Diane Hurley began working at Newport Grand in 1976 when her father asked her to run the food and beverage concessions.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

When The Procaccianti Group held a news conference last week to announce it is buying Newport Grand and will use it to anchor a $1.4-billion development project, the event featured soaring rhetoric and handsome renderings.

But it also had a human element. Joining TPG bigwigs and Rep. Patrick Kennedy at the session was Diane Hurley, Newport Grand’s CEO. Her father, the late Arthur Silvester, built the facility that began life in 1976 as a jai alai fronton and then morphed into a home for Rhode Island Lottery video slot machines.

As part of the development TPG proposes for the city’s North End, the Procacciantis are buying Newport Grand for $155 million. Hurley and her family took in partners in 1997 but still own 50 percent, so they stand to get $77.5 million from the deal.

Even so, at Wednesday’s news conference Hurley was quivering. She’s impressed by TPG’s ideas for a district of hotels, residences, restaurants, stores and recreation venues, and knows Newport Grand could never do anything like this on its own. Still, for her, the sale is emotional and stirs family nostalgia.

Assuming TPG gets the approvals it needs from the state, Hurley, who goes back to the beginnings of the old place, will be out of the picture. The facility also will get a new name, just as Lincoln Park, whose army of slots dwarfs Newport’s, has been reincarnated as Twin River.

Of course, it’s risky to assume the state will necessarily clear TPG for the licenses it needs to operate Newport Grand.

Governor Carcieri tells me, “We’ll go through the process … I had concerns, as you know, when they acquired the Westin … They’ve delivered on everything they said, but we’re going to go through a process.”

Against the backdrop of the 1991 credit-union crisis and its aftermath, Carcieri unsuccessfully pleaded with the Convention Center Authority in 2005 to sell The Westin Providence to someone other than TPG. Only recently had company president, James Procaccianti, paid $6.5 million to settle a suit by the state over a credit-union loan; businesses related to him had left many more millions in loans unpaid.

As you mull TPG’s long-range plan for Newport, bear in mind that the company does not yet own the government and private property sites it eyes for the project. Well, it can dream.

As for Hurley, who is 58, she can remember.

When I say her father, Arthur Silvester, built the jai alai facility, I mean he built it. He was not only the owner, he was also the general contractor.

Jai alai is a high-speed old Spanish handball-like sport. Betting is pari-mutuel, as in horse racing.

Silvester also owned Palm Beach Jai Alai in Florida. New England appealed to him. The family was from Massachusetts. He’d been in the Navy and trained in Newport. Other investors had made plans for a Newport fronton; he bought them out. The Palm Beach fronton operated in the winter. He liked the idea that his players and other key employees would be able to work here over the summer. The players otherwise would have to return to their homes in Spain’s Basque region.

In Florida, Silvester used an outside concessionaire, but he wanted Newport’s food and drink operations to be in-house.

As Hurley and I sit in the first-floor grille at Newport Grand, she tells me, “I was living in Belmont, Mass. I had a newborn and a toddler, and my father said, ‘You know what? I’ve got a nice part-time job for you. You can run all the food and beverage at Newport Jai Alai.’

“And I had never even waitressed in my life. My background — I went to Wellesley College and was an economics major. The only work I’d ever done was economic research.”

She says she toiled virtually around the clock for weeks to be ready for opening night, June 10, 1976. She was 27. She spent the evening racing between the tony Sala del Toro restaurant and the various concession stands.

And, of course, the job turned out to be full time.

Jai alai players use a cesta, a narrow scoop-shaped basket, to fling a pelota, a special ball. Once the fronton opened, Hurley says, youngsters around town soon were using cestas to propel tennis balls against the sides of buildings. Where did they get the cestas? “They would buy used ones from the players, or the players would give them to the kids.”

As we chat, I am distracted by the boop-boop-boop of the slot machines that systematically strip zombie-like patrons of their money. The sounds don’t bother Hurley. She says, “When you’re here, you don’t hear them after awhile.”

And, in her eyes, the patrons are having fun. True, she says, a “very small percentage” have gambling problems, and Newport Grand encourages them to “self-exclude” for life.

Under this program, not unique to Newport, you get your photo taken and sign a form agreeing not to come back. What if you show up and say you’ve changed your mind? Nothing doing, says Hurley. “We just escorted somebody out the other day. They were attempting to get a player rewards card.”

The hypnotic grip of slots horrifies me. It is pathetic that the state government is addicted to this revenue ($49 million from Newport last year, $205 million from Lincoln.)

Indeed, you’d think Congressman Kennedy, who has suffered from substance abuse problems, would be more sensitive to it. Yet when I asked him about it, he rationalized just as state officials do.“It’s a sad fact,” Kennedy said. But, he said, the money helps to finance badly needed education and social programs.

Back to jai alai.

“I loved the sport,” Hurley says.

I used to enjoy it myself. I’d go occasionally and bet extremely cautiously: $2 per game, usually on a favorite. One day I finished $7 ahead, a major triumph.

So what happened to jai alai? The frontons in Nevada, Connecticut — even most of those in Florida — eventually closed. Slots came to Newport in late 1992; by 2003, jai alai there was gone.

Although the ball travels fast, a game, or the wait between games on a night’s program, lasts too long for bettors who prefer the instant gratification of the video terminals.

It also didn’t help, Hurley says, that Newport for three years had a players strike. (The fronton stayed open with substitutes.)

Now here’s something interesting, if not downright spooky. If you leave Newport Grand’s first floor nonsmoking slot parlors and head to the smoking ones upstairs, you’ll find a nonsmoking enclave that houses simulcasting. You can bet on horses in races televised from around the country. Well, sure.

But also on dog races — including those at Twin River.

And on jai alai games beamed in from Florida’s remaining frontons, Dania and Miami.

So much of Newport Grand has changed. The simulcasting parlor and video slots crowd what used to be concourses. And yet the vacant old auditorium — the fronton proper, with the court and the banks of spectator seats — looks much as it did.

Hurley brings me in. There’s the old scoreboard/oddsboard. There are the green walls of the court and the gray polished floor.

It’s easy to envision the players marching in, accompanied by recorded music, the announcer intoning, “Ladies and gentlemen, the players of Newport salute you.” And to imagine the crack! sound of ball-hitting-wall.

After renovations to the fronton, slots will be moving in here too. By next March, Hurley says, Newport should be nearly up to the total of 2,101 the state allows it. (Twin River is allowed 4,752.)

A 2005 deal with the state also requires putting up a hotel.

Hurley, who lives in Jamestown and is involved in many Newport community activities, won’t say how much she personally would get from the Newport Grand sale. But she does say, “I’m a very generous person and I’ll continue to be.”

She says Newport Grand is ready for a new face to take it to the next level.

Not long before her father died, Newport Grand’s first slots arrived and he came to see them. “He was thrilled,” Hurley says.

And she’s confident he’d love where the place is heading. She declares, “He’d say: ‘To the future!’ He always looked forward, never backwards.”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com