XL Cover Story: Belles on wheels
Roller derby keeps on truckin', taking names
By T.K. Hall | Photos by Kelly West
March 24, 2005
Belles on wheels |
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Scarlet O'Terror (Megan Bevers), left, struggles and falls as Sister Mary Jane (Ashley Aretakis-Fredo) skates beside her during a Lonestar Rollergirl bout between the Holy Rollers and the Rhinestone Cowgirls at one of the former airport hangers at Mueller Airport, now Austin Studios. |
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Amanda Fields (Cha Cha) does her situps as her daughter, Mila , takes a ride during Lonestar Rollergirl practice at one of the former airport hangers at Mueller Airport, now Austin Studios. |
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Melissa Arcado, whose Lonestar Rollergirl name is Venis Envy, skates around the banked track during practice at one of the former airport hangers at Mueller Airport, now Austin Studios. |
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In an Austin Studios' hangar at the former Robert Mueller Municipal Airport. Jeff Floyd, below, cheers on the Holy Rollers during their bout with the Cowgirls. |
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Cliona Gunter (Sparky) laces up her skate before Lonestar Rollergirl practice at one of the former airport hangers at Mueller Airport, now Austin Studios. |
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Sarah Rodgers, known as Miss Conduct, salutes the crowd as her team, the Holy Rollers, enters the banked track during a Lonestar Roller Derby bout at one of the former airport hangers at Mueller Airport, now Austin Studios. |
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Lonestar Rollergirls
Texas Rollergirls |
These firecrackers on skates are content -- for now -- to have conquered Austin and a few outlying cities, but their sights are set on a much larger empire.
The homegrown revival of roller derby has exceeded even the most far-fetched fantasies of its original backers. The antics of players dressed in schoolboy-fantasy costumes and misbehaving -- spankings, pillow fights, roughhouse -- appeared to be a fad for Austin's Red River crowd six years ago.
Now it's going countrywide, with a slew of fawning stories in the national press, high-profile appearances in Las Vegas and a television documentary set to air in January on the A&E cable channel.
What started late in 1999 as hobby for the original Rollergirls has grown into a grown-up sport/entertainment all its own.
Austin is blessed with two leagues -- Texas Rollergirls (four teams with an average of nine skaters) and Texas Roller Derby Lonestar Rollergirls (or TXRD, with five teams) -- and the rules of the game vary just a little bit. (Even if the rules don't make sense at first, the colorful announcers fill you in.) Understanding the rules comes with time, but knowing them isn't the whole point.
It's about watching skirt-flapping skaters throwing more elbows than most hockey players, appealing to everyone from Sunday morning tailgaters to thick-rimmed bespectacled rockers to third-wave feminists of all ages.
Clash of styles
At Playland Skate Center during a Texas Rollergirls match, your full attention will be focused on the flat-track action, because you wouldn't want to be caught off guard when one of the players falls into your lap. This is part of the Texas Rollergirls "Rock-n-roller derby" atmosphere -- no barrier between spectators and players.
On the other hand, the Lonestar Rollergirls play on a banked track like the ones used in the sport since 1935, as older spectators may remember from television coverage of roller derbies in the '80s, minus the alligator pit and wall of death. Rails line the track and add to the mayhem when an occasional skater wraps around or flies over one.
Though their different styles and history have taken them on divergent paths, both Austin leagues share one goal: They're blazes-bent on spreading the gospel of roller derby.
The all-female-skater-owned-and-operated Texas Rollergirls has been spreading the word past the Travis County line for a while. They created a United League Committee to set the groundwork for a national flat-track league after being contacted repeatedly by like-minded women across the country.
"We all share ideas to help new (local) leagues get up to speed," says Jennifer Wilson, acting interleague relations manager.
Under Wilson's guidance, the Texas Rollergirls played two teams from Arizona in 2004, inviting the Phoenix Tent City Terrors and Tucson Saddletramps for a doubleheader exhibition. With a successful night at the doors, future interleague play seems bright, as long as, as one skater put it, "they have had a full season under their skirts."
The Rollergirls took another big step in February, booking an exhibition match at Dallas' What's Hot Fun World roller rink. The game, as expected, sold out.
Given the flat-track format, the Texas Rollergirls possess an advantage over the banked-track Lonestars. All they need is a smooth surface to play.
In the past five years, local flat-track leagues have sprouted all over the country -- Houston's Spacecity Rollergirls, Dallas' Assassination City Roller Derby, Chicago's Windy City Rollers and Seattle's Rat City Rollergirls, to name just a few.
However, don't count the Lonestar Rollergirls out of the touring picture. They too have hit the road, and are lugging their banked track with them. Last year, the Lonestar players headed south to play exhibitions in Corpus Christi, as well as to Fort Hood in Killeen to play a bout for the troops.
National publicity
After an article about Austin rollergirls appeared in The New York Times last year, Matt Hovis of Action Figure, one of Austin's premier production and design companies, was among six groups vying for broadcast rights to the Lonestars' story. Eventually Hovis' team won the league's hearts by "showing them how much we really understood their world," he said, adding, "plus, we could handle damn near as much tequila as they could, and that went a long way."
After spending their 2004 season in an East Austin warehouse, the Rollergirls, along with Hovis' production team, moved into Austin Studios Hangar 5 to begin filming the A&E documentary.
"It is technically a reality show, (but) it doesn't resemble what is currently in that genre," Hovis says. With Gary Auerbach, executive producer of MTV's "Laguna Beach," on board, the series will consist of 13 one-hour episodes. Currently working under the simple title "Rollergirls," it will focus on the lives of the women and their intraleague relationships, as well as the "dichotomy between their daily lives and their almost superhero alter egos," Hovis says.
If television wasn't enough, the Lonestar league may also hit the big screen. Stuart Thomajan, who sits on Lonestar's board of directors, recently received a letter of intent from Four on the Floor to work with producers Alan Riche and Peter Riche of Sunrise Entertainment -- known for such work as "Starsky & Hutch," "The Family Man" and "Deep Blue Sea" -- and screenwriter J.V. Hart of "Contact" and "Hook" fame for a feature film based on the league.
Thomajan sees the A&E show and the feature film as adding "awareness of the league specifically, the sport in general, and as a way to further the cause of women's empowerment." In other words, he's ecstatic for what all the media interest will do for the league and the women who participate.
Derby rebirth
Austin's roller renewal began not unlike the original derbies, launched in 1935 from Leo A. Seltzer's notes on Chicago's old Ricketts restaurant tablecloth. The brains behind the revival in Austin was a man who went by the name "Evil Dan," which turned out to be an apt epithet.
"The background history is pretty convoluted," says Marie Rurke, aka "the Wrench," of the Texas Rollergirls, who has skated since the sport's Austin inception. "As clearly as I know, a guy from Oklahoma moved to town, calling himself 'Evil Dan.' While he was sitting at Casino El Camino one night, an anonymous female friend said that they should all bring back roller derby."
(Interestingly enough, the idea for this story was hatched with this magazine's editor in the same smoky bar.)
"A lot of us didn't know how to skate at all, or had skated when we were 12 years old, and yet thought that we could pull this off," Rurke laughs, as she recalls the moment that friend Heather Burdick invited her to join.
Several months later, when "Evil Dan" disappeared without a trace, the skaters were left with angry investors and no structure to build upon. But instead of giving up, they looked to their punk roots, continued to hold practices and plan fundraisers and formed the four original teams that are still seen at Lonestar bouts, though the lineups have changed.
"When I started, the practices were still unorganized, and we weren't even wearing pads yet," Jennifer Wilson of the Texas Rollergirls recalled about joining in 2001.
With their work under way, the original Austin league took on the name Bad Girl Good Woman (BGGW) under the guidance of four original She-E-Os (their version of CEOs): Anya Jack, April Herman, Heather Burdick, and Nancy Lynn. Their first bout rocked Skate World in 2001 and drew a crowd of approximately 400. By the end of the season, the girls were performing to sold-out crowds of 1,300. Even though things were going well at the gates, there were rumblings from within.
"It was really hard for us to have the decisions made by just a few people who did not skate, and who we felt had lost touch with what was happening with a large group of people in the league," Rurke contends regarding the She-E-Os. "We were asking for things, which were turned down, before the big problem, which was the Austin Music Hall."
A match on March 15, 2003, at the Music Hall changed everything and split the original league into two. Up to that point, injuries had occurred, but none as serious as what Whiskey L'Amour faced. She went down with a fractured vertebra and was whisked away to the hospital in an ambulance. It was then that she and the rest of the skaters discovered that they were playing without any insurance.
"I was lucky enough to have insurance through my job," says Lacy Attuso, the woman behind the Whiskey L'Amour persona, "but I still had to pay a large deductible for the accident out of my own pocket."
Though she stopped skating, Attuso works with the splitaway Texas Rollergirls, acting as a master of ceremonies and as the marketing director for the league.
The game at the Austin Music Hall went on, "as it should have," she remembers, but the league fractured within a month. The serious injury "was one of the major things that made us feel like we had to take control of this business," Rurke adds. In April 2003, an overwhelming majority of the skaters left the original league and turned the Texas Rollergirls into a skater-owned-and-operated organization.
"It's a democracy, and it's really hard sometimes," Rurke says of Texas Rollergirls, "but it was what we wanted to do and how we believe we should do it. Every single one of us goes out there and gets the crap knocked out of us, so we should have some say in how the organization runs."
"Decisions are made different ways," Jennifer Wilson says. "If they are going to affect the entire league or a certain money amount that's going to be spent or certain time commitment that's going to be made, then there's a league vote. If it's just going to affect the team then we'll act as a team unit. It's very democratic organization."
The Lonestars, then, began with the departure of roughly 80 percent of their skaters and only one intact team. The She-E-Os of the original league found themselves at square one for the second time. They began with a new name, Texas Roller Derby Lonestar Rollergirls, and a new idea -- going back to the roots of a 75-year-old sport.
The She-E-Os decided to reinforce history by purchasing a banked track from one of the original International Roller Skating League teams, the Bay City Bombers.
"I think that from the beginning, our whole goal was to get a banked track," says Sara Luna, aka "Lunatic."
Once it was purchased, Luna remembers, "We had to train, and it was a lot of work. On flat track, we took anybody and everybody just to make a team. On the banked track, you have to meet a certain requirement and athleticism, or otherwise you're just going to be an obstacle."
With such a dramatic change in skating technique, the Lonestar league was lucky enough to make contact with former roller derby pro Greg Rollie, who skated for Chicago's International Roller Derby League team, Midwest Pioneers, from 1972 to 1973. Rollie, who referees under the alias "G-Spot," first heard about the derby in Austin from a co-worker, and after some Internet research, discovered that the league used a banked track. He asked if he could come out to skate the track, for old times' sake. They agreed on the condition that he help train them to skate.
"It takes a lot of skill to skate the track," Rollie maintains. "People don't realize it. When you see the new girls come out for tryouts, it's not as easy as they think."
Rollie's experience in pacing the track, understanding of legal and illegal blocks, and bag of track tricks are priceless. The track operates with the blessing of Ann Calvello, aka "the Meanest Mama on Skates," one of the most recognized roller derby legends. She started in 1948 and skated through her 70s and now lends her name to the Lonestars' championship series. Calvello will be in attendance at this year's championship bout.
Viva Las Vegas
Next up for the Rollergirls: the league championships in late July and early August. Then, from Aug. 26 through 28, skaters from all over the country will converge on the one city where everyone will feel at home: Las Vegas. The Roller-Con, a nationwide derby convention, includes themed events such as a water fight, a speech from roller derby pioneer Loretta "Little Iodine" Behrens, Bloody Mary recovery parties and, of course, lots of skating.
Though most skaters will leave after the weekend, negotiations are under way between the Lonestars and a hotel-casino to start a franchise of their havoc in the heart of Sin City. (Lonestar management declined to name the Las Vegas establishment.)
Following the convention, both leagues plan to travel, staging more exhibitions in the offseason and continuing to spread the word. And it just seems to be getting easier.
Maybe their hope for conquering the world isn't so far-fetched.
