The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [138]
The many other variations of pelota with baskets and paddles of different sizes were designed to make the ball go faster, making it harder to return, but in a bare-handed match the point is scored by carefully setting up the opponent through the placement of the ball over a series of volleys.
The players used to come from families of players, and many still do. Retegi II, born in 1954, won championships almost every year in the 1980s and 1990s. Tintin III was another leading player. The numbers after their names indicate the number of generations of champions. Panpi LaDouche, the greatest champion from the French provinces, was trained by his father in the family court in the village of Ascain in the Nivelle Valley. His legal name is Jean-Pierre, because until recently, parents were not allowed to register their children’s birth certificates in France with a non-French first name.
Pelota ticket, 1928. (Euskal Arkeologia, Etnografia eta Kondaira Museoa, Bilbao)
One thing Basques in the 1970s could all agree on was that Panpi LaDouche was beautiful. His surprisingly agile, muscular body played the forward court with merciless precision. Though he was right-handed, his left hand could scoop the ball off the left wall, whip it across his body to the far corner of the front wall and up into the spectators’ section before his opponent could touch it. The move is called the gantxo. Panpi spent four or five hours a day at home with his father, a former professional, developing the left-handed gantxo. In 1970 he became the first man born on the French side to win both the French and Spanish championship.
The sport has become more popular and more profitable than ever because of television. The game is organized into clubs, empresas. Typically, an empresa will control fifty players and arrange matches between them. The empresa earns a percentage of the ticket sales and the betting. But in the 1990s, the empresas, like the players, were earning most of their money from selling broadcast rights to television. With television bringing much more money into the sport, professional bare-handed pelota players are no longer trained by their fathers but hire personal trainers, and, as in other professionals sports, the players are becoming stronger and faster.
But Basques work in families, and one aspect of this sport has remained that way: the balls. When an empresa arranges a match, it also chooses the balls. Down the river from Bilbao, past the shipyards and steel mills and the soot-blackened, crowded apartment buildings where a worker can stand on his cramped balcony and stare out at the smokestacks and grime belching from his factory, is Sestao. Like many blue-collar towns in Vizcaya, the center is marked by three things: a soccer stadium, a fronton, and a cemetery.
At the far end of the fronton, up a set of metal steps, is a six-by-twelve-foot room. This is Cipri, the “factory” where the world’s best pelotas, most of the balls chosen for professional matches, are made. Cipri is short for Cipriano. The first Cipriano Ruiz started making the balls in the nineteenth century. His son, also Cipriano Ruiz, began in the 1930s. In the 1990s they were made by the second Cipriano’s two sons, Cipriano and Roberto. Cipri never had employees, because the business depends on keeping secrets. When a manager orders balls, he tells them which fronton the match will be in. Each court has different walls and a different floor, and the Ruizes know all of them. The manager might have other requests. Make it fast, make it slow,