Scribblings › Back in the Jai Life

Thwack! The rock hard goatskin ball rips the air at up to 188 m.p.h. Players with long wicker baskets lashed to their forearms leap, dive, and twist their bodies with breathtaking acrobatic precision, trying to avoid a crash into the sidewall.

On the basis of sheer athletic excitement, watching jai alai is a blast. And then there's the added bonus of feeling you've got the inside track on one of the greatest little secrets in American spectator sports. A sort of adrenalized round-robin handball with origins 500 years ago as a churchyard game in the Basque region between Spain and France, jai alai (pronounced hi-li), is popular in southern Europe and Latin America and was an exhibition sport at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. But in the U.S. it's unjustly obscure, played only in Florida, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

A jai alai arena—called a fronton—delivers the ultimate guys-night-out atmosphere. The air is thick with cigar smoke, there are bars at the back of the stands, and you can gamble on the players (The wagering system is a snap to master if you've ever bet horses). At the Miami fronton, considered the Yankee Stadium of jai alai, you can take a break from the action to play poker under crystal chandeliers. Nothing this much fun will ever show up on a Wheaties box.

Unfortunately for devoted players, whose salaries start at under $25,000 and max out at $100,000, jai alai's popularity seems to have been stunted by the alleged taint of gambling, despite the fact that the game is highly regulated. "It's ridiculous," says Alberto Echabaru, 19, a rising star at the Fort Pierce, FL fronton who's dreamed of a career in jai alai since age 3, when his father was a star in Mexico, "Think about how much money is gambled on every baseball and football game in this country. And then you turn on ESPN2 and you see guys playing some Magic The Gathering trading card game and they're calling that a real sport." Thwack!