You know, I enjoy being the DerbyDog...
It's given me an opportunity to give back to the very people I admire. In fact, by using the internet, I'm able to speak to a world-wide audience to let them know that Roller Derby is far from dead and continues to be a great memory in the minds of so many people.
I'm appreciative of the men and women who've given their bodies for my entertainment... and especially appreciative of the people who share my admiration and undying love for the sport. These are the reasons of why I do what I do.
It's with my great pleasure that I'm able now to sit back and read what was written by another true fan of the sport. I received this at NRDL headquarters, and had to share it with the rest of you.
My kudos to a brilliantly written article. I enjoyed the shared memories, Tim, and I'm sure the public will, too. Thank you for sharing it!
I present it to the world in its entirety...
--------------------------------------------------
Roller Derby Madness
By: Tim Corvin
In the corner of my bedroom sits a display piece that I rarely pay attention to, a suitcase that has been in the family for as long as I can remember. I don’t know how I ended up with it. I recently discovered that it is more than 50 years old, after finding a picture of my mom dated 1951 of her going off to college with this same suitcase in hand. I’ve used it for more than 25 years for storing old treasures from my youth. I so rarely view its contents that I never know what I’ll find when I open it, my high school yearbook and cap from the varsity baseball team, T-shirts of my favorite bands, celebrity autographs, baseball cards, buttons, souvenir programs, snapshot pictures and who knows what else. Any investigator would know that the contents belonged to a teenage boy in the 1970’s who was a sports fan.
Awhile back I was scanning old photos and checked the old suitcase for pictures. What I found this time brought about a strange flashback to the time when I was about 12 years old. It was a program of the LA T-Birds, the local Roller Derby team that I so adored in my youth. It was pro wrestling on skates, complete with internal feuds, soap opera storylines and dramatic come-from-behind victories in the final seconds by our hometown heroes. The villain opponents consisted of teams such as the Texas Outlaws, the Kansas City Bombers, the Northern Hawks (the Indian team), and the Philadelphia Warriors. I later learned that it was all a work and the entire league was based out of Los Angeles. It was a regional outlet, which would explain why the T-Birds never went on the road to these far off places that their opponents hailed from. The full-time skaters were on the T-Birds and all the part- timers were on these opposing teams. The fans were all marks, but even if we were made aware of it, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. It wasn’t like finding out that the Monkees didn’t play their own music.
Whatever feuds were going on between the skaters (sometimes from the same team), challenges would be made during the half-time interview segment of the TV broadcast, challenges for a “match-race”, a one-on-one competition between them that would only take place at the local arenas. That was the hook; you had to come to the live event in your area to see the brutal feud settled in an intense half-time match-race.
I looked through this old photo program and rediscovered my long forgotten boyhood heroes. Shirley Hardman, the team manager who didn’t take shit from anybody, man or woman, Jim Terrigno, the speedy Jammer whom the announcer always talked of the speed skating records he holds, “Psycho” Ronnie Rains, who was an absolute lunatic and loathed for his antics, until he had a change of heart and joined the T-Birds, then his crazy antics were loved and embraced, Colleen Murrell, who was billed as the sex symbol of the team, being as how she was an attractive and petite gal, especially compared to all the bull-dykes. The announcer would always say “Colleen weighs only 89 pounds but she can pack a wallop.” Then there was Big John Johnson, a large muscular black man who was the team Blocker and a true hybrid of John Henry and Jack Johnson.
By going through this program it reminded me of how my friends and I would emulate our Roller Derby heroes when we took to the local skating rinks, which caused nothing but trouble. We would whip each other around the rink to pick up speed like our heroes did; I would use the Jim Terrigno cross-legging method to pick up speed when going around the bends of the “oval track.” It was common for the “rink warden” to make us sit out the remainder of the “all skate” session, either for skating too fast against their warnings or even more so for scuffling. My friends and I didn’t always act like Roller Derby teammates, sometimes we took on the roles of the villains. We would hip-check each other into the rails or knee-lift each other off our skates or give flying elbows to the face when the other tried to pass. We were Rough-N-Tumble kids who loved to take bumps, but after such behavior we could always count on hearing the rink warden blow his whistle at us and point to the seating area, which we called the “penalty box”, like they had in Roller Derby.
Coming from the Los Angeles area, the TV and film capital of the world, I thought that all programming was national. I wasn’t made aware of regional programming until I was 13 years old and my family moved a few hundred miles north, to the Monterey region, where Roller Derby and the LA T-Birds didn’t exist. But they weren’t forgotten and I still emulated them at the local skating rink, which nobody there understood what in the hell I was doing and why I was hip-checking people into the rails, especially being as how the roller rink gang consisted of local church youth groups. My church’s youth group would join others once a month for a “skate night” activity with a prayer meeting thrown in as our intermission. It was a scene consisting of a bunch of Christian teens and this one “Psycho” kid who was out of place.
I even managed to set-up and compete in something of a match-race challenge with one of the members of the youth group. Diane Jones was a chunky high school senior who strutted around like she were the queen of the roller rink, skating backwards while kneeling down, doing spins and showing off a bunch of other tricks she had. Like me, a lot of our youth group didn’t like her for various reasons; she had attitude problems at times. In that sense, we probably should have been friends more than enemies, but she was among my sworn enemies and one night at church I challenged her. I began to emulate my Roller Derby heroes by trash talking her, just like the match-race challenges were conducted:
“You think your hot stuff on the skating rink. You’re nothing! I bet I can knock you down”
“No you can’t. I took skating lessons for years. Nobody can knock me off my feet”
“Would you be willing to put your money where your mouth is? How much you wanna
bet?....FIVE BUCKS says I can” (which was a lot of money for a poor 1974 13 year old)
“You can’t knock me down. I know that for a fact”
“Then what’s holding you up from accepting my challenge? You chicken? You act like you’re hot stuff, but you can’t back it up. You’re ‘Yella’”
“Fine, you’re on. I’ll take your bet AND your money. You’ll live to regret this!”
We shook hands to make it official, but I wasn’t done emulating my heroes. Like them when showing great confidence (and to lure more fans to the event), I sweetened the challenge even more so:
“Let’s make it interesting, I’ll even stack the odds in your favor. Five bucks says that I not only knock you down once, but I’ll knock you down TWICE!”
It was the challenge of the century to this youth group, 13 year old “Psycho” Tim Corvin against the much larger 18 year old arrogant and uppity self-proclaimed queen of the rink, “Hot Stuff” Diane Jones. I could hear in my mind how the Los Angeles announcer would have closed it out, “You heard it folks, an intergender match-race has been set with five dollars on the line. Can ‘Psycho’ Tim knock ‘Hot Stuff’ Jones off her feet? And can he do it twice? You’ll have to come out to the arena to find out, so make your reservations now. This match WILL take place as we cannot dismiss these challenges!”
The big night came. Everybody in my church’s youth group was in on it, probably placing bets amongst themselves. Then word spread through all the other church youth groups there that night. All eyes were on us. As soon as the skating began I immediately showed that I meant business. I skated right up and past Diane, grabbing her by the shoulder and the back of her pants and swinging her down onto the floor along the way. Witnesses on my side applauded while I went back and stood over Diane and used body language to express myself, the same way the Roller Derby characters did, so that all who weren’t in a hearing distance would know what I was saying. I held up my index finger at her and said, “That’s one. One down, one more to go” before skating off.
That first take-down happened so fast and so easy that I felt confidant that I would have my five bucks before the intermission prayer session. But Diane was on her toes and remained quite alert for the remainder of the night. She wasn’t doing her usual cocky strutting around by skating backwards or doing her tricks, and she remained close to the rails at all times to grab onto when I made my take-down attempts. I made several more attempts but failed each time. I already had a reputation there, so the rink warden was quite alert to my antics (and probably knew what was going on) and would force me into the penalty box for the remainder of the “all skate” sessions after each failed attempt.
It came down to the final skating session and it was looking more and more like I would lose the bet. I couldn’t afford to make any more failed attempts and get sent to the penalty box, forcing my loss. Whatever final attempt I would make had to be successful, some kind of methodical sneak attack. I played it off as if I had given up and left Diane alone, not even paying attention to her as she whizzed by laughing in my face. I even spent time off the track and out of sight entirely. Diane put her guards down and started doing her usual arrogant strutting and backwards skating, as if she were proclaiming herself the winner, but she remained close to the rail just in case, and I figured out how to use it to my advantage. I was off the track in the darkness when Diane came my way, but because she was skating backwards she couldn’t see what was behind her, my opportunity. I timed my move so that as she approached I jumped out onto the rink and hung my arms inside the rail so that my legs lay far out onto the rink floor. Diane skated into my legs and tripped onto the floor. It wasn’t an aggressive take-down attempt like I had been trying and failing at all night; it was a thought-out maneuver in which my opponent took herself down due to her own arrogance, which was always the way the T-Bird opponents lost, and in true dramatic T-Bird fashion I pulled out a come-from-behind victory in the final seconds after I had been given up for dead. Friends gathered around and celebrated. I had given these northerners a taste of Los Angeles culture while living out my Roller Derby fantasy, and at the expense of a fellow member of my church’s youth group. I guess I really was “psycho.”
The experience had an anti-climatic conclusion. At the next youth gathering at church I approached Diane, asking, “Where’s my five bucks?” Without speaking a word she held out a bill to me. I snatched it up with joy, but then our dreaded youth leader, Pastor Kuhns, called me over and made me fork over my well-earned prize money, saying “There’s not going to be any betting done here.” I tried to defend myself by claiming “It wasn’t a bet, it was a challenge, and it wasn’t done here; it was done at the skating rink.” That was my logic of the time. But before the night was over, Kuhns slipped the bill back to Diane, who slipped it back to me. In the end I had to give my enemy some respect for holding up on her end of the deal. I can’t say that Diane and I ever became friends, but we began to tolerate each other and didn’t fuss with each other anymore. So I guess some good came out of it. Roller Derby always was a psychological perspective on our many conflicting societies trying to put up with each other in the same circle.
All this ran through my memory before I closed the Roller Derby photo book and put it back in the suitcase. Lots of strange forgotten memories can flow out of old trunks and suitcases, which probably explains why they are so very rarely opened.
--------------------------------------------------
