Hard, fast and ignoring danger: Fid-Bau Portal

Hard, fast and ignoring danger

Draper, D.

Racquet sports traditionally conjure up thoughts of tennis, squash and badminton. There is another racquet sport, jai alai, which traces its origins to Roman times. Jai alai was originally played face-to-face on a rough court laid out in the village square on feast days. The development of solid rubber balls compelled a positional change, returning the ball to a wall rather than over a net, which eventually led to the current official title of the fastest ball game in the world and the projectile achieving speeds up to 185 miles per hour. The game is currently very popular in North America. The greatest concentration of jai alai frontons is in the state of Florida. There are no regulations controlling the size of the cancha. Generally they are in the order of an open rectangle with walls 35 feet to 40 feet high. The long, or side, wall will be up to 190 feet in length; the front and back walls up to 36 feet wide. All the basic playing equipment was originally made by hand, and this is still the case today. The pelota, the ball, is approximately three-quarters of the size of a baseball and harder than a golf ball. Its core is hand wound rubber built up over a month of layering, which is then covered with nylon thread. No two pelotas have the same characteristics. There are as many variations on the game as days in the week. Some use a bat or paddle, others a form of strung racquet. The game of which most people are aware is played using the cesta, a long curved beak of a basket attached to the player's hand by a glove and the cinta, a cord which straps the whole assembly in place. Helmets have been mandatory since 1968 as protection against the kiss of a speeding pelota, and, together with elbow and hip padding, are the only form of personal protection required. A short-sleeved shirt provides colour to denote the player's position in the cancha. A sash, the faja, that may also denote the position in European games, supports white trousers. Athletic shoes with maximum grip soles provide traction on both the floor and the walls of the cancha.