One hundred years of Jai Alai in America.

In 1875, in the small Basque town of Azpeitia, a musician and poet named Serafín Baroja — father of the novelist Pío Baroja — coined the phrase Jai Alai. It means, simply, merry festival. The sport itself was older than the name. Basque villagers had been playing a wall-ball game called pilota since at least the 13th century, first with a bare hand, then with a leather glove, and finally, in 1857, with a long curved wicker basket invented by a young man named Gantxiki Harotcha in the town of Saint-Pée-sur-Nivelle. He called it a chistera. Everyone else called it the fastest thing in sport.

The game left the Basque Country twice before it arrived in Miami. First to Cuba in 1898, where the empire of Spain was losing its last colony and a group of Basque immigrants opened a fronton in Havana. Then, briefly and unsuccessfully, to San Francisco in 1901 — the short-lived Eder Jai club, remembered now only in newspaper clippings. Then, in 1904, to St. Louis, where a purpose-built six-thousand-seat fronton opened for the World's Fair — a spectacle that lasted precisely two months before it closed and was converted, ignominiously, into a roller skating rink.

Twenty years passed. In 1923, two Miami realtors named Carson Bradford and Joe Adams founded the South Florida Amusement Company. They had watched Jai Alai in Havana and believed Florida, freshly booming with tourists and pari-mutuel racing, would love it too. Their first fronton, at Hialeah, opened in February 1924 and drew crowds for two seasons before it was flattened by the Great Miami Hurricane on September 18, 1926.

By then a second, larger fronton was rising two miles south, at the corner of 36th Street and 37th Avenue. Its lead investor was Tex Rickard — the boxing promoter who built the third Madison Square Garden and founded the New York Rangers. Rickard's building, Biscayne Jai Alai, lost its roof in the same hurricane. It opened anyway, in the winter of 1926, on time and sold out. Within a decade, sportswriters were calling it the Yankee Stadium of Jai Alai. For the next twenty-seven years, it earned the name.

That is the moment this story begins.

Between 1953 and 1978, Jai Alai frontons opened at a pace that seems, in retrospect, impossible. West Palm Beach in 1955. Daytona in 1959. Orlando in 1962. Melbourne in 1971. Ocala in 1973. Fort Pierce in 1974. And then, unexpectedly, Jai Alai jumped state lines: Bridgeport, Hartford, and Newport in 1976. Milford in 1977. Big Bend in 1978.

At its peak, in the late 1970s, there were fourteen professional frontons in the United States, employing over three hundred pelotaris, most of them Basque and French Basque, a smaller contingent of Cubans and Mexicans, and a handful of Americans who had learned the game at summer clinics in Miami. The Milford fronton alone handled seventy million dollars a year in pari-mutuel wagers. The Miami fronton, on a good Saturday, drew fifteen thousand five hundred and two paying customers — the largest Jai Alai crowd ever recorded.

It was also, quietly, the era of the game's greatest players. Joey Cornblit, the Brooklyn kid who became "Joey" and won championships in three cities — the first American-born player to reach the very top of a sport built by Basques. Bolivar, the Cuban who could throw the ball behind his back. Michelena, the delantero whose serve was so violent it broke the fingers of two opposing zagueros in the same season. In 1967, in Guernica, the legendary frontcourter Orbea was struck in the head by a pelota and never played competitively again. The following winter, helmets became mandatory across every American fronton — a rule that would eventually save more than a dozen careers.

Then, in the spring of 1968, five of the six Florida frontons locked out their players over pay and working conditions — a five-week stoppage that Miami used to fold in its first cohort of American and Cuban-American trainees. It was the first serious labor rupture in the sport's American history. It would not be the last. And by 1980, after fifty-four years as a winter-only attraction, Miami Jai Alai finally went year-round. On any given Friday, the fronton drew larger crowds than the Dolphins.

By the mid-1980s, Jai Alai was no longer just a Miami sport — it was a Miami symbol. When NBC launched Miami Vice in 1984, the opening credits ran a two-second cut of a pelotari mid-throw, cesta blurred against a fronton wall. For a generation of Americans who had never set foot in Florida, that was Jai Alai: fast, exotic, unmistakably Miami.

Even at the top, the cracks were showing. In 1977, a federal jury in Connecticut convicted seventeen members of the "Miami Syndicate" of fixing 253 matches at the Milford fronton. The convictions were the highest-profile prosecution in the history of American Jai Alai. They would not be the last.

In February 1990, the Melbourne fronton converted its license to greyhound racing. Two months later, Big Bend closed for good. Daytona followed in 1992. West Palm Beach in 1994. Bridgeport was gone by April 1995. Hartford — the largest fronton in the Northeast, with an experienced ownership team and a dedicated fan base — closed at the end of the 1995 season. The stated reason was the cost of player healthcare.

Between 1990 and 2003, twelve of the fourteen American frontons closed or converted their pari-mutuel licenses to greyhound or simulcast racing. Foxwoods opened in 1992, and Native American gaming, followed by state lotteries and then by online sportsbooks, offered every disappointed bettor an easier way to lose money. There was nothing charming about a Basque man throwing a ball against a wall when you could pull a lever and win instantly.

The last traditional Jai Alai fronton in America, Dania Beach, went dark in the spring of 2019. Its final players were pensioned off or sent home. The court was emptied. The rooming house was sold to a developer.

The sport that had opened in Miami in 1926 and defined a city for three generations seemed, to most critics, to be heading towards extinction.

But just down the road, a new kind of Jai Alai was taking form. A developing league — the World Jai Alai League — had a different future in mind for the sport, and no intention of letting Jai Alai fade into the past. They were building towards an epic revival.