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

By Walter Iooss, Frank Deford and Jerry Seltzer

Illustrated with photographs by Walter Iooss Jr.: Iconic sportswriter and commentator Frank Deford’s first book brings to life one of America’s most thrilling—and misunderstood—sports entertainments, the Roller Derby, from its birth during the Great Depression to it second ascendancy in the late 1960s

In Five Strides on the Banked Track, distinguished sports journalist Frank Deford opens a fascinating window on this exhilarating entertainment that operates according to its own set of unique rules—both on and off the track.

The Derby began as an idea on a tablecloth in 1935 by Leo Seltzer. From its Great Depression roots—when young skaters would run away to join the Roller Derby in the same way one might run away to join the circus—through its prewar heyday, postwar decline, and ultimate rise to superstardom in the 1960s, Deford sweeps us along on an unforgettable journey. He brings together the players, the fans, the promoters, and the celebrities. He shares the exploits of Bay Bomber legend Charlie O’Connell, superstar Joanie Weston, and beloved villain Ann Calvello, with her dyed blue hair, who would ultimately go on to compete in Roller Derby in seven separate decades. Deford vividly captures the excitement of a sport Variety called “cathartic, dramatic, fast-paced, and classic as a John Wayne movie.” From the idolatry of the fans to the loneliness of the open road to the hard-charging frenzy of the arena, this is a rare glimpse into a uniquely American spectator sport that continues to reinvent and resurrect itself today.

This definitive new edition includes a foreword by Jerry Seltzer and an introduction by Frank Deford.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Apr 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480477902

Book preview

Prologue

CHARLIE O’CONNELL (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.

BILL GROLL: You mean any outfit, in or out of sports.

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

LOU DONOVAN: Without the Derby?

O’CONNELL: Yeah. Without the Derby. If there wasn’t one.

DONOVAN: Not in boxing anymore. I had to leave there. And I couldn’t be in football or anything.

O’CONNELL: So where would you be if you weren’t skating?

DONOVAN: Well, I’d just be in construction all the time.

O’CONNELL: Right. You and me and all these guys. You’d be just a working stiff.

DONOVAN: Sure.

GROLL: But it isn’t just that thing, Charlie. The minute I saw it, the speed, the contact, I knew it was … I fell for it.

O’CONNELL: That’s 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 demography—how, 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 women’s play. It is symbolic of the whole Derby cosmos that the most outstanding player in the history of the game, Charlie O’Connell—or, as he is always known, Bomber Great Charlie O’Connell, a Living Legend in the Whirlwind World of Skating—was introduced to the Derby by his grandmother. Try to imagine O’Connell’s equivalents—Babe Ruth or Johnny Unitas or Bill Russell—getting 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 sighs—not 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 America’s 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 doesn’t 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.

About two-thirds of that number are drawn on the road, which is where the money is. Obviously, in these days, that is all wrong. The money is supposed to come from television, or, at least, from the hometown operation. Like so many things in the history of the Derby, however, its profit structure is upside down. It is constructed, in fact, like a pyramid balancing on its point.

The fact is, of course, that no matter how good your attraction may be, you cannot just go out on the road and attract crowds. Therefore, you must devote your energies to building up an event to the point where it is awaited. Consequently, the Derby runs for a whole season in the Bay Area, employing dozens of skaters, executives, and spear carriers, so that it can, once a week, televise a game that can then be sold to stations around the country to whet the appetite of the viewers so that they will show up to buy tickets when the Derby tour comes by one or two nights a year. Everything is telescoped out of the wrong end.

Yes, essentially that is the way it works. Now the world will know our secret. The man saying that is Jerry Seltzer, the president of the Roller Derby, and the son of Leo Seltzer, the man who invented the game in 1935 when Jerry was three years old.

A Roller Derby magnate is naturally presumed to be coarse, fat, amoral, with a foul-smelling cigar and a catalogue of obscene suggestions ready for the girl skaters. Quite to the contrary, Jerry Seltzer is urbane, witty, and smart. Seldom is any one of these three characteristics found in a sports promoter. It would seem nearly impossible that all three might be lodged in one man in the profession; that that man should be, of all things, the Roller Derby promoter, is quite too much to take.

But then, really nothing about the Derby is as it is imagined to be. The skaters are most particularly miscast, stereotyped as Cro-Magnons, ruffians and scofflaws. The women, naturally, are most maligned, but only a few are Lesbians (and invariably a few of the men are homosexuals too). For the most part, though, while violence and risk are understood, the skaters are a hard-driven people, but not hard. Many are almost gentle. They are exceptionally private. When Seltzer hired a film company to shoot a Derby documentary, the crew was on the verge of abandoning the project because, even after several weeks, the skaters could never relax when the cameras and microphones were on. They would freeze up, turn silent and unnatural. Eventually, the film was saved only because it was devoted almost entirely to the story of a young man trying to join the Derby.

Alone among themselves, though, the skaters are playful, full of fun, and easily diverted. They are also sincere and direct. Their ultimate compliment is simply that some individuals are good people, and, by these, their own terms, most of them are indeed good people.

The spirit of child’s play is always in evidence, even on the track. The response to more diligent officiating is, for instance, usually a matter of seeing how much more you can get away with. That way it is fun—more of a game. The more aggravated an official becomes under these trying circumstances, the more the players seem to enjoy it. A player sent to the penalty box immediately starts pounding the sides and crying out, How much longer? and My time must be up! within seconds after he has been banished there. Six penalties mean expulsion for the balance of the game. As soon as it is reported that a player has been assessed with three or four, or whatever the number, he begins whining that the count must be incorrect. Faces are often made behind the referees’ backs. It all seems sometimes straight out of elementary school.

Indeed, when the skaters used to travel by train, they always had pillow fights and water battles. Some were continued when the tour paused for a night. The most famous such action took place in an old Chattanooga hotel several years ago. It started when a girl skater was leaving to go out on a date with a local swain, who happened to be a cop. The skaters would throw water on her every time she would leave the hotel. They were up on the second floor. She would get soaked, come back, and change. She was blitzed with water so many times that at last she had to start borrowing clothes from friends. In the locker rooms, the skaters lob empty drink cans over rows of lockers, bombing the team that is dressing the next row over. Often cold cups of water are poured down unsuspecting backs and towels are flicked at bare bottoms.

The most striking characteristic of the skaters is their ability to suddenly suspend their normal high sense of decency and fair play once they hit the track. You just learn, says Buddy Atkinson, Jr., who grew up in a Derby family and has been skating professionally for almost a decade. You just learn that there are two sets of rules you live by. Let’s face it, the things you do out there, you can’t walk down the street and do them. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think you should hurt people all the time, but you can do anything you want if you’re going for a bundle. There’s no feelings then. Besides, the big thing in this game is fear. If you can get someone afraid of you, you got it made.

Buddy Junior, as he is always referred to, is the son of skaters, Buddy Senior and Bobby Johnstone, two placid, warm people, who met, fell in love, married, and raised a family around the banked track. Buddy Junior has been on skates since he was three. At seventeen, supplementing his income as an elevator mechanic, he turned pro for $65 a week. A few months later, Buddy Junior, like Buddy Senior, married a skater. Don’t be fooled by the skating, the roughness, Buddy Junior says. These people are most all introverts. They are shy people who ran across skating and loved it. It became like their release. Or their tranquilizer.

Larry Smith is twenty-six and one of the few skaters to have encountered any higher education. He attended Kansas State for a year. Larry is a carpenter by trade, and he had run a little cross-country, but then he found skating, and now he wants it to be his life. Sensitive, polite, with even a touch of a stutter, Larry is always getting knocked around. He is five feet seven, and both his knees were so bad that he was IV-F. Then, in 1967, his third year in the Derby, he broke an ankle. While convalescing, he was sent to Montreal to help teach the best new kids in the training school that was in operation there at that time.

Francine Cochu was all the rage, on her way to rookie-of-the year honors in Montreal. One of seven daughters of a cabinetmaker, she was just eighteen then. She does not even reach five feet tall and she is hardly one hundred pounds. In the imaginative Roller Derby publicity, she is always referred to as the Montreal Express or ex-Canadian spitfire, but in fact she is a lovely little thing, with soft eyes and honey blond hair and a face that expresses pain vividly when she is clouted. She talks rarely, and even less at that time, since she knew no English. Larry spoke no French. Naturally, they fell madly in love, were married, and honeymooned on the 1968 winter

Reviews for Five Strides on the Banked Track

[datrappert · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Deford writing about the roller derby! What could be better? Well actually, this book from 1971 never quite takes off. The portraits of the stars I remember from my childhood are good, and paint them as real people who just happen to make a living skating, but the very normality of these folks makes the book more interesting than it is entertaining. A little more perspective on what became of everyone after the end of the book would have made this much more interesting. Still, Open Road Media deserves a lot of praise for resurrecting this never-reprinted look at a peculiar corner of American sports.