Jai Alai: Fury At The Fronton

"I said, 'What the hell do you think you're calling me?' It had never occurred to him."

In recent years the fans in Miami , where the big money draws the best in the game during the winter season, have mellowed somewhat, and some have even come to appreciate the finer points of the game, even as the aficionados in Guernica and Barcelona and San Sebasti�n . One hears applause for players who have tried and failed to make the spectacular "gets" that call for mountain-goat agility up the perpendicular wall, and a player who is injured is no longer excoriated as a fink but applauded as a fallen hero. "Sophistication was a long time coming," says Berenson, "but I think you can say it is here at last. Of course, we still have the elderly people out for a good time, the ones who can't even pronounce the players' names and keep everybody else in stitches. They call Chimela 'Shlemiel' and Mendizabal 'Matzo Ball' and Bengoa 'Benny' and Arakistain 'Rocky Stein.' One night I heard a woman rooting her head off for Francisco. She was saying, 'Come on, Franciscoleh baby!' "

A few years back the parimutuels were being distorted nightly by an excellent player named Isidoro who specialized in a "Manolete" shot. Just as Manolete used to pass the bull while looking somewhere else, Isidoro would catch the ball on the short hop and slam it back to the front wall while staring at a little old lady in the third row. Thousands would cheer, and the opponent would feel a whammy creeping over him. Shortly after the clever Isidoro arrived on the scene, word went out that he was Jewish; his name and his long (and typically Basque) nose were all the proof the fans needed. "He denied it," said Berenson, "but people said he must be Jewish with that name and that nose. They said he was descended from the Inquisition Jews who ran away to the hills and took the Catholic religion to stay alive."

From then on, poor Isidoro was an underlay in Miami . Two dollars bet on Isidoro's long nose would return only $2.50 or $3, partially because he was a star but mostly because he was an Isidoro. In the sports folklore of the Barney Rosses and the Sid Luckmans and the Al Rosens, Isidoro will be remembered as one of the greatest non-Jewish Jewish athletes.

To capitalize on the high percentage of Jewish spectators, the Miami fronton's archcompetitor at Dania, 22 miles up the road, once installed an " Israel " team in its "International World Series of Jai Alai." The two players on the " Israel " team, Egurbi and Ituarte, were as Jewish as Francisco Franco -which led Howard Kleinberg of the Miami Daily News to ask, "Could that be Irving Egurbi?" Soon after, the Israeli team was provided with a new country to represent.

To the minor annoyance of the jai alai purist, such artificial devices remain a commonplace in the vigorous competition for the tourist's dollar. Even the Berensons, merchants of jai alai but also ardent devotees of the grace and beauty of the game, are not above gilding the act. In a recent "World Series" game in their Miami fronton, the Berensons presented a team from " The Philippines ," consisting of a Basque and a Mexican. The team from the " United States " was a Basque and a Valencian, and the players representing Italy , Mexico , France and Spain were all Basques. "We're not trying to kid anybody," says Buddy Berenson. "After all, the program tells plainly where every player's from. But we find it heightens interest to assign countries to the teams, and the purists still get a damned good game of jai alai." So far the Berensons have managed to resist the temptation to nominate an Israeli team—and have not been tempted at all to name an Arab one.

There is also a slight overdose of hoopla about the perils and pace of jai alai ("fastest and most dangerous game in the world") aimed at intriguing the unknowing spectator and making an interesting game more interesting. To be sure, the pelota does come off the wall at measurable speeds in the range of 150 mph, the fastest of any sporting object in the world (if one discounts bullets, golf balls and racing cars). But the ball usually travels something like 200 or 300 feet before it is caught and returned, giving the receiving player a chance to get set and thus eliminating many of the high-speed reflexive battles that one sees in close-up sports like tennis and football. There is somewhat more substance to the claim that jai alai is highly perilous. In weight and hardness, the pelota lies somewhere between a baseball and a snooker ball, and when it thuds into a player at top speed a shudder goes through the most untutored audience. Front-court play can be downright homicidal. Erdoza, a famous player of three decades ago, once slammed the ball into the front wall at close range. The rebound knocked out all his front teeth. In the 1930s a player named Ramos was hit by a ball that had traveled all the way to the front wall and 176 feet to the back wall before bouncing off and hitting him in the skull. "You could hear it all over the fronton," Buddy Berenson said. "He walked off, but there was no blood showing and that is a bad sign. Whenever a player is hit, the others rush up trying to laugh it off and praying for the sight of blood, because blood means a glancing blow. Ramos died several hours later in the hospital. There were splinters of skull in his brain."

Another player, Carlos de Anda, was beaned in the Miami fronton, taken to the hospital and operated on to relieve pressure on his brain. "His is the only case of its kind I know," said Berenson. "He had always been an austere type of person, but after the operation he became very jolly and outgoing. He's retired now, a bookie at the fronton in Mexico City , and he's the happiest person there." The great Churruca was hit, too, but it did not make him any happier. Taking a rebote (rebound) shot off the back wall, he misjudged the curve of the ball. It smacked off his cesta and caromed into his temple. "I do not think I am hurt very bad," Churruca remembered, "but then I see that I am sitting down and the door is facing first one way and then another way, and then I am not seeing nothing at all."

Like pilots who crack up, jai alai players are rushed back into action as soon as they are ambulatory, to reduce the chance of a permanent phobia. According to Berenson, there has never been a quitter in the pro game or one who permitted cowardice to shade his play. One might conclude that all such tendencies to be chicken (or "jellow," as Churruca puts it) would long since have been bred out of the players in the frontons of the Basque country, else they would not be playing professionally at all. "The closest we had was a player who was terrified of the ball, but being a Basque he didn't even know this himself," Berenson said. "He went out on the court night after night, playing a good game, a brave game, and all the time he was scared on another level of his mind. Pretty soon the symptoms began. He'd get dizzy on the court. He'd get double vision and headaches. We took him to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist said he was frightened deep inside. We had to send him back to Spain . To this day he doesn't think he was afraid."

The same sort of inner discipline keeps the new breed of jai alai player from letting his emotions show on the court. In the old days certain players would flail their cestas on the floor and pound the wall and shout "Dios!" after blowing a shot. But managers discouraged this. "It gets too much like the way wrestlers act," explained one, "and that's the last image in the world we need." Nowadays a player will miss a shot, smile sportingly while the crowd screams, "Bruta! bruta!" and hurry to the privacy of the players' room to exact revenge on himself. "They are locked into that room from 6:30 to 12:30 every night," said Berenson, "and when they get back after a poor performance, that's when they let the tigers out of their bellies, as they say in Spain . Pedro Mir once butted the wall in the players' room and split his head wide open. I saw another player pick up an iron chair and throw it up as high as he could and then stick his head under it. It knocked him cold, and he played the next night. A great player named Guillermo lost a big championship game and came storming back to the players' room. His cesta was still strapped on his right hand so he lifted a 10-gallon water jug, crooked it in his left arm and broke it on the ceiling. Then he let all the broken glass and water fall down on him."