History of roller derby

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The history of roller derby traces the evolution of roller skating races into a unique sport which has undergone several boom-and-bust cycles throughout most of the 20th century. A form of sports entertainment for much of its existence, a grassroots, early 21st century revival spearheaded by women has restored an emphasis on athleticism.

Contents

[edit] Origins

In 1914, The New York Times reported on a 24-hour banked-track roller skating race held at Madison Square Garden. The reports didn't use the word "derby", but called the team relay event "the first twenty-four-hour roller skating race that has been held in New York in years," and made mention that the crowd enjoyed the sudden sprints and spills in preliminary races held the day before.[1][2][3]

In 1922, the Chicago Tribune announced and reported on the results of two "roller derby" events. These were multi-day events during which roller skating races were held on a flat track at Chicago's Broadway Armory.[4][5][6]

In 1929, as the Great Depression began, a struggling film publicist named Leo Seltzer felt that dance marathons were undermining attendance at his Oregon cinema chain, so he began holding his own dance marathons. Hundreds of unemployed people participated, hoping to win a $2,000 cash prize. Since dance marathons usually ended up with people lazily shuffling around, he soon changed the events to "walkathons". The contests were emceed by celebrities like Frankie Laine and Red Skelton, and grossed $6 million in three years.

In 1935, the novelty of walkathons wore off, but a roller skating fad arose again, and Seltzer decided to combine the two concepts as Transcontinental Roller Derby, an event more than a month long, staged at the Chicago Coliseum. It was a simulation of a cross-country roller skating race in which 25 two-person teams circled a track thousands of times, skating 11½ hours a day, to cover 3,000 miles—the distance between Los Angeles and New York City. Teams were disqualified if both members were off the track during skating times. Sixteen teams dropped out due to injuries or exhaustion, but nine teams finished, and the winning team, Clarice Martin and Bernie McKay, held the lead for the last 11 days of the event.

Over the next two years, Seltzer took the Transcontinental Roller Derby on the road, holding similar races throughout the U.S. with a portable track that reportedly cost $20,000, for daily crowds averaging 10,000 in number, who paid 10 to 25 cents admission. Occasionally, massive collisions and crashes occurred as skaters tried to lap those who were ahead of them. In late 1936 or 1937, sportswriter Damon Runyon, realizing this was the most exciting part, encouraged Seltzer to tweak the game to maximize physical contact between the skaters and to exaggerate hits and falls. Seltzer bristled, wanting to keep the sport legitimate, but agreed to the experiment,[7] which fans ended up loving. Over time, the spectacle evolved into a sport involving two teams of five skaters, with a team scoring points when its members lapped members of the other team, which is the basic premise of roller derby to this day. On March 24, 1937, twenty members of a touring group of Roller Derby skaters and support personnel were killed when their bus blew a tire, collided with a bridge abutment and exploded in flames near Salem, Illinois while en route to Cincinnati for another performance. The ghastly tragedy nearly put Seltzer out of business, but replacement skaters were signed and Roller Derby survived. As a tribute to those killed in the tragedy, the number "1" uniform was permanently retired for all roller derby teams.

Transcontinental Roller Derby rapidly grew in popularity as a spectator sport. Matches were held in fifty cities in 1940, for more than five million spectators, some of whom formed fan clubs and newsletters like Roller Derby News (later renamed RolleRage). Teams began to represent and compete in other U.S. cities, although some teams were actually the same traveling group that would just change names depending on where they were playing, and all were part of the Seltzer-owned Roller Derby league.

The entry of the United States into World War II at the end of 1941 interrupted the sport's ascent; many skaters enlisted in the armed forces, crowds dwindled, and the fledgling league was reduced to one team skating mainly for the entertainment of soldiers.

After the war's end in 1945, Seltzer successfully resumed growing the sport, although a 1946 attempt to bring it to New York's Polo Grounds failed due to twelve straight days of rain. In 1948, well before television was in widespread use, Roller Derby debuted on the CBS television network, but the following year moved to ABC. Seltzer changed his residence to Encino (Los Angeles) that same year, a westward move that foreshadowed changes to come. By 1949, Roller Derby games were being televised live throughout the U.S., and Seltzer was grossing $2 million a year. In 1949, the National Roller Derby League was formed, and the season playoffs sold out Madison Square Garden for a week.[8][9][10][11][12]

Meanwhile, from 1946 through 1948, flat-track roller derby was enjoyed as an intramural sport at the University of British Columbia in Canada.[13][14][15] [16][17][18]

In Los Angeles, roller derby was broadcast on the radio as early as 1939,[19] and on television as early as 1949.[20]

[edit] Jam On, Jam Off

Skaters leap over two who have fallen
Skaters leap over two who have fallen

In 1950, Leo Seltzer moved the base of operations to New York, where it was easier to produce Roller Derby's first wave of televised popularity. Broadcasts centered on the New York Chiefs, who enjoyed nationwide appearances on CBS and ABC. At one point, Roller Derby could be seen on ABC several times a week. Besides the Chiefs, teams in the National Roller Derby League included the Chicago Westerners, Brooklyn Red Devils, Jersey Jolters, Washington Jets, and the Philadelphia Panthers, with these six clubs affectionately considered by fans as the ancestors of all incarnations of Derby teams through 1973.

Off television in the fall of 1951 due to overexposure and declining ratings, the Derby suffered a dramatic fall in attendance. In July 1953, citing the effects of the Korean War and a dearth of venues, Leo Seltzer moved the Derby from New York to Los Angeles and created the L.A. Braves for their debut at the Rose Bowl. The Braves became the first international team when a tour of Europe was launched in 1953.

However, this was not the first time audiences outside the U.S. had seen the game played live. A renegade league, International Roller Speedway, known in some countries as Roller-Catch, formed in 1937 and toured Europe, where they played at the Harringay Arena in London, and the Philippines. Roller Speedway was a modified version of the sport and normally featured two teams, representing Europe (the "home" team) and USA. The 1950 film The Fireball, starring Mickey Rooney, was based on the life of one of the league's stars, Eddie Poore, who skated under the name Eddie Cazar. Roller Speedway ceased operations in 1952.[21]

In 1954, the Derby established the most fabled team in the history of the sport, the longtime champion San Francisco Bay Bombers. Stars on this team eventually included Charlie O'Connell, Joanie Weston, and Ann Calvello.[12]

In 1958, Leo Seltzer gave up on the sport in favor of real estate interests, and his son Jerry Seltzer took full control of Roller Derby. Within a year, he moved the operation to the San Francisco Bay Area. He syndicated Roller Derby to 120 television stations, and he changed some of the rules. For the first time, skaters were required to wear helmets and, at the behest of KTVU television announcer Walt Harris, he made the game more TV-friendly by making jammers' helmets easier to spot.

[edit] In the 1960s

A more theatrical imitation called Roller Games was started in 1961 in Los Angeles featuring retired Roller Derby skaters who chose not to make the move to San Francisco. Owned by Bill Griffiths, Sr. and Jerry Hill, Roller Games was the only viable rival organization to the original Roller Derby and actually consisted of several separate leagues, including the (U.S.) National Roller Derby (NRD), soon renamed to National Roller League (NRL) since the "Roller Derby" trademark was aggressively protected by the Seltzer organization. The NRD/NRL consisted of the Northern Hawks (sometimes billed as the Chicago Hawks), New York Bombers, Texas Outlaws, Detroit Devils, Los Angeles Thunderbirds (nicknamed "T-Birds"), and Philadelphia Warriors (sometimes billed as the Eastern Warriors).

There were also several attempts in markets that failed quickly, with teams such as the Baltimore/Washington Cats, the Florida Jets, and the Western Renegades. Roller Games also encompassed the Canadian National Roller League (CNRL) and Japanese National Roller League (JNRL). Some former Roller Derby stars found new fame in the Roller Games, and a handful of skaters simply went back and forth between the two organizations. After 1968, however, the Roller Derby to Roller Games defections were quite few; instead, a handful of Roller Games skaters returned to their roots and began skating for the Derby again.[22][23]

1961 also saw the advent of a short-lived New York City area rival league, the American Skating Derby (ASD), promoted by Joe Morehouse and Mike O'Hara. ASD debuted two teams of ex-Roller Derby skaters — one team representing "New York" and the other representing Brooklyn — at Long Island Arena in Commack, New York, around April 1961, with plans to appear throughout the Tri-State Region.[24] A league split later that year resulted in the formation of another league, the Eastern Skating Derby (ESD), which lasted until mid-1964 and skated only in New York, sometimes at the same venues as the ASD.[25][26] As with Roller Speedway, none of these splinter groups are remembered today by anyone outside the most dedicated fans and the skaters who participated in them.

To the media, there was only one Roller Derby, and from Jerry Seltzer's takeover in the late 1950s the game reached new heights of popularity with a 120-station television network where taped games from the Bombers' home, Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco, were shown weekly. Television made fans of thousands and the Bay Bombers packed arenas from coast to coast on cross country tours, regularly selling out arenas such as Madison Square Garden, Boston Garden, Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis and dozens more.

[edit] In the 1970s

The indoor record for Roller Derby was set at 19,507 at Madison Square Garden in 1970; it was broken by the outdoor record at the Oakland Coliseum a few months later at around 28,814 for a game between the Bay Bombers and the Northeast Braves. The following year that record was topped again with 34,418 for a Bomber game at the Coliseum; their rival, the Chicago Midwest Pioneers, broke that record with 50,118 fans in 1972 for an interleague game against the National Skating Derby's Los Angeles Thunderbirds at Comiskey Park in Chicago.

At this point, the Bay Bombers home-team concept was duplicated with the New York Chiefs representing the Eastern U.S. and the Pioneers based in Chicago (but really everything west of Philadelphia). A one-season run in 1971 by the Cincinnati Jolter team in the Midwest (Ohio, Kentucky, and other areas) was not financially successful, and the team became a road franchise once again. The Bombers were briefly a Southwest team moved from the Bay Area, but potential new owners couldn't come to terms with the Seltzer family and so the Bay Bombers were returned home. (In an unusual move, the Chiefs were a "replacement" team for the Bombers during the period that franchise was supposedly based in Texas.)

In the early 1970s, a Roller Derby participant was depicted in the children's program, ZOOM, in a segment called "As the World Zooms." This was a main character of the segment who continued through the entire run of that incarnation of the program.

In 1973, high overhead and other factors led Jerry Seltzer to elect to shut down Roller Derby. In a 2005 interview, Ann Calvello mentioned gas shortages during the 1973 oil crisis as a contributing factor because teams could not travel.[9] Some of the IRDL star skaters were recruited to skate for Roller Games' International Skating Conference (ISC), which quickly eliminated all Derby teams except for the Chiefs to again focus on the Los Angeles Thunderbirds.[27][28] However, within two years, the wrestling/circus-like approach doomed all of Roller Games; many Roller Derby skaters quit and fans deserted the arenas. Cultural historian Paul Fussell, perhaps editorializing, attributed the collapse of the sport to the declining economic class of its fan base in its final years; fans were ultimately unable to support the sponsors that had been keeping the sport on television.[29]

[edit] IRSL revival

Several attempts were made in the late 1970s and 1980s to revive the sport.

The most successful of these was the International Roller Skating League (IRSL), operational from 1977 to 1987. IRSL games were held mostly in Northern California, but a handful of games were skated in the Northeastern United States, the Midwest, and Canada. Many skaters from Roller Derby were in the IRSL, and some of the team names were the same as in Roller Derby.

Initially the league was composed of the San Francisco Bay Bombers, the Midwest Pioneers, the Brooklyn Red Devils and the Manhattan Chiefs. In 1979, the league was bought out and restructured by one of its owners, former San Francisco television producer Dave Lipschultz. At this time, two more teams, the Northeast Braves and Southern Jolters (later renamed the Southern Stars), were added, and the Chiefs were renamed the New York Dynamite and, eventually, the Eastern Express. A final team, the Northern Knights, representing Canada, was announced in 1986 but never competed. As before, most of the attention was centered on the Bay Bombers. After skating primarily in Northern California, a Midwest tour was launched in 1984, but flopped due to competition from baseball and football as well as weather related problems. In 1986 a tournament was carried on ESPN and the IRSL set up sporadic appearances in New York. ESPN dropped the contract in its pursuit of the more lucrative professional football market, and although talks were underway to broadcast IRSL matchups on USA Network, the IRSL was unable to survive without television support. Lupshultz shut down the league after its last game at Madison Square Garden on December 12, 1987. Around that time, Lipschultz and skaters were negotiating over how to keep it going. Lipschultz wanted to make it more like professional wrestling in an attempt to win over a fickle TV audience, but the players had different ideas. No agreement was reached, and potential sponsors lost interest.[30][31][32]

The 1985 IRSL matches have been shown twice on ESPN Classic's sports comedy show Cheap Seats as ESPN retains the right to air those matches.

American Skating Derby, promoting the game as Rollerjam! formed in 1987 and played a spring season with two teams, the San Francisco Slammers and the Los Angeles Turbos. Its name was the same as the early 1960s New York based league but was unrelated. Composed of inactive Roller Derby and IRSL skaters, the ASD was formed primarily as a means to keep the game alive, and the two teams (with the Slammers being essentially replaced by the Bay City Bombers) skated around Northern California communities for high school charities. For the next decade, with sometimes as few as one game annually, the ASD attempted to keep the traditional game going.[33]

[edit] RollerGames revival

Main article: RollerGames

RollerGames, created in 1989 by two television producers, David Sams and Michael Miller, and Roller Games owner Bill Griffiths, Sr., was a U.S. television show that presented a theatrical version of the sport of roller derby for a national audience. It featured a steeply banked figure-eight track, an alligator pit, and a number of skaters who had been in the Roller Games league, as well as younger participants. The six teams were the T-Birds, Violators, Bad Attitude, Rockers, Hot Flash, and Maniacs. The show only lasted thirteen weeks despite garnereing over a 5 national rating during its prime-time debut, and was in the top 25 of all syndicated shows for the season--even beating the popular American Gladiators, which eventually lasted seven 26-week seasons and international formats (and a revival nineteen years after its debut).

Announcers were Chuck Underwood, David Sams, and Shelly Jamison.

[edit] RollerJam revival

Between January 1999 and January 2001,[34] Knoxville, Tennessee television impresarios Ross K. Bagwell Sr. and Stephen Land, under the name Pageboy Entertainment, collaborated with CBS to stage another televised revival known as RollerJam or Roller Jam. Bagwell and Land recruited numerous stars from the Roller Derby of yesteryear, as well as newer stars from various athletic backgrounds, including nationally ranked speed skaters, to skate in the six-team World Skating League (WSL). Jerry Seltzer was named RollerJam "commissioner".

RollerJam games were televised out of "RollerJam Arena," situated on the grounds of Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. Initial teams, each consisting of seven men and seven women, were the New York Enforcers, the California Quakes, the Florida Sundogs, the Nevada Hot Dice, the Texas Rustlers and the Illinois Riot (Original names of the latter three teams were the Las Vegas High Rollers, Texas Twisters, and Illinois Inferno. These names were changed prior to the start of the first season). Despite strong funding and four seasons of broadcasts on The Nashville Network (TNN, now known as Spike TV), the venture never became a "live" attraction. After MTV's takeover of the CBS Cable group, fabricated storylines and uncharismatic characters were being featured more than actual competitive skating. This did not go over well with many skaters nor die-hard roller derby fans. Two notable veterans from Roller Games, Rockin' Ray Robles and Patsy Delgato, were featured in the second season of RollerJam. When RollerJam was cancelled, many of the skaters found smaller leagues to skate in. 40 episodes of Roller Jam have been reversioned for UK television after successful televised seasons in other countries. Airing from October 2nd 2006 on Challenge TV much of the narrative has been removed with sex and violence toned down for a family audience.

One major rule difference between previous leagues was the legalisation of in-line skates, which the WSL required for younger players in an attempt to push the league to younger players, more familiar with the in-line game, allowing for more precision skating over the traditional quads, allowing faster skaters to participate.

[edit] Contemporary roller derby

[edit] All-female, grassroots leagues

A Blue Ridge Roller Girl recruits (Asheville, North Carolina).
A Blue Ridge Roller Girl recruits (Asheville, North Carolina).

In 2001, Bad Girl Good Woman Productions (BGGW) was formed, creating a new generation of roller derby, open to women only. Founders formed four teams, and staged their first public match in Austin, Texas in summer 2002. Shortly after, the league split over business plans: The Texas Rollergirls embraced flat-track play, while the BGGW league (also known as the TXRD Lonestar Rollergirls or Texas Roller Derby) went on to skate banked-track roller derby.[35]

The revival then began in earnest, with over 50 similar all-female leagues in existence by late 2005, more than 80 by February 2006, and more than 135 by mid-August 2006. The sport's sudden growth in 2006 is attributed to its exposure via the Rollergirls reality television show, which depicted portions of the lives of real skaters from the TXRD Lonestar Rollergirls. The show began broadcasting in January 2006, but was not picked up for a second season due to unsatisfactory ratings.

The first all-female Canadian league of fifty members, the Terminal City Rollergirls, was formed in January 2006 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The league appeared before an audience of 4500 on March 4, 2006 to participate in a game of "Last Woman Standing" ("Blood and Thunder") against The Rat City Rollergirls at the Everett Events Centre in Everett, Washington. The first full, international bout in women's flat-track derby occurred in December 2006, when the Oil City Derby Girls (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) hosted the Rocky Mountain Roller Girls (Denver, Colorado, USA).

Although this revival of roller derby was initially all-female, some leagues later introduced all-male teams.

[edit] Mixed-gender, for-profit leagues

A handful of leagues, mostly mixed-gender, have origins in earlier incarnations of the sport and heavily promote themselves as professional due to their history, management, membership, style of play and marketing considerations. As of the mid-2000s, most of these leagues do not compete in regular seasons, but rather schedule infrequent special-event games, drawing from a relatively small pool of skaters to form the roster of two teams put together just for the event, or on one team that plays against a similar club from another league. Team names typically pay homage to memorable Roller Derby and Roller Games teams of the past.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Skaters whirling around big track, 1914-12-18 
  2. ^ “Roller skating on banked track”, New York Times, 1922-12-17 
  3. ^ “24-hour roller race”, New York Times, 1914-12-17 
  4. ^ “Roller derby on tomorrow”, Chicago Daily Tribune: 20, 1922-04-24  “Roland Cloni of Akron, world’s champion roller skater, who yesterday tried out the track in the Broadway armory, where the national roller skating derby will be held this week, asserted new world’s records can be established for flat tracks. The derby will open tomorrow and run until Saturday.”
  5. ^ “Ed Krahn and Launey share roller firsts”, Chicago Daily Tribune: 13, 1922-04-29 
  6. ^ “Von Hof first in ten mile roller derby”, Chicago Daily Tribune: 21, 1922-12-01 
  7. ^ Turczyn, Coury. "Blood on the Tracks", Metro Pulse, 1999-01-28. Retrieved on 2008-02-11.  (link points to the archived article in the Spring 2000 edition of the author's own PopCult Magazine Web site) “The faster skaters would break out and try and get laps so they would get ahead in the race, and some of the slower skaters started to band together to try and hold them back,” says Seltzer. “And at first, they didn’t want to let them do that–but then the people liked it so much, they kind of allowed blocking. Then they came down to Miami–I think it was 1936, early ’37–and Damon Runyon, a very famous sports writer, saw it and he sat down with my father and hammered out the rules, almost exactly as they are today.”
  8. ^ Roller Derby at the National Museum of Roller Skating. National Roller Skating Museum (2004). Retrieved on 2007-06-08.
  9. ^ a b Rich Besser (2005-04-15). Ann Calvello interview. Banked Track News (archived by Roller Derby Online / The Roller Derby Association on 2005-04-15). Retrieved on 2006-05-15.
  10. ^ Brandan I. Koerner (1999-01-20). This Ain't No Roller Disco. The Village Voice. Retrieved on 2006-05-25.
  11. ^ Cecilia Rasmussen (1999-02-21). The Man Who Got Roller Derby Rolling Along. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved on 2007-06-08.
  12. ^ a b Roller Derby. KTVU-TV (2004). Retrieved on 2007-06-08.
  13. ^ "Intramural Setup Features Hoopla", The Ubyssey, 1947-01-14. 
  14. ^ "Roller Derby On February 26", The Ubyssey, 1947-02-20. 
  15. ^ "Jokers Staging Intramural Skating Derby Tomorrow", The Ubyssey, 1947-02-25. "The Marathon, explained Joker prexy, Bill Dunbar, is won by the team completing the most laps around the floor space of the Armories during the four and a half hour period. Both the girls and the men will circle the indoor course together, stated Dunbar." 
  16. ^ "Joker Rollermen Win Skating Cup", The Ubyssey, 1947-02-27. "Thousands of students crowded the Armory yesterday and it seems that they just wanted to see what makes the wheels go round. For there it was that the Jokers held their second annual Roller Derby yesterday and for the second straight year, the Jokers managed to take the honors." 
  17. ^ "Intramural Sports Boast Plenty Of Variety - Wynn", The Ubyssey, 1947-10-01. "After Christmas, the sportlight will be focussed on basketball, table tennis, badminton, skiing, swimming, track and field, and the roller derby." 
  18. ^ Photos of the 1946 roller skating marathon are in the 1946 The Totem, the UBC yearbook, page 69.
  19. ^ “Your Radio Today”, Los Angeles Times: 16, 1939-06-05 ; “Your Radio Today”, Los Angeles Times: 14, 1939-07-01 ; “Your Radio Today”, Los Angeles Times: 12, 1940-08-24 ; “Your Radio Today”, Los Angeles Times: 9, 1940-08-26 ; “Your Radio Today”, Los Angeles Times: C8, 1940-09-01 ; “Your Radio Today”, Los Angeles Times: 6, 1940-09-02 ; “Your Radio Today”, Los Angeles Times: 17, 1940-09-05 
  20. ^ “Television Schedule”, Los Angeles Times: A5, 1949-06-18 ; “Television Schedule”, Los Angeles Times: A5, 1949-07-07 ; “Television Schedule”, Los Angeles Times: A5, 1949-07-09 ; “Television Schedule”, Los Angeles Times: A5, 1949-07-14 ; “Television Schedule”, Los Angeles Times: A5, 1949-07-16 ; “Television Schedule”, Los Angeles Times: A5, 1949-07-19 ; “Television Schedule”, Los Angeles Times: A5, 1949-07-21 
  21. ^ Steve Cole (2001-11-20). The International Roller Speedway p. 3. Archived from the original on 2002-10-08. Retrieved on 2007-06-08.
  22. ^ The History of Roller Derby. Rollersport.
  23. ^ RollerGames league info page. Roller Derby Association.
  24. ^ http://www.toooquiet.net/BankedTrack/History/Paper/paper0004.html
  25. ^ Yahoo! Groups
  26. ^ Yahoo! Groups
  27. ^ Rollersport - History - Page 4
  28. ^ http://www.rollerderbypreservationassociation.com/modules.php?name=Leagues&op=ShowLeagueAll&id=179&id_cat=32&categories=ROLLERGAMES
  29. ^ Paul, Fussell (1983). Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Ballantine, 129–130. ISBN 0-671792-25-3. “Below golf comes baseball, and below that, football. Then ice hockey. Then boxing, stock-car racing, bowling, and, at the bottom, Roller Derby, once popular with advertisers until they discovered that the people watching it were so low-prole or even destitute that they constituted an entirely wasted audience for the commercials: they couldn't buy anything at all, not even detergents, antacids, and beer. "Low-Reach Undesirables," the Roller Derby audience became known in the trade, and the event that had attracted them was soon removed from television.” 
  30. ^ Bob Batz (2006-03-22). Roller derby is really a blast from the past. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved on 2006-05-15.
  31. ^ Rollersport - History - Page 5
  32. ^ Joe Blenkle (1991-08-28). Roller Derby promoter says game will return. Sacramento News and Review (confirmation needed). Retrieved on 2006-05-15.
  33. ^ http://www.rollerderbypreservationassociation.com/modules.php?name=Leagues&op=ShowLeagueAll&id=85&id_cat=22&categories=ASD
  34. ^ The RollerJam Episode List at TV.com confirms there were 100 episodes, comprising four seasons, that aired between January 1999 and January 2001, plus a preview/pilot episode in December 1998.
  35. ^ Short History of Roller Derby. Sin City Rollergirls (2006-08-28). Retrieved on 2008-02-13.

[edit] Books