Word: pelota
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Southwestern Europe, it was Pelota Week. From Biarritz on the Atlantic coast to Orthez and Oloron-Sainta-Marie in the heart of the Pyrenees, Basques were playing their national game. Shepherds and schoolboys, fishermen and priests, customs inspectors and smugglers ran each other ragged as they whipped a goatskin-covered ball against any convenient wall and went through the swift gyrations of pelota, that rugged ancestor of jai alai, handball and most other court games...
...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...
...that is needed would be a few tons of reinforced concrete constructed in the form of flying buttresses on three walls to support the terrific impact of the pelota, and a neon sign erected over the middle portal to advertise the pari-mutuel windows...
...whipped the hard-hitting Mexicans, 40-20. The victory gave Spain the overall championship, over runner-up France, 44-39 Noting the five-point disparity between the two countries, and recalling that Spain had entered 18 teams to France's 13, the elderly, greying president of the French pelota federation said bitterly: "Those damned live balls . . . Had I known about the scoring system, I would have entered myself in some of those silly games. I would have looked foolish, but France would have carried off the championship...