Frank Deford - Five Strides on the Banked Track: The Life and Times of the Roller Derby

Five Strides on the Banked Track

The Life and Times of the Roller Derby

Frank Deford

The Roller Derby is the story, and the legacy, of two fine and charming men, Leo and Jerry Seltzer, father and son.

It is very appropriate, accordingly, that this book should be for my father.

Acknowledgments

Besides being indebted to the Seltzers for their continuing cooperation and candor, I have also appreciated the help so many other people in the Derby organization have provided me. It is unfair, really, to cite any of the skaters particularly, because so many of them were so helpful, but nevertheless, I must reserve most special thanks for Ann Calvello and Joan Weston.

I also want to express my appreciation for the assistance that Nancy Williamson, Dick Gangel, and Jerry Tax supplied at Sports Illustrated; I want to thank Mike Hamilburg for providing the interest that revived the project, and David Otte for joining me in the belief that the reading public is ready for the Roller Derby.

A special appreciation also must be awarded Ken Kunzelman, whose private collection helped provide the book with vital and otherwise lost research material. It is to him and to Walter Iooss, Jr., that my thanks are due for the photographs.

F.D.

Contents

Illustrations

Prologue

C HARLIE OC ONNELL (at the bar in the Holiday Inn in Duluth after the last game of his career): I get so tired with the new skaters complaining all the time. You can take any outfit and tear it apart, if you really want to.

B ILL G ROLL : You mean any outfit, in or out of sports.

OC ONNELL : You can tear any outfit apart. So look at it this way: what does the Derby give you? Where would you be, Lou?

L OU D ONOVAN : Without the Derby?

OC ONNELL : Yeah. Without the Derby. If there wasnt one.

D ONOVAN : Not in boxing anymore. I had to leave there. And I couldnt be in football or anything.

OC ONNELL : So where would you be if you werent skating?

D ONOVAN : Well, Id just be in construction all the time.

OC ONNELL : Right. You and me and all these guys. Youd be just a working stiff.

D ONOVAN : Sure.

G ROLL : But it isnt just that thing, Charlie. The minute I saw it, the speed, the contact, I knew it was I fell for it.

OC ONNELL : Thats another reason not to tear it apart. We all just love to skate. I know that, too. Look, I know that

1

Schizophrenic

The Roller Derby prospers, rocking and whirring, exciting its own, nurturing its young. It was designed on a tablecloth in 1935, and often it is still like a breath of the Depression, a carnival air of the dance marathons that spawned it. It is still one-night stands and advance men, Laundromats and greasy spoons, and children who collect in excited clamor to press close to these wonderful skaters who have come so far to perform in their very own town.

The players construct and dismantle their own track, and carry it, and their puppy dogs, along to the next town. It is a game played by kids who come right out of high school or off the assembly line, starry-eyed, the way they used to do in all other American sports before everyone went to junior college and drew $100,000 bonuses.

But the Roller Derby is no rube. It is quaint and unchanged only where that serves its purpose. The Derby is like all those travelogues, where the peasants, idly switching water buffalo, watch the jet planes fly over the golf course and the hydroelectric plant, while the announcer intones: where the old meets the new head-on. The Derby is managed by young suburban executives who know much better than the hidebound traditionalists who run most American sports, how to understand television and urban demographyhow, indeed, to manipulate these new realities. The Derby was utterly ravaged by TV once, but now it may be the only sport in the land that has learned how to use television to its advantage without ever being threatened by it.

As in all its life, no one looks at the Derby very carefully below the surface, for its fans embrace it emotionally without question, and its skeptics dismiss it just as quickly as fraudulent and savage. Maybe the Roller Derby is the way it was in all sports many years ago, or maybe it is just something that will always be its very own. Variety has declared that the Derby is the fastest-growing entertainment attraction in the country, and then tried to explain what that attraction could be: It is neither sport nor show biz, but a new television art form with elements of both. It is cathartic, dramatically structured, fast-paced and classic as a John Wayne movie.

At the heart of the whole enterprise are the Bay Bombers. The Bombers, in brown and orange, are the home team for virtually every Derby fan in America. For twenty weeks of the year, these heroes play various villainous opponents in San Francisco and Oakland, in San Jose, Sacramento, Fresno, and other towns in northern California. Every week that they are playing in the Bay Area, the Sunday night game at Kezar Pavilion, an old arena hard by Haight-Ashbury, is videotaped and sent out to the 124 or so TV stations all over America that run the Derby games.

The stations schedule the tapes at their own leisure. The Derby comes on mostly over the weekend, usually in the afternoon, but there are many exceptions. In St. Louis, the Derby appears at 10:00 A.M. Sunday morning, in New York at 10:30 A.M. Sunday, in Denver at midnight Monday. Nevertheless, whenever and wherever the Derby is scheduled, it invariably outrates the opposition on the other channels at that time. It beats all its competition in about eighty percent of the cities where it is shown.

When measured against such respectable sports as hockey, golf, bowling, skiing, track, and baseball, the Derby always has higher ratings. It duels basketball and football pretty evenly. The Derby always does better than news and talk shows and most movies. What secrets of this land Roller Derby can reveal! In Albuquerque, Roller Derby just edges Meet the Press; in Charleston, South Carolina, Roller Derby nearly triples the rating of Meet the Press. Every week at least three million persons in the United States see a Derby game on television.

Slightly more than half of these people are women, a statistic no other sport can claim. But then, life follows art, for half of any Derby contest is devoted to womens play. It is symbolic of the whole Derby cosmos that the most outstanding player in the history of the game, Charlie OConnellor, as he is always known, Bomber Great Charlie OConnell, a Living Legend in the Whirlwind World of Skatingwas introduced to the Derby by his grandmother. Try to imagine OConnells equivalentsBabe Ruth or Johnny Unitas or Bill Russellgetting started that way. At any arena where the Derby is playing, though, the noise from the stands is characteristically feminine. That is distinctive. Above the ubiquitous whirr of the plastic wheels on the banked track, the din at the Derby is always screechy, with sighsnot the raucous, gruff sounds that mark other sporting events.

Both sexes combined, though, it is probably safe to say that, in the course of any year, more people show up in person to root for the Bombers than for any other sports team in the country. Partly, this is because virtually everybody who comes to the Derby roots for the Bombers. They are Americas Home Team, as perhaps the Yankees or Notre Dame once were, as nobody else really is anymore. The Bombers opponents, the visitors, are usually the Pioneers or the Cardinals; either that, or the Cardinals or the Pioneers; one or the other. In the off-season, on tour, the Bombers play a villainous conglomerate that is titled, ideally, the All-Stars. Most of the time. Occasionally the All-Stars will go under another name; they might be the New England Braves when the tour hits Boston or Providence. It really doesnt matter, because everybody still roots for the Bombers. In the Bay Area and in the more than one hundred cities they play on tour, they draw around two million fans a year.