Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

The heart of jai alai

A Dania Beach man continues to make the expensive jai alai balls to keep a hand in the sport he once played.

DANIA BEACH - Long, long before Julio Anchia came to the yellow cinderblock room in the back of the Dania Beach fronton, he learned jai alai in a town called Marquina in the Basque country. All the boys in that town did.

The best went to a school to refine their skills, and when they left, they went to Mexico or Cuba or the United States to play professionally. Anchia left because he did not want to grow vegetables like his parents did.

When he was 16, he went to Italy, where he made $1,000 a month, then Tijuana for more money, then Miami, where he made more than $2,000 a month and finished his career. He was not a very good player. Nor was he bad, and in those days that was enough, because the sport was healthy. Twelve thousand people showed up some nights in Miami.

He quit after the 1968 players' strike, and a few years later went to work in Dania Beach making jai alai balls. He still works there, in a small yellow-stained room with no windows in back of the fronton.

He is 68: a big man, as most players are, but shorter than the giants today. He is wearing reading glasses and a white T-shirt that says "St. Brendan's Creme Liquor," made filthy over the belly, where he holds the jai alai ball to do his work.

His tools and materials are in front of him on the short old table. They are a stapler, press, needle and thread, goatskin and rubber cores.

The cores come from the Philippines. They make a cracking sound when they bounce. They are dense and hard as stone, which is what ballmakers used in the very old days, along with pellets of dung.

Each core costs $125, which is why practically every fronton in the world has a man like Anchia: the balls are too precious to throw away.

Dania Beach will spend close to $100,000 on balls and the ballmaker's salary this year. Anchia wraps nylon thread around the core so the goatskin will grip. He takes out a big sheet of the stuff - imported - he says, from a particular firm in London for $1,600 a roll.

The leather used on baseballs is cheap enough so Major League baseball can toss away foul balls but it is too heavy and deadeningly soft for jai alai.

He cuts an hourglass piece and soaks it two days in water to make the skin pliable. The first layer is damp and it clings tight when he staples it down. When it dries, he sews the top layer and pulls the seams tight.

The ball goes into the press, into hollow hemispheres that crank together to knock down the seams and give an even bounce. After all this, it will see no more than a couple of hours of play before some young hotshot splits the skin on a 170-, even 180-mile-per-hour throw. Sometimes the ball grows so hot that the rubber core vulcanizes and cracks, but more often it just expands and the skin rips. That happens about 20 times a night.

Anchia used to throw pretty hard himself, when he was young. The last time he threw was five or six years ago, with some friends. Nobody could see, so it was lucky that nobody could throw either. But so slow.

"A slow ball" - here a disdainful pfff - "is boring. Hard is good."

Every so often one of the young giants comes into the yellow cinderblock room. Anchia has chocolate chip cookies and he makes very thick sweet coffee on a hotpot.

He has a pile of Sports Illustrated magazines that ends in 1985 and gets earlier as it gets deeper, like the strata of sedimentary rock. He has last week's newspapers from Spain.

The giants are in their colors already. They say "bueno," sip their coffee and hurry out, because the night's performance will soon start: the anthem, the salute, the crack and breaking of more balls.

There will be new life for them, maybe too for this sport: Dallas, Philippines, Shanghai, expansion, its promoters whisper.

Not the same for a man. Sad. How unfair.

No, says Anchia. "I don't have much time left. I never did find anything bad here. Everything was good. I have more than I thought I was going to have."

[Last modified January 23, 2006, 00:59:12]