ELItorial

The jai-alai high life

I saw the sign on I-95 the first time I drove up to Yale. Green background, white letters. "Jai-alai Fronton, Exit 40," it read, ominously.

COURTESY JAIALAI.COM Pelotari with their cestas.

Perplexed, I ran to my dictionary. "Jai-alai is a centuries-old Basque game that combines athleticism and grace with the speed and danger of the fastest-moving ball in sports." And "fronton?"—"an old Basque term for the arena in which jai-alai is played."

Danger? The fastest moving ball in sports? And a fronton? All that only a few miles away in Milford, Conn.? I had to investigate. It took me three years to get up the courage, but l've finally managed to break into the seedy underworld of the Milford Jai-Alai fronton.

From the outside, the Milford Jai-Alai fronton looks like a legitimate sports complex: a tree-lined entrance, a vast parking lot, and an arena almost the size of Madison Square Garden. My first instinct was that I was in the wrong place. All this for jai-alai?

I relaxed when I saw that I could count the number of cars in the parking lot on two hands. Now that's the jai-alai I was expecting. The whole place was as deserted as a Sigma Chi party—howling wind, tumbling dust bowls, and the shadow of a sketchy guy crouching behind the bushes. This was going to be awesome.

I looked so lost that the lady at the front door offered me some advice: "It's three dollars," she said. "Don't cuss, don't smoke, sit anywhere but the blue seats, bet, and enjoy it." She had an awful perm and enormous troughs of make-up under her eyes. She looked like a ghetto Blanche from Golden Girls. "Wait," she said, "One more thing. You first-timers really need one of these programs."

Inside, the fronton was designed like an enormous theater, actually more like a enormous circus, with around 3,000 seats extending up on one side facing a screened-off proscenium where brightly colored men were performing an elaborate dance.

The place felt like a scene from Kingpin—guys with cheap gold watches, women in warm-up pants and bowling shoes, seedy suit-and-tie types straight from work, retirees, debauched drunks, and a few aficionados who looked like they lived and died with the jai-alai circuit. The average age for the men was about 60, and, for the females, well, lets just say that ghetto Blanche had comparatively little make-up on. If CCL were ever turned into a sports arena, it would be like Milford Jai-Alai—dull orange light, dull orange chairs, cheap food, bored people.

I chose to sit up close, two rows behind the massive fishnet screen that separated the players from the audience, two seats down from some guy in a Patriots jersey. "You're a drunk, Arkaitz!" he screamed at one of the players, "You f**kin' lush! Learn how to play, will ya?" Maybe the "don't cuss" rule only applies to first timers.

With the program's help, it didn't take long to understand the rules. The stage is 200 ft. long and 100 ft. wide. Eight players—pelotari—play in a game, two at a time. Pelotari one, using a curved basket called a cesta, serves the ball, the pelota, over his head and down off the far wall. Pelotari two, standing behind pelotari one, must scoop up the pelota on a bounce into his cesta and throw it back against the wall to pelotari one, and so on until one of them drops the pelota or lets it take two bounces. Because the pelota moves so fast, each exchange only lasts three or four volleys. The winner gets a point, the loser goes back to the dugout, and one of the other six rotates in. The first to seven points wins. In an average night, there are about 14 games.

The coolest part of jai-alai is how fast the pelota moves. The pelota has been clocked at speeds up to 188 miles per hour. With such velocity, and given how hard the ball is, it's no surprise that the sport is dangerous—quite lethal, in fact. One jai-alai website said that only four players have been killed in America, but death rates are much higher elsewhere. Hence, jai-alai is only legal in two states, Florida and Connecticut.

The second-coolest part of jai-alai is the betting. Like horse racing and Foxwoods, jai-alai seems to be run for the sole purpose of taking retirement money from funny little men in fedoras. There are about 30 betting booths right behind the seats where you can place your bets on the pelotari. You can bet anywhere from $3 to $3,500 on a game. Each pelotari is handicapped according to skill, with "Wayne" apparently being the most favored. You can bet on games at Milford Jai-Alai from off-track betting (OTB) stores around the country, and Milford Jai-Alai has its very own OTB from which you can bet on the ponies. Scraps of little white paper clutter the floor, and to fit in with the underworld, wanna-be Las Vegas atmosphere, there are five bars scattered throughout the arena and even a special high-rollers restaurant/lounge with 15—yes, 15—television screens on which to follow the action.

Satisfied, cultured, and about $15 richer thanks to Wayne's exploits, I decided that I had had enough jai-alai for one day. But I'll be back. The Jai-Alai World Championships will be held at Milford Jai-Alai Fri., Nov. 3 through Sun., Nov. 5. "Is this paradise?" I thought as I was leaving. No, it's a fronton.

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