They were the first professional athletes in Spain. Their salaries reached four times the average salary of the time. They filled a multitude of pediments every afternoon, not only in Madrid, but also in Cuba, Mexico or Brazil, and were like collectible cards. However, in the 1980s, they suddenly disappeared and were forgotten, even in their original places. 40 years later, various documentaries and even fictional series like “Las pelotaris 1926” attempt to rediscover the story of thousands of racket players who were pioneers of women’s sport. Gloria Aguirre, María Antonia Uzkudun and Josefina González are among the more than 2,000 women who were professional racket players between 1917 and 1981, when the last fronton where matches of this type were played closed. Its decline began under the Franco regime, when permits were no longer granted to women. The lack of generational change ultimately caused the end of this discipline in the 1980s. From now on, pelotaris are a minority and can in no way make a living from this sport.
One of the best racket players in history was Gloria Aguirre, known in the frontons as “Txikita de Aizarna”, who was also one of the last to practice this type of sport. Since she was little, she played ball on the fronton of this town of Gipuzkoa, “first by hand and against boys,” she says. But it wasn’t until he was 18 that he discovered he could become a professional. It was the summer of 1963 and a Madrid businessman, owner of a pediment, met her and her father in Hondarribia to negotiate her contract. “My parents imposed my studies as a condition, so I enrolled in pharmacy,” he says. So in the morning he went to school and in the afternoon he put on his white pelotari uniform and went to the fronton to play up to two matches a day. “There came a time when I had to ask to only play three days a week because it was impossible for me to combine studies and training,” he recalls.
“You could be a pelota player and study, work or even be a mother,” says Gloria Aguirre, given the false belief that many stopped playing professionally when they got married. “It’s a projection of what happened in other contexts, but it wasn’t like that in pelota,” says the professor of social anthropology at the University of the Basque Country in his book “Raquetistas : glory, repression and oblivion of professional pelotaris”. (UPV/EHU) Olatz González Abrisketa. “Some even asked their husbands to follow them wherever they went,” he adds.
Not everyone welcomed the fact that a woman was a professional athlete.
Gloria Aguirre
— racket player
To find the first female racket players in the archives, we have to go back much earlier, to the beginning of the 20th century. Although there were already women playing ball at the end of the 19th century, the professionalization of the sport came with the racket. It was the racket players who, from 1917, could begin to live on the income generated by their ball games.
That year, Bilbao businessman Luciano Berriatua saw women playing with rackets on a pediment and thought this new type of ball might be popular with the public. Together with former San Sebastián player Ildefonso Anabitarte, they transformed a performance hall on Cedaceros Street in the capital into the so-called Madrid Fronton (with shorter dimensions than the usual pediment to fit it with the characteristics of the racket), inaugurated the same year with a squad of 16 Basque racket players. “Soon the press highlighted the great skill of women in the game, emphasizing their ability and indicating that they were very numerous and lasted up to six or seven minutes,” Olatz González Abrisketa points out in his book.
In the 1930s, Basque pelota in its racket form was already one of the most popular sports in Spain and women were the main protagonists. To the point that more than half of the total professional baseball licenses were reserved for women, whose salaries reached 4,000 pesetas per month, four times more than the average salary of the time and much higher than that of men. Before the start of the civil war, there were frontons all over the country, as well as in Cuba, Brazil or Mexico, and their businessmen made considerable profits from sports betting and tickets.
With the arrival of the Franco regime and the appointment as Secretary of State for Sports of General José Moscardó, who described ball as “an unfeminine activity contributing to sterility”, the decline of female racket players began. In July 1944, the Official Journal of the National Sports Delegation published a provision entitled “Prohibition of professionalism in the game of racquetball” which established the closure of racquetball schools, prohibited the issuance of federal licenses to “young racquet players” and grants licenses. a period of two years for the transformation of pediments of this type.
They told me I had to stop playing because my hands were damaged.
Maité Ruiz de Larramendi
— pelota player
Pressure from the baseball industry, which lived largely on the revenue generated by women’s matches, which attracted the largest audience and brought in the most money in betting, stopped the closure of frontons for racket players, which continued to function, even though they continued to function. stop renewing and granting new licenses to women. Thus, explains Olatz González Abrisketa in his book, “the paintings have aged and made the practice unviable.” Snowshoe schools were closed – located mainly in the Basque Country – because younger people could not make their debut and new generations of women “stopped considering snowshoeing as a professional option”.
Added to this is the figure of Luis Bombín, author of the “Great Book of the Ball” in 1976, considered “the bible of the ball”, who silenced and omitted the figure of the racket players in his works on the ball Basque. hiding data such as the fact that they had a greater number of professional licenses than men. He only described these women pioneers of professional sport in Spain as “beautiful big balls”. […] “more typical of cinema than of virile and masculine agitation. » “[Bombín] “This caused the systematic forgetting of the pelotaris woman in subsequent treatises, which echoed numerous historical inaccuracies, even lies, of the works in which she participated,” emphasizes Olatz González Abrisketa.
The misogynistic messages towards female players weren’t just reflected in the books. In a sport where the fronton audience was predominantly male, there was no shortage of sexist and derogatory comments towards players during matches. “Not everyone welcomed a woman becoming a professional athlete,” says Gloria Aguirre. “He also made comments to us about our looks, like ‘what beautiful legs’ or ‘look at how they are dressed’,” he adds.
However, it was not until the 1980s that the racquet sport came to an end. Women like Gloria, the “Txikita de Aizarna,” managed to make a living playing ball. But the lack of generational change was felt and they eventually disappeared. Currently, however, there are still female pelota players, but they constitute a clear minority and cannot make a professional living from pelota, even winning txapelas and world championships.
This is the case of Maite Ruiz de Larramendi, twice distinguished as the best pelota player in the world and winner of seven medals in seven pelota world championships. Despite this, she did not have the visibility that her predecessors had in the 20th century and was never able to make a professional living from sport. In addition, like many others, from the time she was little, she had to fight against prejudice and discrimination as a woman and a pelota player, to the point that when she was little, she was forbidden to play in baseball in his city. “When I was 14, they started telling me I had to stop playing because my hands were damaged. No one said anything to the kids, but they did it to me. Today, several of them have created the first Pelotaris Women’s Association (Emakume Pilotarien Elkartea) made up of 80 federated paddlers with whom they seek to promote, manage, regulate and structure women’s pelota, but also to publicize the modality of the ball which is played with a paddle and not only with the hand.
