Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Roller Derby

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why roller derby is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Roller Derby, known for being a sport, famous for being a body checking women's sport. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Roller Derby is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Hey!

What is your relationship to or opinion of roller derby? It seems really cool as someone who is not athletic in the slightest. Someone who does not blade. I don't blade. I don't roller blade. I don't do the four wheels or the two wheels. Nothing. Unfortunately, I lack skill. I lack the ability to fall gracefully, the kind of pick yourself up again after you fall on your knees rather than crying and needing

a bandaid for your boo-boos and the bandaid has to have Dora the Explorer on it. Otherwise you're going to cry even harder. So it's not really me, the roller skating, the roller derby, but it looks sick as heck. Now I'm thinking of our recent bubble tea episode because we both aren't that into the boba balls and we both aren't that into roller skating and most people love both those things. Yeah. We're strange. Well, I think we just lack, like it seems that it has something to do with balance,

right? We can't balance on the roller skates. I can't ice skate either. It's just hard for me when my feet aren't steady underneath me. And with the boba, it's like I can't balance my swallow muscles around an orb. I'm just very easily disoriented. I'm kind of the same. I really like to run around and I'm not that interested in balancing on bikes or boards or anything. Skis, anything. And that's just strange about me, but it's

my way. So have you tried roller skating and it's just not you or have you not really done it? Tried it, didn't really enjoy it. Yeah. Yeah. And then like to research this episode, I watched some roller derby online. Amazing. Really cool. Yeah. A lot of contact, a lot of speed. Neat. You've got helmets on, all the safety gear. And I think you try to knock each other over.

That's a big part of it. And also not all of it. And yeah, it's an entire thrilling sport. And we also won't go over every rule of it. There's a long ago episode about hockey pucks where we also didn't cover every rule of ice hockey. You can just look that up or learn it. But we're going to get into culture and amazing stories and amazing history of this sport more than the rules.

All right. I'm ready to learn. Inform me. And also a lot of people were pushing this in the Discord and very excited to see it be picked as a topic. Thank you to Jill, Gnick Gnaim, Like The Buffalo, M The Jackalopes, Dash, Kyrac, other people too, that this was very popular in the polls. And so I feel like people are excited to hear an episode about it. Yes, I am too. I find it in not a disrespectful way, very interesting that there seems to be a Venn diagram of our fans and then roller derby fans and it's like one circle, just like the wheel on a roller skate.

And on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called stats, stats and numbers, stats and numbers, stats and numbers. And that name was submitted by The Empire Strikes First on the Discord. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Missillian Wacking best possible. Submit through Discord or to CivPod at gmail.com. I want there to be a new Star Wars, but it's just, it's all about learning math and you've got like, like a function, function, the function alien who teaches you how to do functions. And you know, just like, just really the full-on Star Wars treatment, but it's all about learning math.

I feel like there's probably math teachers out there who've tried to make like a math Jedi or a math Sith. I'm glad you jumped to the weird aliens. That's the really exciting world building. It's like a strange alien who's a 1940s bartender or something. We're doing a whole statistics course from the Star Wars universe. The Jedi stuff, that just happens in the background. We focus not at all on that. It's just a math teacher, but his name is Funk Sean and he teaches you math in space and he's got like weird sausage fingers.

It's about like education budgets in the outer rim. It's truly gritty. Yeah. And the first number this week, the number is 463 leagues. Under the sea. What? Sorry, no. Kind of similar. 463 leagues. That was the number of roller derby leagues as of 2019 that are part of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association or WFTDA. Question that reveals my ignorance. What is a league? I mean, I've heard of leagues. Believe me, I've heard of leagues. I know there's like a hockey league. Yeah. You know, I don't actually know what

a league is. Like what defines a league? That's a cool question with the sport because a lot of pro sports like basketball, soccer, hockey, football, it's like a very capitalized grouping of organized teams. And in modern roller derby, it tends to be teams of women and non-binary people, and then they are a cooperative nonprofit. The players run the league. So in this roller derby sense, it tends to be like a cooperative club of a few teams that are pretty friendly with each other. I see. Okay. So it is not as monolithic as the National Hockey League. Yeah. It seems to either be at a city or local level in the US.

Apparently more than half the leagues are in the US. And then in other places where roller derby is less popular, it might be one league in the whole country. But it's all over the world. Apparently there are WFTDA roller derby leagues on every continent except Antarctica. I mean, we got to get one there. And probably approaching 500 leagues at this point. We got to get the penguins, the women and non-binary penguins. They got to start getting into, like, because that would add an extra element because they're on ice. We'll talk about positions in a sec.

I think a penguin would be an amazing jammer who's trying to slip through everybody else. Yeah, man. Oh, what an aerodynamic and wet player. Zippity zoop, right, between people. Yeah. It would be unstoppable. Yeah. They'd be unstoppable. Yeah. Yeah. And there's leagues in Germany, Egypt, China.

And then this sport, as we'll talk about, was invented in the United States. So that's part of why a lot of the teams and leagues are here. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And the other amazing thing is the WFTDA was founded in 2004. Whoa, it's recent. So within slightly over two decades, there's approaching 500 leagues.

Wow. It's very fast growth. People get really into this sport as soon as it kind of arrives in their town or city. But it sounds like maybe was it invented in 2004? Because it seems like maybe this is an older phenomenon than that recent. Yeah, the first takeaway especially is all about that. It's older than 2004.

I can't believe I said 2004 is recent. It's really not. I'm just old. Yeah, it's 21 years ago, but that's okay. It's fine. It's really fine and cool actually. Folks, we're from the 1900s, me and Katie. As ancient people, we're doing our best. We really are. I feel like we're holding up pretty well considering we're 200 years old. And another amazing number here is 2,500.

Leagues under the sea? 2500 is the number of spectators at the 2018 WFTDA World Championship bouts in New Orleans. Wow. By sports standards, 2500 people is absolutely a meaningful crowd, but it's smaller than most minor league baseball game crowds. It's smaller than most crowds for the lower levels of England's football pyramid. People are extraordinarily passionate about roller derby and also it is not being capitalized or put in giant infrastructure like other sports are. I see. I see. So it's niche.

There's so many people playing it. The amount of like audience is kind of catching up in this modern era. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, it seems thrilling to watch. Any sport that is a contact sport seems pretty exciting, and they're going pretty fast on those roller skates. Yeah, it seems like this has kind of a thrill of live hockey. If people have never seen ice hockey live,

it's much faster than you think. It looks slow on TV, it's wild in person. It's just the next level up. This topic is so interesting because it gets into all of women's sports too in a really fascinating way. And we'll also talk later about men playing roller derby. It hasn't only been for women and non-binary people the whole time. I see, okay. Okay. And there are smaller men's leagues for this too, to this day.

Okay, huh. That's less common, and there's a different men's roller derby association that is the umbrella for that. Okay, so the matriarchy isn't keeping the man down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The next number is five. This is the main rules stuff we'll talk about. Five is the number of players on the track for each team in a roller derby bout. It's five on five and then there's a few more players on the bench. Okay. It must not be a huge track then because that's like, that doesn't seem like that many players. I don't, I don't really know about sports, but that seems like not, is that like basketball kind of? It is, it's the same numbers as basketball.

I got it, I got a sports correct. Yeah. Yay. And, and your other insight is right, that it's very crowded because the other number here is between 13 feet wide and 15 feet wide, which is about four meters wide. That's the width of a official WFTDA roller derby track. So you're packing a basketball court worth of players into a track that's only about four meters wide. In that space, it's very crowded.

That seems more exciting though, because it seems like more stuff happens within a smaller space. Yeah, that's another thing, especially compared to something like American football, there's a lot of action here. There's a lot of stoppage, but that's only to get to the next action quickly.

And the gist of how a bout works, and by the way, they're called bouts, they're not called games or matches. It has kind of a combat vibe bout. The way it works is it's a 60 minute bout, but it's broken up into two minute time periods called jams. So you just do each jam as quickly as possible.

And also they tend to end much faster than two minutes because both teams get into a sort of a big pile of people called a jam. And then the goal is for each team to score some points, but they can end the jam if they think the other team will start scoring points. So it's a lot of very fast stopping and starting. Yeah, that sounds... I like all of the lingo for it as well because it makes it sound fun and like, hey, we're

just jamming out. And then the kinds of players are a jammer, a pivot, and a set of blockers. I mean, this is like if Quidditch were cool. A little, yeah. The jammer is sort of a seeker, a little. Right. Because what happens is it's almost really a jammer is sort of a seeker, a little. Right. Because what happens is it's almost really a jammer and a whole bunch of blockers, the pivot special.

But start of a jam is each team has one jammer that's trying to get through all of the blockers. And then whichever gets through first is the lead jammer and can score points by coming around and passing players. I see. And then the other jammer tries can score points by coming around and passing players. I see. And then the other jammer tries to catch up with them and take over being the lead jammer so they can score, which is why the lead jammer might end the jam as soon as possible to stop that from happening.

The lead jammer can end a jam. And the lead... Yeah. The lead bouter can end the bout. Nobody's a bowder, that's surprising. I appoint myself first bowder. I really vibe with the names and the rules so far. It feels simple and straightforward. Yeah, and there's like a lot to it.

So we'll only describe it a little bit more and then let people read the rules or watch the videos. I'm gonna link if they want to get deeper. You have each of these single jammer on each team. There's also a pivot who is a special blocker that can take over being the jammer. The jammer wears a star on their helmet. It's like a piece of fabric with big stars on each side and they can pass that to the pivot, like take it off of their helmet and the pivot puts it on their helmet. That's freaky. Then they're the jammer. That's so rad.

It's cool. That's so cool, man. I love this sport so far. This is this is my kind of sport. You got costume changes. You call stuff jams. You're going around on roller skates. Maybe the coolest strategic part to me is that basketball is a cool comparison because at each end of the floor, you're either playing offense or defense pretty much. And then in roller derby, you're playing offense and defense all the time at the same time. That those groups of blockers, they also will link arms and be sort of a human wall a lot of the time, but the blockers need to both slow down the opposing jammer and help their jammer. And then also the pivot is blocking but can also become the jammer.

And so there's a lot of strategy happening very fast in a very tight space. Was this based on the 1975 movie Rollerball? The movie Rollerball seems to be based on Roller Derby. OK. But in a writing dystopian fiction way, the existence of Rollerball, the movie, indicates how massive Roller Derby was in society because they could like borrow it to make a fiction. And the main difference is Rollerball adds a ball. There is no ball element in roller derby.

Well, I don't... Now, Alex, I don't think that's the main difference. And also it's a horrible corporatocracy to Soapian society. A lot of death. People die. They have like big spiky things that are deployed to kill people. Yeah. Okay. I think... They don't have stars on their helmets though. That's an even bigger difference. That's the biggest difference.

The most disappointing difference. The other thing to say about the rules of the game is the number 30 seconds. 30 seconds. That is the length of a penalty in roller derby. Ah, okay. Sort of like ice hockey where a player who commits a penalty has to leave the track and then play continues with the disadvantage of that player not being there. So the, I think, cultural knowledge of roller derby is that it's women beating each other up and

you can't just beat up the other team. You will immediately lose the derby because you won't have enough players and they'll score a bunch of points. I mean, I didn't think it was people beating each other up, but I thought that shoving people out of the way was like, that is okay. Or is that not okay? Are there rules to the shoving? There's rules to the shoving. Apparently you are not allowed to punch, trip, kick, elbow, clothesline, hit or slam. Sensible? Officially it's all frontal and side body contact above the knees.

Okay. So it's like most contact sports where you need the referee to do a good job of it and it kind of varies how much or little is allowed each bout. But the other number is seven. If a skater gets seven penalties, they foul out of the bout. And also the referee can eject anybody at any time for something egregious. And they got to turn in their skates because they're a loose cannon. Hand in your skates. And the other skates. A little smaller skates on the right.

So yeah, this is a highly strategic contact sport in a really exciting way. The other number here is 1863. And the year 1863 is when an American inventor named James Plimpton patented the quad roller skate. Mm, yes. With two sets of two wheels like we're sort of used to today. That seems early. What were they made out of? Like leather and wood at that point?

Kind of, yeah. And apparently people started to develop wheels on shoes as a skate in the later 1700s. It was first done allegedly as a part of a theatrical production where actors were pretending to ice skate. So like as a prop and special effect, they put wheels on shoes on a stage. The other big event before these kind of quad roller skates, a Belgian inventor tried to make roller skates a whole thing and did a bad job. Oops. His name was John Joseph Merlan. He lived in England, this Belgian inventor, but in the 1760s he tried to do a publicity stunt for his idea of wheeled shoes. So he rolled through a fancy London party

while also playing the violin and wearing wheeled shoes. Well, why didn't that work? That'd work on me. Yeah, apparently he had not built skates that he could steer or break and was not good at balancing. And what happened is he crashed into a big mirror and like almost died from the wounds That's so cool! How did that not make roller skating a thing? A guy roller skates through a party playing a violin, crashes into a mirror, shatters it into a million pieces and almost dies? That's the best publicity stunt you could have ever done Yeah, I think near death like that wasn't cool yet

They weren't they weren't cool at this time I see okay, he couldn't make a fail video promote roller skates right this didn't become a Viral trend that people were doing roller skating right into a mirror while playing violin. Kids, don't do that at home. Even if it would be sick and rad, please don't. So he also smashes his violin. This was reported in the London papers and society stuff. And so that slowed down the adoption of roller skates. Later in the 1800s, people get it going. James Plinton's huge insight is if you have two sets of two wheels and you built it so the skater can tilt to either side, like there's a little give horizontally each way, then you can steer very

easily. If you add a little bit of braking or the person uses their feet to brake, it's suddenly exciting to roller skate. I guess that's like marginally better than my idea, which is that you hold two violins and you use them to steer like they're oars. Yeah, pedal violating. Yeah, sure. Right. And yeah, and then Plimpton also promoted an entire social framework for roller skating inspired by ice skating rinks. He set up businesses that leased and rented his invention of skates. He made the first roller skating rink. He gave personal lessons to people in skating and he promoted it as men and women can spend

time together without a strict chaperone if they both roller skate. Right, because the roller skates are an instant turn off, so you know no one is gonna be doing anything ungodly there. Dork stuff. Yeah. I'm joking roller skating is incredibly sexually a turn on. It is wild that he was able to convince people that suddenly doesn't need chaperoning

or else you can like escape the chaperone because you're fast or something. Like it doesn't really make sense to me as an argument but it worked so. Right. Well like every time you try to kiss because you're on roller skates, you just push each other away.

So like if you try to like grope someone, you just kind of push them and they get further away So there's no you can't like kiss there's no necking or Goosing or whatever they used to do back then that you can do because you just you push each other And then now you're drifting off on the opposite ends of the roller rink Yes, it's the 1800s version of wondering what happens if you fart in microgravity like will it push me around the spaceship? Exactly wondering what happens if you fart in microgravity. Like will it push me around the spaceship? Whoa. Exactly.

And you know they had high fiber diets back then, so goodness. Actually they probably didn't. It was probably all potato and goose. Yeah and so, Plimpton and others make roller skates finally start to catch on, and especially in the United States. Like around the 1880s, and so, Plimpton and others make roller skates finally start to catch on, and especially in the United States, like around the 1880s, 1890s.

That's the start of roller skating as a really popular activity. A few decades later, the US invents a kind of sport named roller derby. And mega takeaway number one, the name roller derby describes a few different American sports spread across nearly 100 years. All right. I'm ready to hear all the variations. Is there one where you're in an entire sphere and you can go 360 degrees around? Because that would be so cool. Yeah, was it Rocket League or something like something like that? Yeah.

Yeah. I want thrusters on the roller skates so that you can go all the way around the, the, the sphere, the battle sphere. Yeah. Thunder doming. Yeah, sure. Yeah. We keep, we keep finding dystopian sports roller ball. That's great. I know this would be like a, this would be the opposite. I forgot what the opposite of a dystopia is because I never really entertained the idea, but what a. Utopia.

Utopia, utopia, that's it. This would be a utopian sports game where you're in a sphere. It'd be called the, you know, the joy sphere and you're joyfully getting thrusted by rocket-powered roller blades, skates around the sphere. Because that sounds very fun. I think we should have more utopian movies where everything's just really cool.

We have really cool sports. That would be great. Yeah. Yeah. And everyone's, it's all fair and happy and everyone's got good health insurance Roller derby that name has meant at least three kinds of sports across the 1930s to now The three kinds of roller derby there was first an extreme endurance sport in the Great Depression run by entertainment promoters Then there was more of a WWE version that also had some sports rules.

And then the current version is like local collectives of women and non-binary people playing an actual sport. Got it. And then there's some other little variations in between too. A lot of things have been roller derby. Right. Lots of sources here. One of them is a book called Roller Girls, the Story of Flat Track Derby.

That's photos by Felicia Graham and writing by Melissa Julewan. And then also citing a piece for Smithsonian Folklife magazine by Gabrielle Puglisi, a New York Times feature by Jennifer Harlan, and writing by Colleen English, associate professor of kinesiology at Penn State University. They all agree that there's like a start date for roller derby. It's August 13th, 1935. That's specific. Yeah, this coming August will be the 90th anniversary of roller derby, in a sense.

August 13th is the day before my day-diversary with my husband. We should probably celebrate the Derby thing instead. You'll want to do two straight days of seeing Roller Derby. You can't do both events. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Forget it. No, no, no, no, no. We've got priorities.

Weirdly the first version of Roller Derby took a few weeks to finish one. You wouldn't call it about, but one event could a few weeks to finish one, you wouldn't call it about, but one event could take several weeks to finish. In 1935, there was an entertainment promoter named Leo Seltzer. That's a good entertainment name. And he organized something called a roller derby at the Chicago Coliseum. And this was based on another really weird sport of the turn of the century called pedestrianism. That was also called walkathons.

Now, there's a sport for me. Yeah, it was men walking around a circular track for several days in a row as an endurance challenge. Never mind. Never mind. Not for me. I'd take it back. And it's really weird. Like sometimes the rules allowed brief naps, other times they didn't.

And a lot of competitors very publicly used alcohol or stimulants to keep going. It was considered like too outrageous and also drew stadium sized audiences. Like the first Madison Square Garden in New York City would fill up for pedestrianism. Leo Seltzer who organizes the first roller derby, he comes out of this like walkathon scene and he was late to walkathons. He was born in 1903 after they were already a thing. He was a son of Romanian immigrants to the United States and they moved to Portland, Oregon because his mother's health needed a mild climate. This was still the era of like the climate for the vapors for my health, like

that kind of thing. Right. Yeah. And Portland's nice. So when they get there, Leo and his father and brothers, they all try to get into the movie distribution business and run movie theaters in the Portland area. And then the Great Depression ends all that. It all goes out of business. I see. Leo says, I'm pivoting into live entertainment, organizes walkathons. And this era early in the Great Depression, there's a lot of entertainment events where people try to do something really

difficult and endurance oriented to scrape together some prize money so they can buy food. You know, that's not topian. That's not utopian. That's dystopian. It's so rollerball or running man or something, you know? But walking man. So there's walkathons, there are dance marathons, there's something called tree sitting where you try to sit in or on top of a tree the

longest. And Seltzer builds up a big walkathon business, but he's also new to it and he's thinking, what's the next big thing? Can I be the first to that? And in 1935, he reads a magazine article that says over 90% of Americans had roller skated at least once. Wow. That's a lot of Americans.

That could be made up, but it influenced him. That seems more than today, probably. Yeah, truly. We've kind of moved on. But Seltzer says, oh, if people like roller skating, I should do the roller skates version of a walkathon. And so that was what was called a roller derby. And his first one drew 20,000 spectators in Chicago.

That's more than the roller derbies today. They also didn't have TikTok back then. Kind of, yeah. Yeah, in 1935 in the Depression, people in Chicago said, I'll go to this stadium and watch teams of one man and one woman who take turns roller skating. One of them has to be skating at all times in a big circle inside this stadium. Nobody's interfering with each other. It's not roller derby where they're

hip checking and stuff. And they can spell each other, the man and the woman. Right. And if that sounds boring, I want people to keep in mind, we used to have much plumper and less rotted brains, so we had longer attention spans in this era. We were able to focus on something happening at a slow pace for hours at a time. It used to be a thing. Today, the human brain is sort of like a pink cue ball

in terms of size and texture. All of those pesky wrinkles have been ironed out through the magic of algorithmic entertainment and now you don't have any of those ugly wrinkles. It's like Botox for your brain. And yeah, and so the other hook to this entertainment was Seltzer set up a big map in the middle of the stadium with blinking lights and it was a map of the continental United States. Oh, so it's like they're roller skating around the United States.

Yes. The rules of the race were whichever team can skate approximately 2,700 miles Wow, which is over 4,300 kilometers Whichever team does that first has simulated the distance from New York City to San Diego Wow, and in a artificial way skated across the 48 states So this would take days and they would presumably get to rest between days? The entire resting mechanic is only one of the two of you has to be skating. The other person can sleep and stuff.

Oh, so it was continuous for days. Wow. The team that won in Chicago, Bernie McKay and Clarice Martin are their names. They won with a time of 493 hours and 12 minutes. Wow. Which is a little more than 20 and a half days of skating. That's incredible. But why was there the rule with the one man and one woman?

That seems kind of like weirdly progressive for this time period. It came out of walkathons being more and more gender parody as time went on and also the related craze of dance marathons where people want to see a man and a woman dancing. Yeah, dance marathons make sense, right? Because that's like a traditional couples thing. But yeah, that's interesting. So I guess because it's all the same genre,. But yeah, that's interesting. So I guess because it's all the same genre, people are like, hey, I gotta see a man and a woman. Yeah, and there was also some willingness

in American society to see women play sports that weren't considered contact sports and were also relatively individual. The two big examples are golf and tennis. Right. Especially golf, people said, oh, it's a lady taking a walk and she swings a club once in a while. That's not masculine.

That's fine. Right. Sure. Yeah. When you put it that way. It's stupid logic, but it's how people felt. And tennis is sort of like a lady using a frying pan, but with a ball and the frying pan has a net in it. And the net is her children who are her whole life. Yes, exactly.

And what else? Right. And football, but like with American football, it's like if the ball is like the baby and the mom could be just protecting the baby from a bunch of other moms who want to steal her baby. In the process of making a sport where women are doing something that seems just totally vanilla, just skating on roller skates, they accidentally invented the first contact sport for women in America.

Amazing. Because Leo Seltzer is primarily an entertainer. He's not some sort of Olympics ideal of the athlete kind of guy. And as he builds up this roller derby business, he brings in a collaborator who has him increase the violence and the sex appeal. And they do it together. He

didn't force him or whatever. What's, do you know this collaborators name? He was a pulp novelist named Damon Runyon. Yeah it was. Yeah he was. I knew it. I knew it was gonna be someone like that. And they changed everything. They took what was just a walk-a-thon on roller skates and turned it into a sport with a lot of physical fighting and combat. It was less rules than the modern, modern roller derby where you're not allowed to push and kick and stuff. And it was instead of a pair of a man and a woman, it was a battle between two teams that were half male, half female, roster-wise. I see. And so you'd have the two male sides fight and then both leave and the two female sides

come in and fight. They leave and it's here alternating the same gender playing against each other, but half of each team is female. When was this? And this happened pretty quickly. By the 1940s they were sexing and violence-ing what had initially been calmly going around a track on roller skates. Right. Yeah, I mean, you know, look, you can only watch that for so long before you start fantasizing about them beating each other with sticks. That seems to be what happened, yeah.

Like people were like, this is gonna get boring fast. We gotta get out of this. Yeah. So. Yeah. And the new version also had skaters who were made famous in the press. They had heroic or villainous personalities.

There's like a big dispute in the accounts of this of whether it was scripted. Hmm. Like the participants even vary There's a big dispute in the accounts of this of whether it was scripted. The participants even vary in whether it was fully written out behind the scenes or whether the promoters merely staged it to put interesting combos and teams together. But there was a lot of setting up a fight in a narrative way. That sounds like it was scripted to me. That's all the dog whistles of that was it was scripted. Yeah, but that

It does seem that way. There's nothing wrong with that. It's modern. It's theater, man It's it's Shakespeare WWE and this roller derby thing. It's Shakespeare on wheels Yeah Reporters would call it stuff kind of like that but also sexualizing the women. Journalists called it, quote, a cat fight on wheels that was, quote, putting on a show. And they said that in comparison to what they considered legitimate sports.

Also the bouts were promoted with the female skaters wearing their uniforms, but without the actual tights and pads they would also wear on top of that. And the uniforms were as skimpy and low cut as possible by the standards of the time. Reporters would also like describe a match and only name the men and then just describe the women by their hotness. Right. So so Gerald Howard, he's got a really good run this year.

And then there's boobs McBoobsies, who's got boobs. Yeah, the Chicago Tribune reporter describes the best female player in one derby as the blonde in the serese tights and a right pretty gal she is. And never got around to a name, a man named the man. Right. I like being sort of denoted by my hair color and what I'm wearing instead of my name. Like the copper-headed gal in the sweatpants and stained a t-shirt with the muppets on it. Women and men were paid athletes in this, but the women earned a lot less than

the men. It was run by promoters as an entertainment business with massive crowds and also it was sexist pretty much top to bottom. In 1949, there was a five day world series of this new kind of thing and it drew 55,000 people to Madison Square Garden. In 1947, Leo Seltzer's son Jerry set up the first TV broadcast of a roller derby and that was soon syndicated to 120 TV markets. This sexual violence scripted sport was massive in the 1940s and 50s. Yeah, I mean, you know, sex sells, wheels sell. Yeah. Yeah.

Spherical arenas sell. Yeah, and then it stopped selling kind of by the late 1950s. Apparently other pro sports really kind of got going and then also just new mass media takes eyeballs. So That and the negative moral reputation make roller derby decline and pretty much disappear by the 1970s Like it's immoral to watch scantily clad women fight each other. What is moral is repeated Aggressive head injuries for young men playing football.

That's just clean, good fun. Now we're talking. Now we're talking. Yeah, and this sport remains in the popular imagination because it was so huge for a couple decades. And people kind of forgot that men were a lot of the skaters and people also kind of forgot that it was one of the only relatively lucrative professional sports for women in America. In 1972, The New York Times interviewed Sandy Dunn, who was the women's squad captain for the New York Chiefs.

And she said, quote, this is the best sport for women to be in. Women tennis players and golfers aren't recognized as much as we are and we're equal with the men, end quote. Were they paid the same at that point or just was she talking about the rules of the sport itself? She means the rules, yes. Apparently, they were consistently paid less. It's also a thing where as recently as 1972, a woman could make money in tennis or golf or roller derby And otherwise she could be an Olympian or a student athlete for free or she could not play sports

Right and that really stayed true until like the late 1990s when women started making real money in basketball and soccer Yeah, it's still not as much as men though, right? Like they're still not paid the same as male. Far less. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so in a country and world where there's never been a particularly lucrative world for female athletes, roller derby was a relative exception.

Yeah. Even with all the issues. I mean, it's got to be that sports are sort of a power fantasy, right? Like for men where it's like you are watching simulated warfare, where you're kind of imagining yourself as the warrior doing this. And so when it's women, that doesn't sort of for a lot of men, it's really difficult for them to put themselves in the shoes of a female protagonist. It's kind of the same way, where guys I think get really upset when there's video games and they have to play as a woman.

Most video games, I'm out of luck if I don't want to play as a man. I'm not saying all guys, right? I think for a lot of people sports or something else. But yeah, I think a lot of the popularity is due to this sort of like being able to have sort of this like, uh, outlet for this like idea of having cool battles, but you know, with tights. Yeah. And then roller derby, because of the like other entertainment elements, people started seeing it as less of a legit battle. They were like, oh, football, you know, despite the bright colors and mascots and fireworks and stuff, they were like, oh, football is a sport and roller derby is wacky because of the women.

Serious. It's a solemn and serious. Yeah. So if you want that battle vibe, men started turning to like football and hockey. Yeah. Men piling on each other wearing tightly fitted pants with padded buttocks, very masculine and very solemn. Yeah. And then the remaining memory of roller derby leaned into the entertainment element because we mentioned roller ball as like a dystopian science fiction imagining of more of it. But a masterpiece yes there

was also a 1980s TV show called Roller Games I didn't I didn't know about this and this is after regular roller derby's pretty much gone Roller Games is two masked skaters on a figure-8 shaped track with two alligator pits in the middles of the eight. And it's like elements of roller derby, but as maximum TV entertainment and American gladiators as possible. I mean, I feel bad for the alligators though. Me too. I don't think they signed up for this.

If they were robot alligators, I'd be a hundred% on board. But if they're real alligators, then come on. Yeah, apparently real alligators. It's so weird. If you fell in, if you fell in, you'd freak, you wouldn't get eaten by alligators. They would freak out. Yeah. And alligators don't belong in TV studios. That's not their habitat. No. It's moms. No. It's marshes. No, their habitat is podcasts. It's bumps. No. No, their habitat is podcasts, audio mediums, radio. They just want to be cozy with their headphones listening to a podcast. That's alligators.

Yeah, exactly. They're not camouflaging in the water. They're calmly listening to a podcast on little earbuds. Yeah. Yeah. With their little coffee. Yeah, with their little coffee. And yeah, and in 1999, a cable channel called TNN tried to make a version of Roller Derby called Roller Jam, where the highlight was inline skates, like roller blades, you know. But these fictionalized and hyped up versions speak to the lasting legacy of Roller Derby. And then the third version that really came along is the modern one. And we'll talk a lot more about that in the next takeaway, but start around 2003 is kind of the beginning of how we have it now. I mean, as far as I understand it now, it seems like a good balance.

Like there's still sort of the contact sport element with enough rules that you're not hopefully concussing people, but then also like still, it still seems a little campy without being over the top, right? In the same way that like any sport, every sport is campy. Sorry to break it to you. You're very serious baseball outfits, your cute little basketball outfits and mascots. It's super camp, guys. And that's fine. Not a criticism. I'm going to go run out to the mound and we'll pat each other on the butt and talk about

why. Katie's wrong. Katie's wrong about this. Pat, spit, hug, signals. Anyways, it's Mini Bat Day! Mini Bat Day! Folks, we have tons more to say about the modern version. That was also a lot of take away on numbers. We're going to take a quick break, then get more into the modern day. Folks, as you know, our podcast exists because of support from listeners. Go to maximumfund.org slash join to become one of those members, one of those supporters. You get a bunch of tangible stuff and I hope fundamentally you get pride in making a show

like Secretly Incredibly Fascinating happen and exist at all. We also don't just ask you to do that. We try to find brands, partners, businesses that can promote themselves in a way that makes sense to us and is good and positive. And our partner this week is The Best Idea Yet. It's a show called The Best Idea Yet. It is a podcast about the weird and wonderful origin stories behind products and brands that you're obsessed with. For example, did you know that Polaroids were invented by kind of a set of people,

and one of them was three years old? Also, the Patagonia Fleece has its origins in the inspiration of a toilet seat cover, and the Super Soaker water gun was invented by a NASA engineer, literal rocket scientist. Again, that show is called The Best Idea Yet. You can follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back and we're back with takeaway number two.

Modern roller derby is one example of women and non-binary athletes playing a sport together, successfully and collectively. Hey, I was told that's impossible. I admittedly don't think about roller derby a lot unless I'm researching this episode, but there's a bunch of Americans who seem to spend most of their time on whether trans or non-binary people are trying to play a sport, and they're not aware of more than 20 years of women and non-binary people doing roller derby together with no issues at all. The Venn diagram of the people who actually

seriously care about women's sports and have been watching them all this time as real fans. Yeah. And then the circle of people who care about banning trans women from sports. It's like they're so far apart. It's like the sun in Pluto. Yeah. The one overlap is a couple of famous women soccer players who got red-pilled in the last 20 years. And that's it.

Like that's the only ones. And that's just a weird bummer. Everybody else is separate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because key sources here include the New York Times, the Associated Press, Mental Floss, The Guardian. We talked about previous things called roller derby and those did influence the modern thing, which is sometimes nicknamed the flat track revival. I don't know if I mentioned that a lot of the early versions

of roller derby happened on a banked track where it's like a sloped floor toward the middle. That's how I've always recalled it being portrayed in media. Yeah. But is that not the case anymore? That's always been a good track for it. It's just that this revival of roller derby has been very grassroots, very community driven, and they often don't have access to a bank track.

So they just used a flat space and found that there's another cool version of a sport on a flat track. All right. Yeah, it seems like nobody was like bank tracks are bad. They just could get flat tracks kind of anywhere. Easier, less concrete you gotta do. Fewer struts and fewer joists. I don't know how stuff works, but you know.

Cause a lot of those bank tracks were in, they're called velodromes. It's like cycling racing spaces that are also not really a thing anymore. That's not common, so. Right, velodromes. Why don't we have cool stuff anymore like velodromes? Fuck. Yeah, there's one, the soccer team in Marseille Velo-Dromes. Why don't we have cool stuff anymore like Velo-Dromes?

Yeah, there's one. The soccer team in Marseille plays at a stadium called the Velo-Drome because it used to be a Velo-Drome, but even that's not a bank track anymore. It's just for soccer. We just, we used to call people like, we used to call people like Cosmonauts or maybe that was just the Russians. But anyways, we used to have a cool name for stuff. Yeah, there used to be cool names for things, dang it. Yeah, damn it. Yeah, and so the Flat Track Revival, maybe the two biggest changes are a flat track and also that unlike all the previous kinds of roller derby,

where it's run by a promoter or a business or a corporation. The Flat Track Revival is driven by collective nonprofit leagues, where the players run it themselves. And also separate male leagues exist that run the same way, but these collective leagues have consistently not been out there to try to make a bunch of money and have been out there to say anybody and any gender is part of this if they want to be. So they don't reference, it's also they don't advertise and reference them based on hair color and the outfit they are wearing, I assume.

Yeah, like even the sexualization of past roller derby athletes was at least partly for the benefit of promoters. And now when people do it in roller derby, it's kind of both a joyful reference to the past and completely their own choice for themselves. And so it's a different and exciting version of the sexualization. Yeah. I mean, when I look at pictures of roller derby teams, most of them seem to be wearing things that are quite functional. So like pink tops, shorts, protection, like helmets

and knee pads. And then occasionally it seems like sometimes it's a little more campy with like skirts and fish nets and stuff, but it just seems much more variable. It's not like with women's volleyball where the Olympics, sort of what are they? The board of the Olympics, I don't really know. They're like, hey, you know what? Not sexy enough. You got to wear like a little tank top and little short shorts or skirt. If you want to wear the same clothes that the men wear, no one's going to watch. Everybody got to see that mid-drift. And the men are wearing those shorts from the NBA in 2003, where they're as long as possible.

Right. It's just like normal clothing. Right. This flat-track version, it's all about the players being glad to be there and playing for their own joy and their own expression and One reason this works very well is the sports well designed for all sorts of body types Like any size and shape of body has advantages or disadvantages if you're all on roller skates Right a smaller skaters faster a bigger skaters easier to knock down

But then a bigger skater has more strength a smaller skater's easier to knock down, but then a bigger skater has more strength, a smaller skater is easier to knock down. Everybody's easy to knock down. You can be built pretty much any way. Because you're also on wheels, which makes your body sort of less tied to the frivolous rules of gravity. But like, is there like a space for people like me who sort of have the physiology of a penguin? We recently described penguins as being potentially amazing at this sport. So yes. I feel like I could do like what I lack in athleticism, perhaps I could manage in just zippity zoops where you don't even expect me to be penguins sliding on my tummy

Yeah, it seems like the main limitation on playing roller derby is whether you want to get hit. Oh And that is not a body type. I'm out. I'm out. Yeah. Yeah, like and that's a very level limitation Like just I am a little baby. That's that's the other thing. Like there's, this maybe is not a sport for little baby penguins. Penguin chicks, yes. Yeah. Who barely managed to waddle a few steps without falling over and crying and demanding adore the explorer bandaid. But also like beyond the way this sport is designed in a bigger and more fundamental way,

the WFTDA leagues are able to accommodate women and non-binary athletes because they just choose to and you just can. Yeah. I was told this would be the end of the world and also the end of women. So do women still exist is my question. No, they're gone. Yeah. Oh. You should get a letter in the next few days says, you're now part of like a new gender created by the Wocists. So. Well, you know, if that closes the wage gap, who am I going to complain to?

Huh? If that closes the wage gap, who am I going to complain to, huh? The official rules and charter of the WFTDA says that they welcome anyone of a quote, marginalized gender. Marginalized gender is a very succinct description of everyone from intersex people to cis women. It includes a lot of different people. Yeah. And it also includes teenagers and kids. There's leagues for young people. The LA Derby dolls run a league for girls from ages 8 to 17, as well as non-binary kids and anybody else. Hey, that sounds really nice and pleasant. Yeah, and it's and all these leagues are collectively run.

They just do this and it's effective for everybody involved because people of marginalized genders, from cis women to non-binary people, have often been encouraged to not make noise, not be noticed. And roller derby's been a space where they support each other to be funny or sexy or strong or anything else they wanna be.

Yeah, I mean, that seems rad. There's a lot of neon too, which I like. Yeah. Noticing a lot of neon, which I think is kind of like, hey, if you wanna highlight your existence rather than feeling like you have to hide it, wear some neon. Yeah, and that's even just like functional too.

Yeah, you can see your teammates. See each other. Because our main show has one last takeaway number three. Roller derby nicknames and costumes are a mix of creative expression and sports tradition and personal safety. It's artistic and functional all at once. I see everyone got their helmets and their knee pads and their arm pads which seems like a smart choice. Right, it seems to be a sport full of people bothering to wear their safety gear which in local leagues does not happen in a lot of sports

Like I play rack soccer and a lot of guys like won't wear shin guards sometimes Bothers me you'll get hurt What's a little compact fracture between friends? Right, right. Sorry compound fracture between friends. Yeah bad. Don't you know avoid that? compound fracture between friends. Yeah, bad. Don't, you know, avoid that. And also like the art and the culture of this, the nicknames in particular are amazing because they're not just funny.

These are also known as derby names. People in these leagues have a tradition of not playing under the name on their birth certificate or driver's license or whatever. They come up with a nickname. There's too many examples to list. A few of them are Achilles Squeal. Good. One source said somebody plays as Hurt Vonnegut, which is not me, it's somebody else.

That's great. That's fantastic. And I also really liked Luna Shovedgood. Great. It's usually violence and humor is the theme. Oh, this is fantastic. And that has a long tradition actually. It's not just a revival element. The kind of second big stage where it's sex and violence and sports rules. That also included some nicknames and pageantry. Apparently one star of roller derby from the 1940s through the 70s was skater

Anne Calvello. And she proudly skated under the alias Banana Nose. Which in the mid 1900s is punk. That's wild to be called Banana Nose in public. Fantastic. I don't get it, but I love it. And also she lived to 2006, so she got to see the sport revive. Like, there's much more interconnection across time than I expected with this sport.

What would be your roller derby name, Alex? You knew this was coming. You had to know this was coming. I really wish her Vonnegut wasn't taken because it's great. What about HG wheels? Oh, and then Jules Byrne. Somebody could be Jules Byrne. Right, right.

You usually want to do like a reference and some kind of pain or injury word. Right, right. That's kind of the scheme of it. Pushkin. Simple and perfect. And yeah, and then the nicknames, you know, it helps the skaters psychologically, along with costuming, it helps them enter the mental state to fight it out on the track. And also, apparently some of the skaters just benefit

from the anonymity. Mental Floss interviewed a player in Raleigh, North Carolina who skates under the name Electra Qtion. Perfect. No notes. It's Electra like the Marvel Comics character with a K. No notes. It's great. Perfect. And she said, quote, roller derby is kind of like being a C-level celebrity. Some players can have stalkers. I have a couple of fans that can be a little aggressive. Using Electrocution helps keep a separation there.'" That's fantastic.

Yeah, like they can't go find you in life or in the phone book or whatever. It's not fantastic. There's the need, but yeah, I mean, it's smart. Apparently also in Electrocution's case, the nickname has helped her tell medical professionals that everything's okay. Occasionally they'll need to see an actual doctor for an injury from roller derby and she says one time the doctor sent her partner out of the room to ask if her partner's hurting

her and stuff hurting her. And stuff like her nickname was a way to prove and indicate that like, no, this is from the sport. I'm like doing something I want to do, you know? Right. Yeah. Like other people know me by this name. You can tell it's real. Yeah. It's still good on the doctors for making sure. That too. Everybody's doing the good thing. Yeah. Yeah. And then also the beyond the Derby names, the uniforms help these athletes, you know, honor themselves and others. Like we said, now they can sexualize themselves, but they can also

reference the pinup style of the past if they want to, if that's a style they like. I sometimes come across this like, and I kind of doubt most if any of our listeners would subscribe to this sort of ideology, but I have seen men individuals online say that, well, if women sexualize themselves, why is it bad for men to sexualize them? You know I'm preaching to the choir here, but yeah, it's just that there's a different, there is a difference between someone consensually and happily engaging in something that makes them feel good about their bodies and that they are fine with other people also enjoying versus a weird kind of sexualization where the person isn't fully

consenting in into it. That's it. That's all it is. Yeah, it's really easy to understand. It's like, what's the difference between this very bad thing and this very good thing? And yeah, and then the costumes, like we said, there's plenty of safety padding. Any contact sport with slamming into each other, you can hurt yourself and also people accept that risk under dressing for it, right?

And the last, last story here is an interesting uniform number thing. There is a really neat tradition around the uniform number one in roller derby, like wearing one. Because across sports that can mean specific things, any uniform number. In soccer, one tends to be a goalie number by default with no real other connotation to it. In other sports, it can mean an athlete is celebrating themselves or they avoid wearing one because they don't want to appear selfish.

There's a lot of vibes to a uniform number. Right. Roller derby has a specific tradition around it from the dawn of the sport. Way back in 1937, so two years after the first version of a roller derby was created, there was a bus going from St. Louis to Cincinnati. It was just a public Greyhound bus, but more than a dozen roller derby skaters were on board to get to the next derby gig. And the bus crashes, 21 people perish, and one of them is a beloved male skater named Joe Cleats. Cleats was 36 years old, which by the standards of that roller derby world made him kind of an older guy and kind of a father figure to other male and female skaters.

And he wore uniform number one. So then everybody who knew him and wanted to honor him refused to wear the number and like kind of retired it in his memory. No, that's really sweet. Yeah, and like not everybody knows this story. If you attend a roller derby and someone's wearing one, they're not a jerk. But they're not. They're not an enemy of Mr. Cleats. Yeah. Of Joe Cleats.

But apparently, you know, 80 years and counting later, there are still derby athletes who don't wear it to honor this, like, beginning of the sport person. And in many cases, that's like entirely marginalized gender leagues honoring a man from the start of the sport. Like there's so much lineage and across all genders with this that I had no idea. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, that's really sweet.

It's really cool. So like, yeah, like, like it is a very funny sport in its pageantry and there's so much logic and heart and other things going on too. It's really rich as a text and a culture. Yeah, I did. I did look it up. There are concussions that happen during roller derby. So be safe out there. Oh, yeah. Like football.

It's like football or hockey or something that makes total sense. Helmet doesn't completely protect you, but you should wear it anyway. Yeah, yeah. Wear it. Wear a good one. Wear good helmets and be safe. Yeah, don't get CT and otherwise enjoy yourself. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe I'll just end every episode that way on any topic. Like, and that was socks. Anyway, don't get CT, everybody. Yeah, exactly. I think it's important, especially for our audience. You know what they're like?

Just going out there, trying to dash their own heads against walls everywhere. I see you guys out there trying to do extreme pillow fighting. Wear helmets. Yeah. You don't get to do it under the name Pushkin. That belongs to Katie. That's Katie's derby name. That's my, thank you HD Wheels. Ha ha ha.

["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega Takeaway Number 1. The name Roller Derby describes a few different American sports spread across nearly 100 years. The three main ones are a coed extreme endurance sport in the great depression, a violent and semi-scripted form of a sport, and the current high contact sport run by collectives of marginalized gender people. Takeaway number two, modern roller derby is just one example of women and non-binary athletes

playing a sport together, successfully and collectively. Takeaway number two, modern roller derby is a flat track sport and an example of women and non-binary athletes playing sports together, successfully and collectively. Takeaway number three, roller derby names and costumes are a mix of creative expression, sports tradition, and personal safety. And then it's so many numbers this week, including a loose explanation of the entire sport. We have links and videos with the full explanation of the rules and gameplay of roller derby,

also a quick history of roller skates in general, the entire broad picture of roller derby, also a quick history of roller skates in general, the entire broad picture of roller derby across the world, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is two stories. It's a wonderful roller derby league in Egypt

and an amazing scientific study of the microbiomes of roller derby skaters. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, for a library of more than 20 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a wonderful book called Roller Girls, The Story of Flat Track Derby.

It's primarily photos by Felicia Graham. It's also excellent writing by Melissa Jullon. Further scholarly writing about this sport from Colleen English, associate professor of kinesiology at Penn State University. They wrote that for theconversation.com. Also tons of writing for the New York Times, in particular a feature by Jennifer Harlan, an amazing piece for Smithsonian Folklife magazine by Gabrielle Puglisi. And I'm also going to link a short film. In 1950, a short film called Roller Derby Girl was nominated for an Academy Award.

It's a 1950 short film. It's narrated, lightly fictionalized, but mostly a five minute depiction of not only how the sport works, but also how it felt for American women to have this outlet and this potential way to make a living. So if you want to watch or consume anything from our links this week, I think that's an amazing five minutes for you. That episode page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land

of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wabinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also KD taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free CIF discord where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord.

We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 212 that's about the topic of salt mines. Fun fact there, one former salt mine in Kansas also became a storage facility for the Golden Age of Hollywood. Film reels, props, costumes, everything else.

So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Unshaven by the BUDDHOS band. Our show logo is by artist Spertan Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping supports. Extra extra special thanks go to our members.

And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating So how about that? Talk to you then Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.