Everything Old is new again

Back in the days of my mis-spent youth I managed to avoid the wrestling craze of the day, not once did I ever attend a live wrasslin match when the circuit came to my home town. I saved my money for the odd rock concert, a weekly junior hockey game and a seat in the end zone or occassionally on the 35 yard line for the hometown CFL team.

But there was one guilty little pleasure that I spent my money on once, a one night visit to the local rink, when the Ontario Monarchs and the Quebec Fleur de Lys came to town to battle it out for whatever Roller Derby trophy was in vogue at the time. They were two faux Canadian teams, cobbled together for the frequent Canadian tours that the Roller Derby would make across Canada, mainly in the eastern cities.

Roller Derby at the time was big, the shows much like today's Wrestling spectaculars with all the hype and attention that goes with any over hyped event, I remember but one name from those days, a sleek and fast young lady named Skinny Minnie Miller. A skater who toiled for any number of teams on a Saturday afternoon watched through the NBC affiliate on cable. My guess now would be that she is somewhere in her mid fifties or early sixties today and probably no long fast, but possibly still sleek.

Roller Derby was pretty well on its last legs by the time I got around to catching my one and only show, but yet it still drew a capacity crowd cheering on mercenary warriors dressed in the colours of the day.

As time went on Wrestling grew bigger and bigger, the folks in Roller Derby began to find themselves playing in smaller and smaller venues, the television contract for Saturday afternoons expired and the strange combination of skating and wrestling went off to the burial yards of other fringe sports that found themselves no longer wanted. It apparently carried on through the nineties and across the millennium but with as low a profile as you can imagine, well that is until today.

So imagine my surprise to see MSNBC providing an in-depth look at the revival of that icon of the seventies. The MSNBC piece provides some background to the rejuvenation including a video that looks at the status of the event today, an introduction to some of the players and for those that actually care about such things a sample of some of the rules (those that may or may not be enforced we assume).

The new Roller Derby is starting from the bottom it appears, the rinks not the temples of sport that the big league sports play in, there’s no Monday Night Roll to counter the Vince McMahon WWE juggernauts, but in small town USA (and parts of Canada) it seems that the Roller Derby gals are finding an audience ready to rumble all over again.

It’s not quite the organized mayhem of the glory days, in fact it seems more of a loosely affiliated group of local clubs that occasionally travel to tournaments and such, a quick scan of the net finds Canadian teams such as the Hammer City Roller Girls, Vancouver’s Terminal City Roller Girls and Edmonton’s Oil City Derby Girls to name a few.

The Roller Derby of the sixties and seventies featured both mens and women's teams, but as time went on it seems that the men were downsized out of existence. Roller Derby today seems to have become mainly an event populated by the ladies, no doubt part of the marketing plan put in place to attract a young, predominately male and beer drinking crowd.

It most likely won’t reach the lofty heights it controlled in the late sixties and through the seventies, when a ticket to the Roller Derby had to be purchased weeks in advance. With an endless supply of the fringe sports to entertain an apparently bored North American public, the Roller Derby will have to fight and claw its way back into the consciousness of the sport connoisseur.

One thing is certain though; they’ll be coming up from behind pretty fast and using their elbows to find their piece of the entertainment pie.