Magic City Jai-alai Averaging 100,000 TikTok Viewers a Performance

Magic City Jai-alai Averaging 100,000 TikTok Viewers a Performance

There’s a great article on Jai-alai that just came out in the online newspaper called “Thrillist”.

It’s called “Can Miami Save this 150 – Year Old Sport from Near Extinction?”.  There are quotes from Scott Savin, Benny and even “Baby” Benny, Chris Bueno that talk about the sport and what their frontons are doing.

The online newspaper is quite good – I had never heard of it before, but they do have offices in nearly twenty cities across America.  This article is written by Matt Meltzer of their Miami offices. 

Without stealing their thunder, there were a couple of things I thought were interesting in the article.  Savin mentioned that Magic City Jai-alai was getting about 100,000 views on TikTok, the controversial social media platform, which is overwhelmingly favored by the Gen Z generation.   That is certainly the age group you want to be marketing to, and not the ones that went to jai-alai 40-50 years ago like me.  Besides, we’re already fans of the sport. 

Savin also mentioned if betting were allowed in Florida for their Battle Court matches, they would be breaking even or making a profit.  The Battle Court matches allow sports betting only in states that have approved jai-alai.  Don’t look for that to happen with the Hard Rock anytime soon – it was Magic City Casino that sued the state and successfully shut down sport betting with the Hard Rock Casino for two years and still has a case pending in the state Supreme Court.  It’s too bad, that version of jai-alai is much more exciting and when you place your bet, you know what you’re getting paid – to the penny.  And its one team vs. another and much easier to predict IMO.

I only noticed one mistake in the article. They mentioned Heineken beer as using jai-alai in one of its commercials, when it was Dos Equis Beer that used jai-alai in one of their great “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercials. I know. The Madison Avenue Ad agency first contacted me at my National Jai-alai Association site about the sport and acquiring old 1980s video to use. I went to my buddy Lou (Jai-a-Lou) Berdelllans, the former Newport Jai-alai pro, who was the marketing director for Dania Jai-alai at the time. He hooked me up with Marty Fleischman who took over from there using old Tampa Jai-alai film. The commercial was a hit.

CLICK THRILLIST PIC BELOW TO SEE ARTICLE

Will jai-alai ever regain its success like it had in the 70s and 80s?  It could – and I will tell you how in a story coming next week.     

Also coming next week is a story on Dania Jai-alai and what’s going on over there.