jai alai

Reviewed by Richard V. McGehee, University of Texas at Austin

31 may 2019 archive

Being an old handball and racquetball player and having attended jai alai matches in Mexico City and Havana, I was very interested in seeing this book. Given its subtitle, I hoped it would turn out to be comparable to Heiner Gillmeister's monumental Tennis: A Cultural History (London: Leicester Univ. Press, 1997). No such luck.

Jai alai is one of a group of games referred to generally as pelota vasca (Basque ball game). It is distinguished from the others by its use of a cesta (a basket-like device) strapped to the player's right hand and used to catch and throw the ball. Other forms of pelota vasca include the use of hands, paddles (palas) or racquets to propel the ball. The variety played with racquets is called frontenis. The courts (frontones) have front, left side, and back walls, and a boundary line but no wall on the right side, which is open for viewing by spectators. Jai alai is almost exclusively professional, and exists basically as a vehicle for betting. The other forms of pelota vasca are for recreational play, and all varieties of the game originated in the Basque country of northern Spain and southwestern France.

The book opens with several pages referring to a 1986 episode of Miami Vice which featured a backdrop of jai alai and its associated gambling, Also included in the introductory section is a brief description of the jai alai court, equipment, and basic rules and general pattern of play of the game, and some information about the Basques and their language.

This book's intriguing subtitle lays claim to its being "a cultural history," which is a bit of a stretch, and to "the world's fastest game," which refers to the speed of the ball and not the players, whose movements are not generally more rapid than those found in many other sports. The record-producing ball speed of 188 mph was measured during a promotional speed-throwing contest during a rest period between games and measured by a police radar gun in Newport, RI, in 1979. Given the normal speed/accuracy trade-off in sports, it's unlikely that such ball speed would occur during actual game play.

The author mentions many sources of information she consulted as background for the book, but her own presentation doesn't always inspire confidence. For example on p. 26 she refers to jai alai as a "right-handed game," and then tells the story of a Spanish player who had lost his right arm and yet "played extraordinarily well with his left." She doesn't mention that all pelotari (jai alai players) are required to play right handed because, the court having only a left side wall, a left-handed player would have the advantage of being able to take balls along the side with forehands whereas the righties must use their backhands. Another example (p. 36) involves two very brief and almost entirely unbelievable stories of the possible origins of jai alai (i.e., pelota vasca with cesta). In a chapter devoted to the jai alai ball, the largely irrelevant and unrelated Mesoamerican ball game and pelota mixteca (a pre-Hispanic ball game still played in Oaxaca, Mexico) are mentioned, and in a chapter on jai alai in Cuba, two pages are devoted to details of battles in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the rest of this chapter is mainly about General Leonard Wood's political problems related to his support of jai alai in Havana.

Perhaps the most interesting sections of the book are the stories of jai alai's introduction in the U.S. (Florida) by Cuban promoters in the early 20th century, and its appearances in such places as Chicago, New York City, Hartford and Bridgeport, CT (and China!), and related questions of its associated gambling.

The glossary, notes, and selected bibliography are helpful adjuncts to the book, although the notes and bibliography would be more useful if there were more direct connections made between text and sources. Valuable as these references may be, readers who are actually interested in them may be disappointed by much of the rest of the book, especially the general lack of depth, completeness, and organization of its content, including the origins and evolution of jai alai's predecessor forms of pelota vasca and intriguing phenomena such as the special court (trinquete) that contains a shed running along the base of the sidewall.

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