Devil Dolls
By Neal Pollack
Old pal Ty blew in from Austin last week for a bachelor party. We set aside Saturday night for our touching reunion. He and his buddies were thinking about hitting the Dodgers-Angels game, the prospect of which filled me with the kind of dread that only a knowledgeable fan can feel: The Blue’s offense had been sucked into an 8-9-1 black hole, a Ned Colletti-signed incompetence special bracketed by Angel Berroa (who everyone knows is the worst position player in baseball) and Juan Pierre (who everyone thinks is awesome but actually isn’t but now has mercifully gone down for a month with a knee injury). Yes, the pitching had been great, but how many shutout games, going either way, can a baseball fan endure? I’d expected so much more from this squad.
Fate directed me elsewhere. Ty and friends had gone to the Thursday afternoon game, where the Dodgers had been blanked 2-0 by the White Sox, and they’d been permanently traumatized by the post-game traffic. I tried to explain to Ty that there was a big difference between L.A. traffic at 5 p.m. on a Thursday and 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday, but he’d seen our town at its gridlocked worst and was through with taking chances.
Instead, they were going to hit the roller derby.
Ty, on the surface a fairly respectable gentleman, is also the lead singer of the Yuppie Pricks, a comedy-punk band that’s not afraid to eat sushi off the bellies of strippers onstage. To pay his mortgage and his son’s preschool fees, he has a job throwing parties, sponsored by Camel cigarettes, in a private lounge upstairs from Emo’s. This is the sort of gig combo that gets someone familiar with roller-derby gals. He used his pull to get me a green wristband at a discount.
I arrived at the event pre-medicated after sucking down some weed behind a Dumpster in an alley a half-block south of Temple Street. This made me feel suspiciously like a crackhead, but I didn’t want to pay the seven bucks they were charging for a Pilsner Urquell. When I arrived, a spirited defensive struggle was underway between a team from L.A. and a team from San Diego.
This weekend’s derby featured all-star squads from various cities. The one currently skating was, for lack of a better comparison, the Clippers of roller derby, the secondary L.A. team but still definitely superior to San Diego. However, San Diego played it tight between shrill ref-whistle interruptions. Roller-derby penalties seem to be completely malleable; you can send a woman flying through the barrier onto the concrete below and keep on skating, but then sometimes the action will stop for seemingly no reason at all. Every league skates under slightly different rules. For the weekend, the roller-derby brain trust had established a fresh set of laws that no one actually understood.
Therefore, the San Diego team won, but then because of a penalty, the L.A. team got another shot and it looked like they won, but then there was another penalty and the refs gave the match to San Diego. There was much ferocious gesturing from the track, indicating that L.A. felt it had been robbed. The crowd, fortified by Pilsner, booed lustily.
The ultimate match of the evening was between the L.A. Derby Dolls, the sport’s Laker equivalent, and an All-Star team from Austin, which is where the sport re-birthed last decade, where A&E set its roller-derby reality show, and whence the best players sprout. Ty said he felt divided, loyalty-wise, because he knew some babes from both towns.
It had been a rough day for the Austin five. Used to skating on a flat track, they found themselves getting clobbered by a team of curved-track All-Stars in an earlier match, and they were no competition for the Derby Dolls, either. A cannon-thighed behemoth blocker named Broadzilla repeatedly hip-checked and fore-armed them into the floor, and the Austin blockers looked old and slow and, dare I say it, fat when faced with the Dolls’ lithe, smokin’ hot, Tia Carrere-lookalike jammers. The highlight arrived when Broadzilla blew Austin’s best jammer, or at least the only one who looked like she was really trying, into the pit so hard that she vomited on impact. Roller-derby fans aren’t satisfied until one of their heroes excretes girl-power toughness.
After the Derby Dolls skated around, exulting in their rout, Ty presented me with a freshly minted copy of the Yuppie Pricks’ third album. It features a close-up cover shot of Ty’s greasy crotch in an American flag Speedo. This album will bring the Pricks mainstream success for sure.
We got into my party Prius. I turned on Fascist Talk 790 just in time to hear Charley Steiner scream, “The Dodgers get no-hit, and they win the game!”
“No fucking way!” Ty said.
I bashed my head against the steering wheel.
“Shit shit fuck!” I said.
Only four other times since 1900 had this phenomenon occurred in baseball. I would never, ever see the likes of it again on television, much less in person. A transcendent display of Dodger offensive incompetence had somehow transmuted into a stadium-shaking miracle, and I’d missed it because a bunch of out-of-towners were worried about traffic. Well, at least I’d seen a chick lie facedown in her own barf. That only happens three or four times a week in roller derby.
Published: 07/09/2008
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If it's any consolation, the rollerderby event you attended was the first of its kind. There are only two fully active banked track rollerderby leagues in the world playing regularly scheduled games, and around 300 flat track leagues.
The Lonestar Rollergirls, who were the Austin league who competed in the tournament, are the other banked track derby league. In fact, they started the whole "unscripted rollerderby as a real sport" movement in 2001.
In the era of non-staged, unscripted rollerderby that started in 2001, this is the first tournament of any kind, and most certainly the first in roller derby's 70 year history to have flat track teams competing as equals.
The rule that had the crowd the most confused was one that doesn't allow the game to end on an unanswered major penalty. It doesn't come up often, and so the officials aren't drilled in rapidly executing the remedies.
By coming in second to the LA Derby Dolls, losing by a single point, the flat track all-star team, "Team Awesome" ignited a fire in the modern era rollerderby world.
It's esoteric, but it proved that flat track teams could compete at an equal level to the best team on the bank track. Before this tournament, no one knew or even suspected that.
Earlier this year, the regular (non-all-star) LA Derby Doll team, the Tough Cookies, competed and won a game against the Orange County Roller Girls in a flat track mini-tournament.
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Busta Armov