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Overview
Along the way he considers roller derby’s roots in Riot Grrrl and DIY culture, and the importance of the LGBTQ community both inside and outside of the sport. This is a warm, thoughtful look at a sport that Miller understands intimately, which takes us beyond the costumes and showmanship, into the heart of what he feels may be the first truly feminist sport.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781928088356 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wolsak & Wynn Publishers, Limited |
| Publication date: | 06/21/2016 |
| Sold by: | PUBLISHDRIVE KFT |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 242 |
| File size: | 878 KB |
About the Author
A graduate of Mount Allison University, the University of Victoria and the University of Guelph (where he completed his MFA), Miller currently lives in Toronto where he works as a college English instructor. He also announced at both the 2011 and 2014 Roller Derby World Cups and was part of the ESPN's broadcast crew for the 2015 WFTDA Championships.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
a wholly unique murig
THE CALL OF THE FLAT TRACK
May 31, 2008. Montreal, QC
The streets were so empty we could hear the sounds of our shoes scuffing the sidewalk, kicking up dust created by the remarkably dry, warm spring air. We were rushing down St-Dominique Street in Montreal's Mile End neighbourhood, late, and up ahead we could see our destination. Arena Saint-Louis was nondescript, a squat-looking brick arena that wouldn't look out of place in any city, town or village in Canada, and it seemed silent from a distance, empty perhaps. I was starting to wonder if we'd even come to the right place. But once we stood at the foot of the steps leading up to the main entrance we could hear it: a faint din leaking out through the glass doors at the top of the stairs; the muffled moans of a crowd; the sharp voice of an announcer cutting through a blanket of sound. We hurried up the steps, our hands slipping from each other's grasp.
Entering the door we gave our tickets to a young woman with a thick nose ring. Tattoos of paws scampered up her left forearm, her hair was an asymmetrical, spiky blue, but she had a sweet smile and welcomed us in slightly accented English. She ushered us through the inner doors and we found ourselves on a concourse overlooking a bowled arena with a wall of seats immediately beneath us.
It was packed, as packed as this small Canadian arena could be, and loud: the acoustics of the building allowing the sound to rebound, echo and erupt as they would for any sporting event. Only the crowd was unlike any I'd ever seen downtown at the Bell Centre watching the Habs. It was mostly women, for one, and predominantly lesbian, I assumed: heavily tattooed, pierced and as equally decked out in armless, punk rock–certified fraying jean jackets as they were in hipster-chic skinny jeans and retro plaid. It was a glorious sea of riled up, belligerent fans, screaming at the action below with their hands thrust skyward, clutching half-drunk cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR). I followed those cries down onto the arena floor – iceless now – to an oval in the centre of the polished concrete, marked out by pink duct tape over a rope and ringed by a circle of fans three-rows deep, who either sat directly on the floor or stood, leaning over those sitting, straining to have their voices heard on the track where two groups of women roller skated.
The action on the track that they were all so focused on was a blur to me, a swirl of purples and greens and blacks, hair whipping out from under helmets, arms flailing, bodies tumbling, a cacophony of seemingly uncontrolled chaos. Over it all, I could hear a single voice cutting through the noise with a crisp timbre that focused my attention. Standing in the centre of the oval, seemingly flitting above the mess of bodies that surrounded or scrambled upon the track, was a stunning human. A topless feminine figure, confidently decked out in very little: high-heeled black leather boots that stretched up to the knee and gave way to smooth, toned thighs, black booty shorts and a matte-black corset that thrust and presented the figure's masculine, muscular chest upward toward a perfectly contoured face. The face – sharp, deep-cheeked, with smoky charcoal around the eyes giving them an enigmatic, yet still penetrating look – was framed by a shiny platinum bob that cut a line of straight bangs above the brow. The announcer strutted about the action, drifting effortlessly between English and French, sometimes interacting directly with the crowd and seemed to be describing the sight in some carnivalized version of a traditional sports play-by-play. As I listened I began to see – ever so crudely – the links between the action and the words. The chaos on the track seemed to slow somewhat, at least to the point where I could distinguish one team from another and the skaters from each other. I began to see the slight consistency in the uniforms, but mostly I was taken by the personalized variations: the heavily stickered helmets, multicoloured knee and elbow pads, the fishnets or booty shorts. I may not have understood the game, but at least I recognized the sport of roller derby.
I wish I could remember what my expectations were for that night, but whatever they may have been, I know they were wrong. It's probably more accurate to say my expectations were shapeless and weighed down by murky memories of a dead sport. I would quickly learn that the state of the game was in a similar spot, that the muddle I was seeing and feeling was actually the murkiness of a game trying to figure itself out.
My partner, Jan Dawson, and I were nearing the end of our time in Montreal. We'd been in the city for two years while she completed her graduate degree in Library and Information Studies at McGill University. We had been tipped off about Montreal's roller derby league from two of her classmates who were budding fans. We were supposed to meet them that night, but our late arrival made finding them difficult. So instead, we grabbed a couple cans of PBR (two for five dollars) and headed to where a few seats remained in the southern edge of the stands. As the first game neared its end, Montreal's defending house league champions, Les Filles du Roi, were on the wrong side of the score against a team from Boston called the B Party. In the buildup to the evening, I had naively thought that flat track roller derby was exclusively a Montreal thing, so I watched enthralled as these women who had travelled all the way from Boston rocked the Montreal skaters. As the night wore on and the pyramids of empty PBR cans began to rise along the side of the track (they were called beeramids I would later learn, built in the hopes of being knocked down by a skater hit out of bounds), the crowd became increasingly belligerent toward the opposition, and downright rude and obnoxious toward the referees.
For someone like me – a slightly nerdy, but passionate sports fan, who'd played a few sports, but would never have been considered a jock at any point in his life – being in that arena that night felt like being in a kind of paradise. Here was a sport that had many of the trappings of the traditional sports spectacle but managed to feel completely different. From its competitors – women who ranged widely in size, shape, sexuality and style – to its announcer to its fans, nothing seemed recognizable to me, a lifetime consumer of the Big Four North American sports and the bloated amateurism of the Olympics. One thing that remained the same was that core of sports empathy that is nearly indescribable and that people seem to crave once they get a taste for it: the joining together with a group of others and rallying behind a team. I could feel it there that night immediately, even if whatever was happening on the floor in front of me was unlike any sport I had ever seen and the audience surrounding me was unlike any I'd ever been in.
Walking into Montreal's Arena Saint-Louis is for fans of Canadian roller derby what walking into the old Montreal Forum would have been for fans of hockey. After the closing of Edmonton's Grindhouse (a.k.a. the Metro Sportsplex) in the summer of 2014, Arena Saint-Louis became the single oldest continuously used arena for roller derby in Canada, and some of the defining moments for the sport in this country have happened there. In May 2008, Montreal Roller Derby was in the early stages of its second competitive season. I was surprised to discover that the league consisted of about sixty women, separated onto three home (or house league) teams: Les Contrabanditas, La Racaille and Les Filles du Roi. The top sixteen or so skaters had also recently formed the all-star team, The New Skids on the Block.
Jan and I saw every game that season, never leaving our spots at turn 1 of the trackside suicide seats. We saw the regular season and the playoffs. On July 12, we watched our first Canadian inter-league game between Montreal's New Skids and Hamilton's Hammer City Eh! Team, where I realized, for the first time, that this sport was being played elsewhere in Canada. All of this was to come, but on that initial night in May, I remember Jan and I glancing at each other in silent wonderment. Once we'd gained some confidence, we began to ask the fans around us about certain aspects of the game, but we quickly discovered that not many in the audience really knew what was going on. Many had seen the sport only once or twice before, or, more often than not, not at all. The best we got was that there were three positions: the blockers, the pivot (who was a blocker that wore a stripe on her helmet, the reasoning for it beyond my understanding at the time) and the jammer, the skater who could score points and who had a star on her helmet.
By the second game of that first evening's doubleheader, I was starting to figure things out, at least on a large scale. The sprawling mass of what seemed to be pure confusion began to take on shape, and I could see a little order to the commotion. And, like most of the people who have leapt into twenty-first century roller derby, particularly in those first years when it was still essentially unknown and you could stumble unaware into an unassuming neighbourhood arena and discover this thriving, raucous subculture, I had what some skaters refer to as "the calling." Most skaters, announcers and officials are able to boil their callings down to a specific moment. A moment when the sounds and sensations create an almost out-of-body experience that allows something small and specific to suddenly open up to expose an all-encompassing bigger picture.
This calling doesn't happen as much anymore because that element of being caught off guard has been lost. Even if people don't quite know exactly what it is, everyone seems to know that there is a roller derby revival going on, so the sport surprises people less and less. But when it was still a derby little secret hidden away in rinks and gyms in a few places across North America, the discovery was often a shocking revelation. The first few waves of the growth of the sport consisted of women having this calling and following it to extremes. In Canada in 2007 and early 2008, there were only a few cities where derby was played – Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, Edmonton and Vancouver – so at this stage the future roller girls who would soon take up the game in London, Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Red Deer and Victoria relied on the existence of those initial leagues to discover the sport.
The moment of my calling came late on that first night in Arena Saint-Louis. Fuelled by equal parts wonder, adrenaline and beer, it was life altering.
It turned out that both Montreal teams were quite overmatched (I would learn later that the US teams were significantly more experienced), but in the second game, featuring La Racaille taking on Female Trouble, a team from Baltimore, I finally began to notice that whenever one particular skater took to the track wearing a helmet cover with a star on it, La Racaille's score rose. She was easy to pick out as she skated with an awkward, hunched-over stride that brought her so low around the turns she could slap the floor if she wanted. She gave me something to latch on to and gaining a centre point allowed me to see that there was an order to things. There were strategies and counter-strategies. I could match the cheers in the crowd with this skater's ability to get through the pack, weave her way through the opposing blockers and take assists from her own.
The skater's name, I learned quickly, was the Iron Wench.
As Iron Wench approached the track and one of her teammates knocked an opposition blocker out of the way so she could get past, the sport began to unfold for me. It was a raw understanding, though the sport at the time was still in a fairly raw state, but when that fundamental understanding of the game coupled with the energy in the arena that night, I knew I was falling in love with the game. Luckily, when I looked over at Jan, I saw that something had changed in her as well. She was the one who would first describe to me the moment of her own calling. Later she told me that as soon as she walked into the arena, she felt as if she were surrounded by her "people," though she couldn't explain with any more precision who those people were.
As La Racaille's loss at the hands of Baltimore was winding down, we began to anticipate when Iron Wench would come back on the track. We could easily recognize her loose gait, the rounded back and the jutting elbows. Eventually I began to look beyond her stance and down at her feet. When I'd first walked in, the tangle of legs and knee pads had been a blur, but late in the second game, I could begin to make out the skates – all quad roller skates, of course – cutting through the air. They almost seemed to be floating above the concrete. Then I finally heard the sound, the muffled screech of wheel edges connecting, digging into the concrete underneath. It was unlike anything I'd heard before, maybe similar to an ice skate stopping sharply, digging into ice and kicking up a spray of snow and ice bits, but it was deeper, heavier. It was as if the hard plastic wheels were sanding down the concrete, grinding it away to nothing; and the more the skaters moved their feet – stopped, started, leapt, turned – the more the wheels would screech. It was unnerving. It was mesmerizing. It was a wholly unique music, and I was hooked.
CHAPTER 2
by the skater, for the skater
THE DO-IT-YOURSELF DRIVE BEHIND THE CANADIAN ROLLER DERBY REVIVAL
It's game day at the Bunker, the home of Toronto Roller Derby (ToRD) since fall 2011, an old military supply depot in Downsview Park just north of downtown Toronto. The Bunker is swarming with activity, with dozens of volunteers at work, virtually all of them players whose teams are not scheduled to play tonight, but also spouses (who are often labelled derby widows if they don't get involved) and other family members. Some of these volunteers set up temporary changing rooms in one end of the building over what is known as track 2; other skaters work to shore up the thin roped track outline around track 1 as volunteers use large brooms to sweep around them, removing any fine debris from the track. Still more are lining the track with movable steel bleachers, rolling them into place on their stiff, tired wheels, while a few others set up the bar. Roller skating and derby-specific vendors are putting up temporary shops in vendor alley; the ToRD.TV crew is taping down cables from the cameras lining the track and preparing for the evening's live web-streamed broadcast; and, of course, somewhere in amongst all this, there are skaters warming up for their game.
The Bunker is a massive space, lined throughout with thick concrete columns that guide you through the dusty room. It is windowless; the only natural light that makes its way into the building is through a garage door at the far end, near where the members of ToRD were able to craftily set up one of the two flat track roller derby tracks in the space. Although it doesn't have the sort of seminal history that Edmonton's Grindhouse or Montreal's Arena Saint-Louis have, during its time as ToRD's home, the Bunker has been the busiest roller derby space in Canada, and one of the busiest in the world. Nine or ten teams spread over three leagues use the space, with all seven of ToRD's teams practicing on weeknights (the multiple tracks allow two teams a night to practice). On Saturday afternoons when there aren't any games to set up for, full league practice is held. On Sundays, the busiest day of the week, Toronto Junior Roller Derby and Toronto Men's Roller Derby share the space with the skaters of ToRD's Fresh Meat Training Program.
It is as far from a traditional sports venue as you will find; a repurposed, inadequate space (setting up a round track surrounding huge pillars should be impossible) made to not only work, but to thrive. Skating in the Bunker is the personification of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association's "by the skater, for the skater" mantra, a perfect illustration of the do-it-yourself approach that has driven the flat track revival of roller derby.
In her expansive and inclusive 2005 book DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture, Amy Spencer charts the history of the DIY ethos, as she calls it, from its roots in sci-fi fanzines in the 1930s and the beat generation's self-publishing of the '50s to its defining moments with the '70s punk and the '90s riot grrrl movements. In the introduction, Spencer points out that across DIY subcultures "the primary aim is to build unique idealized networks in which anyone can participate" (11) and that participants in DIY culture are driven by "the urge to create a new cultural form and transmit it to others on [their] own terms" (12). When discussing the riot grrrl movement, which derby rose from, Spencer notes that the movement sprouted in the early '90s from women's dissatisfaction with the dominant indie culture of the time: "Many young women did not see themselves represented in either the mainstream music or the underground [i.e., grunge] in the early '90s" (292), and because of this, "they wanted to break away from the preconceived stereotypes of female sexuality in rock music" (293). Although Spencer's study was published in 2005 during the earliest days of the development of the roller derby revival – 2005 was the year that the WFTDA formed – the sport could have slipped easily into her book.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Eight-Wheeled Freedom"
by .
Copyright © 2016 D. D. Miller.
Excerpted by permission of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue,
A Wholly Unique Music: The Call of the Flat Track,
By the Skater, For the Skater: The Do-It-Yourself Drive Behind the Canadian Roller Derby Revival,
Nerding Out: Five Things You Need to Know About the Modern Roller Derby Revival,
Riot Grrrls on Wheels: The History of the Roller Derby Revival and the Birth of Flat Track Roller Derby (2001–2006),
Eight-Wheeled Freedom: Roller Derby as a Reflection of its Era (1880–2000),
The Great Leap Backwards: 2009 and the Defining of Flat Track Roller Derby,
Nerding Out: The Five Key Moments in the Development of Competitive Canadian Roller Derby,
Smack Daddy and the New Skids: Roller Derby as the Sport of Third-Wave Feminism,
Out Ina Bout: The Importance of (and in) the LGBTQ Community,
The Whip It Bump: Web Streaming, Mainstream Media and the Spread of the Sport,
Lifestyle vs. Sport: Men, Children and the Grassroots Explosion,
Nerding Out: The Nerd's Five Favourite Canadian Skaters,
Real Uniforms, Real Names, Real Sport: The Seriousing of Roller Derby,
Jumping Through Loopholes: The Evolution of the Flat Track Rules,
Going Global: The Roller Derby World Cup and the Globalization of the Game,
The Wide-Open Track Ahead: Flat Track Roller Derby Comes of Age,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgements,
Notes,
Bibliography,
What People are Saying About This
“Dave is the perfect writer for this topic. He is more than a ‘Derby Nerd’ (as we all know him), he is a derby lover, a derby fan. He understands and knows the sport both statistically and culturally, he is interested in skaters and teams of all levels, he loves roller derby through and through. You best believe this book is not only accurate, but heartfelt.”
“As a broadcast announcer, D. D. ‘Derby Nerd’ Miller has long since emerged as one of modern roller derby’s best narrators, so it comes as no surprise that sitting down with his book Eight-Wheeled Freedom is like attending a master course in oral history. Miller’s passionate account of the rise and success of Canadian roller derby is so well woven into the fabric of the sport’s global history that this book is not only an essential collection of soon-to-be well-known anecdotes, but an important component to understanding roller derby’s unique cultural impact.”
“As a broadcast announcer, D. D. 'Derby Nerd' Miller has long since emerged as one of modern roller derby's best narrators, so it comes as no surprise that sitting down with his book Eight-Wheeled Freedom is like attending a master course in oral history. Miller's passionate account of the rise and success of Canadian roller derby is so well woven into the fabric of the sport's global history that this book is not only an essential collection of soon-to-be well-known anecdotes, but an important component to understanding roller derby's unique cultural impact.”