Punk Rollers Ladies who crunch
Back in time and behind the scenes with the all-girl sport that’s reclaiming independence and bringing back brawls.
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Thundering around a slippery floor is a pack of women on roller skates. The London Brawl Saints are hurling their way towards defeating Glasgow’s IRN Bruisers. This alternative reality is a pink and black whirl of shoving, blocking, jamming and bouting. There’s a blur of kneepads, helmets and hotpants, as a tangled group suddenly goes down. Fast and furious skating continues in a flash, while a voice borrowed from the boxing ring booms out above the hooting, hollering and cheers to commentate on the exploits of heroines like Vagablonde and Grievous Bodily Charm. Violent and strange, it could be a Marvel comic brought to life, or a modern gladiatorial contest perhaps; squint your eyes and it could be rugby on wheels. But in fact this phenomenon is roller derby. And you’d better get to know it because you’re lying in its way.
Chicago promoter Leo Seltzer was the man behind this mayhem. He witnessed the success of Depression-era dance marathons that saw out-of-work hopefuls contending for cash prizes in days-long endurance contests, and in 1935 he launched a version on wheels. In his Transcontinental Roller Derby competing couples skated on a banked track for thousands of laps, equal to the distance from California to New York. When it proved a hit, Seltzer took his show on the road.
Impromptu collisions between contestants weren’t uncommon, and this led Seltzer to introduce nuances that radically altered the face of his invention: he incorporated body contact and started keeping score. The new sport pitted two teams of five skaters against one another, with sides scoring points when skaters lapped their opposition. It’s the same basic formula used today. From a relatively staid show derived from partner dances, roller derby became a spectacle of equal parts rock and roll.
In the 1950s television delivered derby to American audiences nationwide, and Seltzer’s rough and ready professional rollers became legends. His son Jerry took over and derby careened full tilt through the next decade, but screeched to a financial halt in 1973 when the Seltzer organisation was forced to shut down its show.
Other promoters attempted revivals, but it was a grassroots effort decades later that successfully seized the keys to the roller kingdom. The modern movement took hold in the college town of Austin where post-millennium pioneers the effected two important changes over earlier incarnations. First, new leagues took shape as entities run by the competitors themselves. Instead of a business owned and managed by promoters, roller derby would in fact belong to its own amateur participants. Second, by using skating rinks and gym floors, the innovators hatched flat track derby, relegating the infrastructure requirement of a banked track to the past.Texas Rollergirls
The Texas Rollergirls Rock'n'Rollerderby league formed in 2003, and the Women's Flat Track Derby Association took flight the following year. Today, thanks to a cocktail of irony and adrenalin, modern roller derby is as infectious as a virus and addictive as a drug. It’s gone from a handful of teams to 450 recognised leagues worldwide in less than a decade – nothing short of a pandemic.
Thanks to the skater-owned and operated ethos, roller derby embodies DIY. According to the London Rollergirls I talk to, it’s about passion and commitment more than playing the right note or singing in key. “I’m actually pretty lucky,” laughs Erin No Bragh, “because I couldn’t really skate when I first started. And then right after my group started they got a little more strict – you had to have a certain minimum skill level!”
Even with entry requirements though, derby offers a uniquely level playing field that’s appealing. “I was Miss Extracurricular,” says Poddington Peeved who skates for the Ultraviolent Femmes. “But I was always the worst person in the band or the worst person on the hockey team. I wanted to do something where you had to learn. Because everyone has to do hockey and netball you kind of know how to play those, whereas no one really knows how to play roller derby – you can’t already have any idea of how to hit people while on roller skates.”
Dot Slash joined the Suffra Jets after spending her youth figure skating. “With figure skating you have to be a certain type of person who fits a certain criteria, and there’s no room for someone that’s a little bit different. I outgrew it; I didn’t like all the snobby mums and hairspray and glitter eye shadow.” Three years ago, roller derby supplied her with a gritty alternative and instant addiction. “When you get older you start to know who you are and what you like and don’t like. Stuff you do as a kid, often you do it because your parents want to keep you out of trouble – or in our village, stop you getting pregnant!”
Auntie Terror grew up in the States before moving to Britain and joining the Steam Rollers. “I did run track for a while, played a bit of field hockey. But once everything got competitive I wasn’t interested anymore. People were competing for sports scholarships, and I didn’t want a sports scholarship.”
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Punk Rollers (text) by Shannon Denny is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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