Word: frontones
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...towns. In Bridgeport, a gritty industrial town 50 miles from New York City, the crowd is a mix of short-sleeved factory workers and highrollers from New York. Sedate Hartford, a city that retires so early that players can find only two restaurants open when they leave the fronton, seems to have found a long-needed outlet in jai alai. An ovation greets the players each time they march out; the fronton's two "pits"-two standing-room areas closest to the court-are filled with jai alai groupies squealing for their favorites...
...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...
...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...