Category Archives: True Derby

Derby attracts a wide range of skaters. They come from all backgrounds and in all flavors. Each is following her own path. Here are a few of their stories.

Art of the Listen - Bench Talk, Political Muck and Such, True Derby

MEAN PEOPLE

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So, what do you do with the mean people?

You know, the ones you really didn’t intend to have a conversation with, bench or otherwise? But for some reason there one is, right in front of you. A real snake.

A stranger who could not get the door to open and laughingly I showed her how.

Big mistake. My mistake. My attitude, she says, going on to point out all the other gaping holes in my inadequate personality, punctuating each word with venom.

An invitation to fight if there ever was one!

What’s a derby girl to do? Defend? Fight back? She wasn’t very big. I probably could have won. But despite outside appearances, derby girls are smart, not mean.

And they play offense and defense at the same time.

“You know, ” I finally say after a few feeble defenses. “You may be right. I apologize.”

As we walk away my nine year old companion states firmly, “You didn’t have to say that. She started it!” (This coming from the girl who sat in the principal’s office for hitting back at a bully.)

“But I won,” I tell her. “I gave her a way to back down and it just made her look mean and dumb.”

Because sometimes being right may be the wrong thing to be. Or just not worth it.

And, as I heard growing up, you don’t get into a spitting match with a snake.

SKATE ON!

Darla

(Don’t know where this bench is located, and not sure I would sit on it, but thanks to photographer Wieslaw Jarek )

Art of the Listen - Bench Talk, True Derby

THE FUTURE FROM BEHIND

(photo credit: Hanna Dymytriieva | Dreamstime.com )

More bounce per ounce, I say.

Recently I met with a group of derby girls from Seattle, Washington. I asked them about the future of derby.

“It’s the junior skaters,” they said, all in agreement. “They can do all kinds of things we can’t.”

“They fall down and literally bounce right back up. “

“They take chances we didn’t take. They come up with moves we didn’t think about.”

“They are redefining the sport from behind us.”

Seems to me that pretty much sums up life, I thought to myself later.

While we are fretting and arguing and trying to plan the future, maybe we should be looking behind us. To the next generation of chance takers, dreamers and bounce-back-uppers.

They may just sneak up behind us with some answers.

In the meantime, SKATE ON!

DARLA

True Derby

There’s science in them wheels….

Oh yes. Behind all the tats, fishnet stockings, crash-crazy names and slamming, there is science. And a lot of that science has to do with the counter-clockwise direction of the play.

Not a spectacle sport any more than racetrack driving, horse races or speed skating is just for fun, derby has physics with a capital P all over it.

But I am more of a writer than a physicist, so let me graciously share this derby girl’s details of the whip, the wall and the centrifugal force of the outside skater….

“Why Counter Clockwise?” by Mathundra Storm

Thanks for showing us the “right” way to look at derby.

SKATE ON!

(photo credit Zack Lynch)

Darla

Art of the Listen - Bench Talk, True Derby

WASN’T EASY BEING US…

Sharing a bench talk recently with a woman about my age, we of course had to go back and recount the old days…back when women were entering the workplace and the sports field without many of the regulations and considerations today.

She shook her head with a wry grin. “You know, it wasn’t easy being us back then.”

Reminds me a bit of something the women in roller derby back in the 60’s and 70’s might say to each other (and maybe they do!)

Ask anyone (except the folks who have been initiated into derby) and you’ll probably hear how he or she watched the spectacle on television as entertainment. Most often it is compared to televised female wrestling of the time.

Yet even back in those olden days women had to be incredible athletes, often competing head to head on the same tracks as the male skaters. Colleen English of Penn State penned a good article on the dilemma of women derby skaters of the 60’s and 70’s — “Women in the Roller Derby: Groundbreaking Athletes or Entertaining Celebrities”

In the article she quotes sportscasters of the day…
“Sportwriter Frank Deford, in Five Strides on the Banked Track, written in 1971, took a slightly nuanced view of women in roller derby.,.. Despite Deford’s somewhat progressive attitude toward the role of women in roller derby—he noted their perpetual inclusion—he still saw them as a potential distraction and as not part of the “real” game. Deford goes as far as to blame women for derby’s reputation as a spectacle, writing that “there is no doubt that it is the women who give the game its tawdry, sideshow image” and that fans may initially come to see the women skaters but “stay to enjoy the faster, harder, men’s play.” 

Today derby is considered first an incredibly tough woman’s sport, although the number of men’s and coed teams are growing as well as inclusion of transgender athletes. But the women are setting the rules now as well as the social standards. It’s worth your watch.

Maybe they will be able to say on a bench sometime in the future, “Wasn’t it great being us…”

SKATE ON!

Darla

True Derby

DERBY POP QUIZ #4 – Who invented roller skating?

Currently a pair of roller skate costs anywhere from $20 for a child’s set to hundreds of dollars for professional wheels. And none of the offerings resemble that skate and key that you wore to skate the neighborhood.

(OK, maybe it was your parents who had the skate key. Or grand parent. Let’s not get technical.)

But do you know who actually invented roller skates and roller skating? Pick one below:

  1. A inventor in Belgium put some wheels on an ice skate as part of a costume party in 1743.
  2. The Westminister gun makers fashioned roller skates from left over metal during the early 1900’s.
  3. In the 1840’s an European Opera used something like roller skates in a staged scene simulating ice-skating on a frozen lake.
  4. All of the above.

And the answer is…..

#4, depending on which report you read and to whom you talk.

That guy in Belgium, an inventor and musician named John Joseph Merlin, really did show up with wheels stuck on ice skates where the blade would be. He took a pretty big fall, according to reports.

The Westminister Repeating Arms Company also lays claim to invention of the roller skate, this one made of metal that strapped onto your shoes. They created a large market for the sport, advertising roller skates “as good as a gun”.

And Meyerbeer’s Opera, Le prophete, put dancers on roller-skates in a winter stage scene. The intriguing skates popularized the sport throughout the Continent.

However, Dr. James I. Plimpton of Medfield, Massachusetts actually secured the first patent on the roller skate in 1863.

Personally, I think those guys who first invented the wheel probably took a stab at a Neanderthal version of the roller skate in order to get around faster. Maybe they just didn’t live to talk about it.

Now you know….or don’t.

SKATE ON!

Darla.