was soon good enough to go on an exhibition tour with French Tennist Henri Cochet...
With the physical set-up arranged, the possibilities become almost unlimited. Twenty years after the installation of the "Memorial Fronton," there would be an Ivy Jai-Alai League, a flourishing Basque Research Center in the department of Romance Languages and Literature, a course in Pari-Mutuel betting, and a huge increase in the University's endowment...
...another chance for a "big first." And Cambridge is peculiarly well-suited for Jai-Alai, too. Ever since its erection in 1871 Memorial Hall has been a chronic problem--too big for a classroom, too small, for an indoor polo field. But it's perfect for a Jai-Alai fronton...