Can Miami Save This 150-Year-Old Sport from Near Extinction?
While jai-alai is thriving in other parts of the world, the last frontons in the US are trying to revive the sport.
To an entire generation, the fast-paced sport of jai-alai isn’t a game, it’s an IPA made by local brewery, Cigar City—and that’s a problem for Scott Savin.
“This game is amazing and it has a cool history,” he raves over the sound of hard thwacks of a pelota against the glass-walled fronton at the Magic City Casino, which he runs. “There’s pictures of Hemingway in Cuba with a team of jai-alai players on his boat, hurling grenades at German U-boats. It’s documented! Man, this sport is amazing.”
What was once a sport that commanded crowds in the thousands has since come to a halt across the country—leaving Miami as the last place in the U.S. where you can see this sport in action at Magic City Casino and Dania Beach Casino.
Savin, one of few remaining jai-alai enthusiasts, is attempting to revive the self-proclaimed “fastest game on earth,” with a new format he believes will capture a modern audience and put jai-alai back in the American sports conversation. And while some skeptics might call his efforts a longshot at best, Savin is passionate that with the right Miami mix of speed, celebrity, and online wagering, jai-alai might once again become more than just the name of a tasty, hoppy beer.
When jai-alai ruled the South Florida sports world
Jai-alai was once as much a part of Miami culture as cafecitos and running late, the biggest game in town when the Dolphins weren’t playing.
“Back then, we weren’t really competing with anything,” says Chris Bueno, a second-generation jai-alai player who currently plays in Savin’s World Jai-Alai League. “The Panthers didn’t exist. The Marlins didn’t exist. There was jai-alai, and that was it.”
The game dates back almost four centuries, originating as an outdoor variation of handball in the Basque region of Spain. It evolved into its current form where players hurl a pelota at a glass wall using a curved basket attached to their right hand called a cesta. The cesta creates a ball velocity of up to 150 miles per hour, making the game frenetically fast-paced and athletically demanding.
Jai-alai found its niche in American sports as a parimutuel game, as crowds flocked to frontons to bet on players in a sort of round robin, king-of-the-mountain format where point winners stayed on the court and losers went to the end of the line. The spectacle reached its pinnacle in Miami’s vice-fueled glam of the 1970s and ’80s, creating a sports “scene” decades before Pegasus or Formula 1.
The smoke-filled frontons of this era were places to see and be seen, an early-evening nightclub filled with gold chains and expensive suits. Jai-alai was featured in the opening sequence to Miami Vice, and has popped up everywhere in pop culture from Heineken commercials to The Simpsons and Mad Men.
A two-year players’ strike in the 1980s began the sport’s decline. A few years later, the Miami Heat came on the scene, followed shortly after by the Marlins and Panthers. With four pro sports and a burgeoning South Beach nightlife scene, Miami made jai-alai an entertainment afterthought by the mid-1990s. In the early-2000s, it was niche. By the 2010s, it only survived because a law required casinos to operate a parimutuel to keep their licenses.
That law ended in 2021, so casinos like Dania Beach and Miami Jai-Alai had no use for the sport. Miami closed its airport-adjacent fronton permanently, but Dania stayed open to give jai-alai a dying breath.
“When the decoupling bill passed, some tough decisions had to be made,” says Benny Bueno, Chris’ father and current Jai-Alai Operations Manager at the Casino at Dania Beach. “The ownership group at Dania, they like jai-alai, and know without the sport they’d never have had a casino. But there’s no obligation of playing at all, they play it because of the tradition and culture.”
Dania Beach—the lone fronton in America where people can still go watch the traditional format—cut its fronton’s capacity from several thousand seats to about 400 when it expanded its casino. Before decoupling, Dania Beach played about 150 performances a year. Now, it runs a seasonal three-month tournament from December to February, a novelty attraction for gamblers looking for something to do between slot machines and trips to the buffet.
“When people come in for a show, or to grab a bite or whatever, they can’t help but to look right and see this ball is hitting a wall, people are running around and yelling,” Benny Bueno says. “They get intrigued, they stay for five or 10 minutes, but it’s really a matter of education. We need to educate a younger group on how to watch jai-alai.”
A new kind of jai-alai emerges in the Magic City
While Dania Beach holds down America’s last bastion of traditional jai-alai, Savin is taking the game in a different direction at Miami’s Magic City Casino.
“We did a focus group and nobody got [the parimutuel style],” he says. “People said we want something we can readily understand, that’s like other sports. You can’t be arrogant when you’re on death’s door, so we came up with the team concept.”
His World Jai-Alai League plays the game in a match-play format similar to tennis, which he calls “Battle Court.” Each team is comprised of six players, who compete in singles and doubles matches. The first to win six points wins a set; the first to win two sets wins a match; the team who wins the most matches wins that night’s performance.
Battle Court also shortens the length of the fronton to make the fastest game on earth even faster. Savin has invested heavily in the fan experience, inviting celebrity owners like Udonis Haslem, Ray Lewis, and Dan LeBatard to own WJAL teams. Pitbull is an equity investor, and Spanish radio host Kim Marie has a team as well. It’s not exactly ringside at UFC, but the sport has generated at least a little bit of celebrity buzz.
“It’s a perfect pregame or happy hour,” adds Savin’s daughter Lindsay, who is also WJAL’s head of communications. “Enjoy the $7 drinks, have fun with your friends, and watch a sport you’ve never seen before. You can’t do it anywhere else.”
Betting big on gambling and TikTok
The big difference between Battle Court and traditional parimutuel jai-alai is that the live audience can’t bet on Battle Court. The parimutuel format—where fans bet on games like they would horse races—is still legal, but Battle Court’s match play format is considered a sport rather than a parimutuel. And in Florida, the Seminole Tribe has a monopoly on sports wagering, the same Seminoles who own the competing Hard Rock casinos.
That means the Magic City Casino—or anywhere in Florida that’s not associated with the tribe—can’t take action on the games. FanDuel and Draftkings offer wagers on Battle Court jai-alai, but the pools are only open to people in other states. The audience in Miami still can’t bet, and Savin knows the key to his long-term success is the energy that comes from live wagering.
“If we were legal in Florida, we’d be profitable, or at least break even, overnight,” he says. “But for now, you can come watch it, and it’s a whole different thing when you can hear the excitement of it.”
Even lacking live wagering, WJAL audiences have increased significantly over the five years since it launched. The sport has also some traction on TikTok, where Savin live streams jai-alai matches that average about 100,000 views.
“They may only watch for a minute or two or three, but they like it and it's interactive and they chat on it,” he says. “We’ve built a big following between TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.”
Whether social media and live wagering are able to save the fastest game on earth remains to be seen. Benny Bueno says Dania’s parimutuel matches draw a couple hundred people to the fronton, and get about 1,500 YouTube views per performance. Savin has been able to get his Battle Court format on ESPN+, and the World Finals will be broadcast on ESPN2 live this September.
“It's the fastest, most diverse ball sport in the world. And where else in Miami can you go park for free?” he continues. “The main goal is that in a few years jai-alai is a household name. I don’t know if we’ll be able to save it, but we’re gonna give it everything we can.”