On the season’s last Saturday night on Nov. There were more people and money bet over the last two weeks than the venue had seen in years, Bueno said. Conway helped to gather former players and diehard fans from the Tampa area who arrived aboard two charter buses. They came by car from Florida cities that once hosted jai alai, and they came by plane from other states where the sport was once popular. Players, too, saw their incomes drop as nightly betting totals declined.Īnd then, amid the sadness of the season’s final weeks, as the final weekend drew closer, something inspiring happened, Bueno said.įans returned to say goodbye. “If I had to guess, I’d say they were losing $1 million a year on jai alai,” he said. As jai alai’s prominence diminished, attendance at the fronton dwindled to a few dozen each night.įinally last spring, the Seminole tribe and the Florida Legislature negotiated an agreement allowing parimutuels in the state to “decouple” their unprofitable horse racing and jai alai attractions.Īlthough the Dania Beach casino’s Argentinian owners supported jai alai, the decision was a no-brainer, Conway said. Dania Jai Alai Fronton became The Casino Dania Beach, with multiple events and attractions. Gamblers no longer needed to leave their homes. Then came the Florida Lottery, casinos on cruise ships and Seminole Indian reservations, Major League Baseball, professional basketball, and finally, new laws allowing declining parimutuels to offer casino games.īut there was a catch: Those laws required parimutuels to keep their sports going - even as crowds and betting totals dwindled - as a condition of offering the more lucrative casino games.īetting via closed-circuit television blossomed, followed by betting via online streaming video. In its heyday, thousands of fans regularly packed fronton grandstands, largely because jai alai frontons were among the few places that allowed legalized gambling. The popularity of jai alai, a centuries-old sport founded in the Basque regions of Spain and France and introduced to the United States in 1904, had steadily fallen since peaking between the 1950s and 1980s. They understood the reasoning, Bueno said. “Everyone took the decision as though it was going to be permanent.” Players and support staff at the Dania casino “went through a very emotional period at the end of 2021,” said Benny Bueno, a former player who served as the casino’s jail alai operations manager for more than a decade.

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