Friday, September 08, 2006 Look at this
Then look again.
That's a clip from the Bumberbout, the tournament that the Rat City Rollergirls hosted at the Bumbershoot music festival in Seattle, and what's happening, in barest terms, is that D-Bomb is whipping Femme Fatale forward ahead of the pack, with her leg.
The move is ridiculous, amazing, mind-blowing. Think about wheels, shifting weights, transfers of momentum, balance, and capacity for hip rotation. Think about split-second decisions, and physics. Think about phenomenal trust.
That's still not why this clip is significant.
These skaters are sisters, and within their own league, they're on opposing teams, so they never get to play together, but on their travel team they can join forces, so there's a human interest angle if you like those, but that's not it either.
Probably a hundred different girls in the next month or so are going to break their legs trying to get this down, but maybe a few won't. They'll keep practicing, and they'll teach a couple people each. Some of them will also break their legs, but again, some of them won't. Maybe this isn't like watching the invention of the slam dunk or seeing the first triple axle. For all I know, this isn't the invention at all, and some leagues have been doing this move forever, in their home towns, in front of their fans without the eyes of the world on them. Maybe once enough girls get this move down and it becomes expected, it won't be as effective. Maybe the cavalcade of snapped fibulas will keep it from ever catching on. (I doubt it.)
I don't know, but I think, and I think this is a manifestation of something amazing happening. Derby skaters across the country have felt it for a long time, and many more will feel it as leagues pop up out of nowhere like a fairy ring in big cities and podunk towns all over the world (Canada, the U.K., Germany, and New Zealand all have cities with leagues now, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were more). What we know keeps us from getting downhearted the hundredth time someone insinuates that this is a sideshow or a cat fight. It keeps us doing this, joyfully, even as the money flies out of our bank accounts on gossamer wings, as we neglect our jobs and families, as our relationships break under the strain, as we get hurt again.
Suppose you wanted to start a basketball league, but anybody you met who'd even heard of basketball either thought that you still played it with a peach basket and some gumption, or they'd seen the Harlem Globetrotters when they were a kid. Suppose you knew that in your career in basketball, if you made a cent off the sport it would be because you started a business that supported its growth. You'd never get a scholarship. You didn't even know how to dribble, and nobody else you knew did either, but one night an angel whispered in your ear, and from then on you burned to play basketball.
Suppose you went around your hometown looking for people to play with, and most people thought you were an idiot (or they talked to you about peach baskets and the Harlem Globetrotters), but some people, almost before you'd finished your pitch said, "Yes. Yes. When? Where. I am doing this and you can't stop me."
I could stretch the simile, like, suppose you had to get somebody to watch your kids while you did this, and suppose you had to go around begging auditoriums and warehouses for a place to play, and you had to do your own publicity and come up with a standard set of rules, and on and on, but I'm not one to belabor a point.
Roller derby is a sport that people in the U.S. just made up one day, and its got America's miraculous, grubby fingerprints all over it. We love to make something out of nothing, (or to steal and pretend that what we stole was nothing), we love something new. We love the counterclockwise circle.
The story of the gensis of roller derby starts out boring. During the depression, people went for extreme, punishing fads and competitions, largely because they were broke. When Leo Seltzer came up with the spark for it, roller derby was equivalent to a dance marathon: hard to do, yet monotonous, grueling, yet repetive. Teams of one man and one woman had to circle a track in shifts until they had skated, in lap after lap, the distance between New York and Los Angeles. People liked it, I guess, because it beat watching the radio, but it wasn't a sensation until the first miracle of derby occurred.
Damon Runyan, the writer who split his energies between writing popular stories about small time hoods and floozies on Broadway and writing about sports, told Leo Selzter (in my mind, he sounds just like Jimmy Durante and speaks exclusively in the Runyonesque slang he made famous) that people really liked hitting, and that maybe the sport would be more successful if there was contact between the skaters.
Now, here is one of the coincidences that makes me suspect that roller derby is more than somewhat supernatural. Look at what the wikipedia says here: "He spun tales of gamblers, petty thieves, actors and gangsters; few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead to be known as "Nathan Detroit", "Big Jule", "Harry the Horse", "Good Time Charlie", "Dave the Dude", and so on." Damon Runyon was obviously a man who knew the power and beauty of an implausible name, of razzle dazzle. Here on another website, it says "Many of the great sportswriters of the time often let poetry creep into their work, but it would be a mistake to say the same about Runyon. He was a poet at heart who wrote about sports."
And here we come, back in a counterclockwise circle, to derby as I know it. This sport is lousy with poets, and if not poets, mathmeticians, and if not mathmeticians, strippers. Derby, this made-up sport, is the home of people who'd ordinarily have a pretty hard time getting paid or rewarded for their athletic abilities. (They're called women! Rimshot! Hayo. Take note, though: derby has included women since it began, and it was one of the first sports where a woman could be a professional athlete.)
Some derby skaters have played sports their whole lives until they got out of school and there was no one to play with, and these skaters are ecstatic to go back to a sport again. Lots of us, though, lots and lots of us, were too unpopular to get picked for teams, or too dreamy to watch the sky for the oncoming ball. Too fat, too short, too skinny. Some of were taught that sports interfered with the rich inner life of the mind. Maybe everyone we knew who loved sports also happened to be a complete jackass, full of malice and loathing and ready to torture anyone they could.
So, we became poets in our hearts, and a lot of never knew until our own miracles occurred and when we heard "roller derby" an instant, blind "Yes!" clicked in our heads, we never knew what we could do. Because of all the poets, we have skate names, team themes, hot uniforms...everything that draws other poets in, and all of us poets who up 'til now treated our bodies like big dumb animals we had to herd around are beginning to wonder what would happen if we tried to balance on one leg and whip somebody forward with the other.
Looking at a clip of D-Bomb leg-whipping Femme Fatale, I see a hundred new paths of what we can do, and only one of them leads to breaking our legs. posted by Frenz | 9/08/2006 12:49:00 PM
14 comments
|
