REMEMBERING WHEN: Saturday morning roller derby

By Keith Schell

When I was a kid, Saturday morning television was specifically ‘kid time,’ with a lineup of cartoons from very early Saturday morning until early in the afternoon on the small handful of TV channels that we would eventually receive out in the country back in the day. But in the 1970s, there was an hour-long sports show on Saturday mornings just before lunch that was so cool I never missed it once I discovered it. It was a sport that just seemed to be made for Saturday morning TV.

And that Saturday morning TV sport I never missed was: ROLLER DERBY!

Professional Roller Derby back then certainly had a checkered past. The sport changed names and owners many times before I finally discovered it and started watching it in the mid-1970s.

Formed in 1974, the International Skating Conference (ISC) was created with the intent that the greatest stars of competing leagues “Roller Derby” and “Roller Games” could all come together and compete under the umbrella of one league. The Los Angeles T-birds and Eastern Warriors were the premier teams in the ISC along with Team Canada, the Tokyo Bombers, and the Latin Libertadores. The San Francisco Bay Bombers came into the league at the end of 1974.

Of course, because Canada had their own team in this new league that was the team I had to cheer for. To my recollection, the most famous names on Team Canada back then were bespectacled Men’s team Captain Paul “The Bear” Rupert (who wore a pair of “Buddy Holly” style eyeglasses before he apparently got contact lenses), Frankie Macedo, Women’s team Captain Diane Syverson, and, of course, the greatest and most famous Canadian Roller Derby icon of all time: GWEN “SKINNY MINNIE” MILLER! (By all accounts, the late Gwen Miller hated the nickname “Skinny Minnie,” but it stuck with her and made her the most recognizable and beloved Canadian roller derby icon of our generation until her passing in 2017.)

Watching the games as a kid, I thought scoring seemed to be very subjective because I didn’t really understand very much about the game at the time and how both teams scored points.

Only the Jammers (the players wearing the designated helmets) on both teams are allowed to score points. Each time a Jammer skates completely around an opposing player on the other team, the Jammer’s team is awarded one point.

When ‘time’ is whistled in and play begins, you have a period of two minutes to score points before ‘time out’ is automatically called and play is stopped. A Jammer has the option to put their hands on their hips to signal a ‘time out’ or ‘stop time’ at any time during play, and when that happens, play automatically stops.

In some ways back then, professional Roller Derby was kind of like professional wrestling, with “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys” and “Good Teams” and “Bad Teams,” with bragging and bluster and false bravado from the skaters being interviewed between periods to help build up fan interest and increase TV viewership.

As a kid, I sometimes wondered if the ISC hired the most clueless and visually-impaired people they could possibly find to referee their games. Every time the referee went to give someone a penalty, two other people behind his back would start pounding on each other! In hindsight, I sometimes wondered if professional Roller Derby was fake back then the way wrestling was, as much performance art as it was sport, but I ultimately dismissed that thought because the injuries during the games I watched back then certainly looked real to me.

And it certainly held my attention. It was fast, most definitely violent, and Canada had its own team entered in this new Roller Derby league. That was good enough to entice me to watch it. And being a good Canadian, sometimes when things were going badly for Team Canada, I would get so worked up I wanted to throw something at the TV! Our mother actually had to poke her head in the living room and calm me down a few times with some well-chosen words (“Don’t act so silly!”). I smile about the memory now.

Recently, I have been watching YouTube videos of the old Team Canada roller derby matches that were broadcast on TV back in the 1970s, and I had forgotten how incredibly violent those games could actually be; helmetless skaters being rolled head-first into the walls of the collapsible penalty box at full speed, skaters being slew-footed and flying off the angled track on to the concrete floor of the arena, bare-knuckle fist-fights, and bare-headed skaters being hit over the head with Jammer’s helmets and being head-banged into the guard rails! And amazingly to me, sometimes the women could be even more violent and vicious than the men!

But that was just the way it was back then. Wild, woolly, fast and furious, I always looked forward to watching professional Roller Derby and cheering for Team Canada every Saturday morning back in the day.

Sadly, because it was only a niche sport in a time of rising costs and expenses, the International Skating Conference business model could not be financially sustained, and the league was permanently disbanded in 1987.

But I will always remember professional Roller Derby as being the coolest Saturday morning TV sport of the 1970s!