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These Derby Girls Are SMASHING - Young and Hip, Roller Women Are Ready to Rumble

Posted on: Tuesday, 26 April 2005, 18:00 CDT

One of the first things you learn in roller derby is how to fall. Because sooner or later, someone's going to push you. Hard.

On a recent Wednesday, eight women whiz around an oval track in tight formation. As The Clash plays overhead, they jab their elbows into each others' ribs.

"Pack it up, girls! Pack it up!" someone yells. The formation turns into a high-speed shoving match. The skaters bank hard and ram each other out of bounds. Within seconds, most lose their balance and hit the floor in spectacular falls, their wheels clopping on the wooden floor.

"Oooh," a woman groans, lying spread eagle and face down on the floor. She takes a second to see if anything's seriously wrong, then wrenches herself up and starts skating again.

Welcome to modern roller derby - a kitschy combination of burlesque and blood sport.

Roller derby has been around a long time. Its high-speed, coed crashes with high potential for injury made it popular in the 1940s. Decades later, long after the original sport had petered out, there was an ill-fated revival that involved actors in shiny Spandex, televised grudge matches, and fake-wrestling-style plots.

The sport's latest amateur incarnation draws a whole different kind of crowd: urban, hip, retro, ironic -- and strictly female. There are more than 20 leagues across America, including a nascent one in Providence. Each league consists of two or more teams of 10 competing players.

Physical aggression is still as much a part of the sport as skating. The players adopt noms de guerre such as such as Hard- Hearted Hannah and Rhoda Perdition.

"I can't imagine men doing this, because I think it would get really, really violent," said Sarah Kingan, who founded Providence Roller Derby, the local league. "When women fight, they don't lose their head as much as men do."

Kingan, 25, a grad student, started the league last summer, after she moved to Providence and found herself pining for the high-speed brawls she had helped instigate in a league in Tucson, Ariz. She put up fliers, called an organizational meeting, and weeks later found herself putting four art students through falling drills at a rink in Cranston.

"They didn't know how to stop, go fast, skate backwards - they just weren't very agile," she said. "None of them knew how to skate. I didn't tap into skaters, I tapped into the cool girls."

One of those women was a 23-year-old office assistant who skates under the name of Tammy Guns. Tammy, from Little Compton, was "totally inactive and sedentary until I did roller derby." Her initial ineptness made her start jogging, skating at a nearby tennis court, power walking -- anything to build up stamina.

"It's really built up my self-confidence. I'm really happy with my progress," she said. "I feel like I'm achieving something."

A year later, there are 21 women in the local league, divided into two teams: the Mob Squad (the name is a homage to Providence's storied past) and the Sakonnet River Rats. They practice twice a week at Silver City SkateLand in Taunton, Mass. They've had two fundraisers in the past few months, netting $1,000 each, and they're preparing to take each other on in their first official bout at the Bank of America skating rink in Kennedy Plaza on Sunday.

The game looks chaotic and lawless, but there are rules, and they're fairly simple. Four women from each team skate in a tight bloc called a pack. At a whistle, two fast, agile skaters -- one from each team -- skate up from the rear and try to dart, shove and bash their way through the pack, scoring a point for each opposing player they pass and usually leaving bodies in their wake. Skaters can't grab or hit each other with an out-stretched arm. And they can't jab their elbows up or down.

The teams compete for two to four 20-minute periods. Whoever has the most points at the end wins.

There's a distinctly punk-rock feeling about the whole affair. The players make their own uniforms -- and the more outrageous the better. Even at a practice, these women aren't in sweats and ponytails. They wear retro tube socks over fishnets, short skirts or hot pants, and helmets decorated with stickers, paint and even a knitted helmet cozy. They're mostly in their mid-20s, and many of them, even now, are art students -- but don't forget that they enjoy a good punch-up now and then.

"There were a couple of months when I didn't skate, and I was a sad, lonely, depressed girl," said Ivana Clobber, who skated in a league in Madison, Wis., before she moved to Boston this year. She pulled off her sweater to show a huge purple bruise on her arm.

"It's really fun, it's aggressive, it's kind of dangerous. I can list 25 ways it's fun," she said.

"You can beat up on each other and there's no hard feelings," Kingan added.

Indeed, at this practice, a fight broke out on the rink. Two girls smashed into each other and fell to the floor, where they started tussling. They were both laughing hard, but they punched and pushed each other until the ref stepped in to separate them.

"You wanna play, you gotta pay," said Betty Black Eyes, a statuesque 29-year-old from Portsmouth who was nursing a sore back after several eye-popping spills on the rink. "It's all good."

The Mob Squad and the Sakonnet River Rats will skate at the Bank of America skating rink at 3 p.m. on May 1. Tickets are $5 and are available at the event.

* * *

Hard Hearted Hannah, a member of the Mob Squad, one of the Rhode Island Roller Derby teams, stretches in her skates before a scrimmage.

* * *

Tough skaters roll in packs as the Sakonnet River Roller Rats and the Mob Squad scrimmage to practice for May Day Mayhem on May 1 at the Bank of America Skating Center in Providence. About half the members of Rhode Island's two roller derby teams are RISD students. One Mob Squadder, known as The Godmother, below, stretches before doing battle.

Journal photos / CONNIE GROSCH

Source: Providence Journal

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