Bounding Basques

In Southwestern Europe, it was Pelota Week. From Biarritz on the Atlantic coast to Orthez and Oloron-Sainta-Marie in the heart of the Pyrenees, Basques were playing their national game. Shepherds and schoolboys, fishermen and priests, customs inspectors and smugglers ran each other ragged as they whipped a goatskin-covered ball against any convenient wall and went through the swift gyrations of pelota, that rugged ancestor of jai alai, handball and most other court games.

At Saint-Jean-de-Luz, spectators ignored a broiling sun and crowded the town fronton, as the pelota court is called. Kids clambered in the branches of chest nut trees to get a better view. This was the biggest pelota game of all: the championship match between a team led by Basque Idol Jean Urruty and a team headed by his closest competitor, Spanish Champion Valentin Careaga.

Above the Bar. On regulation pelota courts, the fronton wall is 16 meters wide and ten meters high. The flat concrete floor is 70 meters long. After the pelota, a rubber-cored ball, is smacked against the wall, an opposition player must catch it and fire it back before it has bounced more than once. Points are lost by missing the ball, tossing it against the wall below an iron bar set one yard above the ground, or sending it sailing beyond the bounds of the concrete floor.

Over the years, Basques have developed four varieties of pelota:

¶ Main nue, played by two-man teams, in which the ball is walloped with the bare hand. No one has ever toughened his palms enough to be a good main nue player unless he started as a child.

¶ Yoko garbi, in which two-or three-man teams carry short, sickle-shaped wicker baskets. These chisteras, used for both catching and throwing, add a wicked impetus to the pelota.

¶ Grand chistera, played by three-man teams with extra-long chisteras. This is the fastest and most spectacular variety, the favorite of the pros.

¶ Rebot, played by five-man teams. Four of the players carry yoko-garbi chisteras, the fifth serves with his bare hand, then straps on a stiff leather glove.

Swift Skill. Slim and lively as a weasel for all his 40 years, Jean Urruty is a past master at grand chistera. Next to the husky Spaniards in their rose-colored shirts, Urruty and his teammates looked a little too frail for so tough a game, but the very first serve dispelled any Basque doubts. Urruty bounced the pelota, caught it in his chistera and slung it against the wall with whiplash speed. There was a sharp, dry crack, and the ball had bounced back 60 yards. The Spaniards were already on the defensive.

Such swift skill is the product of long practice. As a ten-year-old choir boy in the tiny Basque town of Saint-Palais, Jean Urruty was already a promising pelotari. Sunday mornings, after Mass, his priest would take him to the local court for an hour-long workout at main nue. At 14, he quit school to become a carpenter's apprentice, but his heart was still at the fronton. French Tennis Champion Jean ("The Bounding Basque") Borotra, a fine pelotari himself, took the youngster under his wing, brought him to Paris and taught him tennis. Urruty was soon good enough to go on an exhibition tour with French Tennist Henri Cochet.