Miss Spence threw down her cigarette and stamped on it.
“Haven’t they caught that bastard yet?” she demanded angrily.
5
Jai alai is the fastest and toughest sport in the world. It is played with a cesta or basket, strapped to the player’s right hand. The curved, three-foot basket has a maximum depth of five inches. A player can wear out three or four baskets during a contest. The hard, rubber-cored ball or pelota, s lightly smaller than a baseball, is covered with goatskin.
The ball is driven with such speed that it sometimes breaks a leg or arm. The playing court or cachet is spacious, its gr een walls rising to the high-netted skylight of the auditorium. Where the concrete of the cacha floor ends in the red foul line and meets the wooden floor of the auditorium, there is a vertical wire screen which protects the tiers of customers.
The server drops the ball, catches it on the rebound, and hurls it with a terrific forehand stroke against the wall. The opposing player has to intercept the ball with his basket and keep it in play. The players move like lightning, their cesta-lengthened hands reaching out miraculously to intercept and return bullet-like rallies of the ball. The pelot a c ontinues in play until it falls in illegal territory, or a contestant fails to make good a return.
There are few ball games calling for greater strength, endurance and skill, and it is said most jai alai players die young. If they’re not sooner or later severely injured by the ball, their hearts give out.
I had followed Miss Spence and her boy friend in their Cadillac sedan to a large coral-tinted stucco building, which turned out to be the jai alai headquarters. I had watched Miss Spence leave her boy friend at the player’s gate and enter the auditorium. I had tagged along behind her.
Now I was sitting beside her on a plush seat in the front row of the first of the tiers behind the wire screen, looking down into the floodlit cac ha.
Four energetic young Spaniards were dashing about the floor slamming the almost invisible ball back and forth, and performing acrobatic miracles. The crowd seemed to be getting a big bang out of them, but I was more interested in Miss Spence.