roller derby.”
And both men and women flocked to the
sport not just as skaters but also as specta-
tors.
“Coming from a very small town, roller
derby was like Hollywood to me,” McGuire
said.
The drama of roller derby during Jerry
Seltzer’s tenure was cinematic, with fes-
tering feuds playing out over weeks and
brawls breaking out mid-jam. McGuire in-
sisted that the bouts were never fixed.
(Jerry Seltzer waffled on the issue.) But
even if the theatrics were, for the most part,
organic, the casting of certain teams and
players as villains or heroes had striking
parallels to the melodrama of professional
wrestling.
And whether it was faked may not be the
point: As Frank Deford wrote in The New
York Times Magazine in 1998, not to go “just
because you knew the Bombers would pre-
vail on the last jam was not to go watch
Dame Margot Fonteyn dance Aurora be-
cause you knew how ‘The Sleeping Beauty’
would turn out.”
In May 1973, 27,135 fans packed into Shea
Stadium to watch the tripleheader world
championships, in which the Chiefs, led by
Mike Gammon, defeated the Pioneers, 34-- He and McGuire, married at the time,
were featured the following March in Peo-
ple magazine. They had a deal with Double-
day to write a memoir, “Ram, Slam, Jam and
a Little Bit of Ham.” But by the end the year,
the roller coaster of derby came, again, to a
crashing halt.
“We never got a reason,” McGuire said.
“It was a cold way of closing our career. And
it was confusing, because the crowds were
still so big.”
Jerry Seltzer sold the rights to the Inter-
national Roller Derby League to Roller
Games, a rival league based in Los Angeles.
It lasted a few years longer than he had,
even staging a bout at Madison Square Gar-
den between the Tokyo Bombers, Japan’s
first professional roller derby team, and the
Chiefs that drew 14,251 fans in February- But by 1975, Roller Games too had
gone belly up.
And so it seemed roller derby had gone
the way of walkathons and dance mara-
thons. There were a few attempts to bring it
back in the 1980s and ’90s — in increasingly
exaggerated, W.W.E.-esque forms — none
of which went anywhere. But then, in 2001, a
group of women in Austin, Tex., resurfaced
the sport, combining the traditional struc-
ture with a decidedly feminist bent.
“There are very few spaces in the world
where women, transgender and gender-
nonconforming folks get to use their bodies
freely and unapologetically,” Molly Stenzel,
the president of the Women’s Flat Track
Derby Association, or W.F.T.D.A., the
sport’s main governing body, said in an
email. (Stenzel is better known to her fellow
skaters as Master Blaster.)
In addition to full-contact aggression and
women’s empowerment, roller derby today
is known for the skaters’ creative, often
pun-laden names — a tradition started by
the founders, who were inspired by Austin’s
drag scene.
“People take these names, and they’re
kind of goofy, but it also frees you up,” said
Atwell, a.k.a. Em Dash. “It’s not an alter
ego: It’s a way to be more yourself than you
can always be in your normal life.”
While the banked tracks and orches-
trated violence of roller derby’s earlier iter-
ations may be gone, the spirit of the sport
remains the same, Atwell said. And Jerry
Seltzer, who died on July 1, was “an incredi-
ble advocate of the modern sport,” despite
the ways it evolved from his creation.
Now in the throes of its third renaissance,
roller derby is making yet another come-
back. Since 2004, the W.F.T.D.A. has grown
to include 463 member leagues in 33 coun-
tries. There are now roller derby leagues on
every continent except Antarctica.
Atwell recalled discovering roller derby
in 2005, when it was still in its latest infancy.
“It was both campy and colorful and ex-
tremely serious,” she said. “The skaters
were having a lot of fun, but they also
brought an intensity to it unlike almost any-
thing I’d ever seen. And I loved the idea of
an intense sport that didn’t take itself too se-
riously.”
Last year’s W.F.T.D.A. world champi-
onships, in New Orleans, drew 2,500 specta-
tors. Someday, Atwell said, she hopes they
will return to Madison Square Garden.JOHN SOTOMAYOR/THE NEW YORK TIMESBARTON SILVERMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMESVallow, left, playing for the Northeast Braves, fell over the rail at the Gar-
den in 1971. Sandy Dunn, above, the captain of the New York Chiefs’
women’s team, said: “This is the best sport for women to be in. Women
tennis players and golfers aren’t recognized as much as we are, and we’re
equal with the men.” Decades later, the sport is making a comeback.
JOHN SOTOMAYOR/THE NEW YORK TIMES