Why I love Roller Derby Women

If you’re one of the few people who haven’t heard of the resurgence in Roller Derby of the last nine years or so, welcome back from your coma and I’m glad you’re able to read this. You have some catching up to do.


I make no bones about it – I love roller derby women. They represent to me the perfect modern type of the opposite sex. To be honest about it, it’s been that way throughout my life (if you remember the names Francine Cochu, Sherri Erich and Darlene Langois de la Chapelle, you recall exactly why). But the women making up the current-day version of the sport have added some very important elements to that image.

This ain’t your grandpa’s roller derby we’re dealing with here. Mind you, I loved that version, too. In junior high school, how I wished roller derby was a scholastic sport, put on the same level of respect as basketball, football or softball. My Wisconsin classmates idolised Oscar Robertson, Ray Nitschke or Henry Aaron. My sports idol? Psycho Ronnie Raines of the Los Angeles Thunderbirds, who would gleefully goad fans into throwing their paper Coke cups at him when he played the heel on the banked track – and just as gleefully chewed those cups directly in front of the ticked-off fans and spit them right back out. Then he’d punctuate his response by racking up a few points on the next jam just to stuff it up their noses. Now there was a man.

I even attended a match on what turned out to be one of the last tours of the original Roller Derby league, the San Francisco-based International Roller Derby League, in 1972. It was at Kolf Sports Center on the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh campus. I know the Cincinnati Jolters were one of the teams, but I forget who they skated against (maybe Jerry Seltzer can fill me in sometime). I was so captivated by the action on the banked track that I insisted on standing on the floor a few feet closer than the bleachers were; after my dad convinced me to sit back down, one of the Jolter skaters took a spill over the railing and landed almost exactly where I had been standing only a few minutes before. (Dad never let me hear the end of that one.)

One of the images above is of the label of the British 45 r.p.m. single release of “Roller Derby Queen” by Jim Croce. I realise that, to the derby skaters of today, that song comes off as an insult – more than a handful of them have said as much to me. But Croce wrote songs about characters that made up street-level America, some bad (the pimp in “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” the pool hustlers in “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim”) but most good (the truck driver in “Speedball Tucker,” the down-on-his-luck musician in “Box #10,” the stock car driver in “Rapid Roy”). Most of these images were icons of Americana that even Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson weren’t singing about yet. In the concert album Jim Croce Live, he told the story of how he came to write “Roller Derby Queen”: a patron at the bar applauded particularly enthusiastically at one of Jim’s earliest performances at a Country & Western tavern, and when they conversed after the performance she’d told him that she used to be a Roller Derby skater in Texas. She was the very kind of person Croce loved to immortalise in his songs.

Alas, the IRDL ran out of gas a few months after that, and the Bill Griffiths-operated league in L.A., for whose T-Birds Psycho Ronnie skated, somewhat limped along for another dozen years, eventually even landing a weekly slot on ESPN in ’85 before everything finally ground to a halt. The less said about two later attempts to revive it commercially – that over-hyped Griffith monstrosity RollerGames in 1988, and the flaky figure-8-tracked RollerJam that used AWA and WWF reject Ken Resnick as a commentator ten years later – the better.

A few years ago, a curious thing began to happen in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona – all-female leagues of roller derby teams began competing, independently of any commercial structures. Rather than being held in a top-down business model, the skaters were putting on the bouts – making fun of the kayfabe aspects of the Griffiths product instead of practicing it – as a grassroots-up experience. The Austin TXRD Lonestar league used the banked track of yore, but Phoenix’s AZRD and Tucson’s TRD used simple plastic rings of lights on a flat surface for their tracks. Although there have been other leagues that have adopted the banked-track structure – the Los Angeles Derby Dolls, Phoenix’s Arizona Derby Dames and Oklahoma City’s Red Dirt Rebellion Rollergirls are among the more notable – by far the flat-track version has proven to be the most popular, with over 200 municipal flat-track leagues of one form or another popping up across North America, Australia and Europe.

There are five character traits that these women all possess that make them my favourites:

1. INDEPENDENCE. Yes, it’s a team sport (the occasional match race notwithstanding). But every woman associated with these teams and leagues display fierce independence by the simple act of organising these bouts in the first place. There’s no George Steinbrenners (thank God!) or Ted Turners owning these leagues, and no Michael Jordans making tons of money from playing the game. The vast majority of leagues are skater-organised cooperatives made up entirely of amateur competitors, many of which are registered with the IRS as not-for-profit organisations. Often, they never get serious attention from area media (when was the last time KNBC in Los Angeles gave the score of a Long Beach Roller Derby bout?) And, let’s face it, Roller Derby was, for all intents and purposes, dead for the dozen-plus years before the Lonestars cranked it back up. Hitching your wagon to a dormant star and getting the star moving again is damned independent.

2. COURAGE. Most people of either sex wouldn’t have the guts to even venture onto a baseball diamond or a hockey rink, let alone a roller derby track.

3. INTENSE DEDICATION. These women practice their skills for hours on end at least two days a week (many three) on top of those weekends when bouts are scheduled.

4. OUTRAGEOUS WIT. Only in roller derby can somebody calling themselves Dr. Mary Lu Botomy compete as a top jammer for a team called The Coffin Draggers, as is the case with who is probably my very favourite skater in the Arizona Derby Dames. It takes a truly wicked sense of humour to keep coming up with event names like Girl on Girl Traction (Long Beach), The Final Smackdown (Stuttgart Valley Roller Girlz), It Came From The Roller Rink! (Colorado’s Castle Rock ‘n’ Rollers), Autumn Slaughter (Derby Revolution of Bakersfield), Coal Miners Slaughter (Australia’s Sydney Roller Derby), 2010: A Rollerderby Odyssey (Edmonton’s E-Ville Roller Derby), Hassle at the Castle (Edinburgh’s Auld Reekie Roller Girls) and Boutin’ for Boobies (a Central Oklahoma Roller Derby fundraiser for breast cancer research).

5. LOYALTY. Not only to their fellow skaters, even on opposing teams and leagues, but especially to the fans who keep coming to the bouts to support their efforts.

In all of my relationships with women throughout my life, I have yet to find a partner that displayed independence, courage, dedication, loyalty, or a tolerance for my admittedly sick sense of humour. (One woman wondered aloud within my hearing range, exactly what the hospital did with the tissue taken from breast reduction surgery? I instinctively responded that she may want to avoid the meatloaf in the cafeteria. That relationship didn’t last much longer.) That’s probably why, if I ever do pursue another relationship with a woman, it’ll almost definitely have to be with a modern-day derby skater. Any Derby women reading this – especially between Tucson and San Francisco -- interested in taking me up on that idea? You know where to find me…