All-Female Roller Derby Packs A Punch With Hockey Fans

Friday, April 29th, 2005

According to one fan, “It’s girls going around fighting and skating. What more do you need? It’s perfect.” But it wasn’t always that way. From All-Female Roller Derby Packs A Punch With Hockey Fans:

It’s a far cry from the early days of roller derby. The sport was founded in 1935 in Chicago, as a distraction from the Depression. It was originally an endurance race. Male-female couples were required to complete tens of thousands of laps, until they reached the equivalent of skating from New York to Los Angeles.

Noticing that occasional collisions between couples elicited the biggest howls from the crowd, promoters made it a contact sport and introduced a point system. It evolved into a co-ed team sport and boomed in the next decades, with teams playing before crowds of 40,000 or more in big venues like New York’s Madison Square Garden. Actress Raquel Welch starred in a 1972 roller derby movie, called ‘Kansas City Bomber,’ and another film, where the teams tried to kill a player in each bout starring James Caan, called ‘Rollerball,’ appeared in 1975.

Nevertheless, financial troubles, declining crowds and a recession at the time forced the main leagues to shut down in the mid-1970s. Several attempts to revive the sport since then — often using a choreographed, pro-wrestling-style approach — failed.

The latest incarnation, initiated mostly by the female players, seems to have found the right formula, particularly for hockey fans in withdrawal.

Poor, poor hockey fans.

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