What I watched: Two roller derby shows (games? matches?) from 1949, both featuring the Philadelphia team of Leo Seltzer’s National Roller Derby League.. They take on New Jersey in the first match, and New York in the second. Roller derby was aired on ABC at 10 PM three nights a week, and both of these events seem to have taken place in late December.
What happened: We join Philly vs. NJ in media res, at the start of the seventh period. It is at this point that I realize I do not understand the rules of roller derby. Bobbi Burns elbows one of her rivals into the railing and scores, but gets taken out herself a minute later. We also find out about a contest to provide a nickname for each of the six teams, which are currently only named for their cities.
We get a nice animated ad for Blatt’s, purportedly “Milwaukee’s Finest Beer.” Anyway, it’s knotted up at 10 apiece. I also discover that this is a mixed-gender competition, with the men and women competing separately and adding their scores. Philadelphia goes in front before their jammer Millie Bruno gets taken out again. NJ’s jammer (Vannam?) gets one point before having her run ended by an illegal blocking call. Rules! They get another penalty on the next run, this time with a point being awarded to Philly. The crowd and coaches start getting rowdy.
The eighth period brings the men in, and my interest begins to falter.. New Jersey quickly begins to dominate, pulling away from Philadelphia as a unit, causing their jammer Buddy Collins to pretty much give up. NJ’s jammer is also a Buddy, with the surname of Atkinson, and he scores two points on his run. Philadelphia takes it back on the next term, and now leads 15-12. There’s a big tackle, but it doesn’t bring me as much joy as the women wrecking each other. No one is able to get separation for a while, until New Jersey’s Buddy comes close to lapping the rest of the team but ends up wiping out, giving NJ their second game in the series.
The second match from this year emanates from Philadelphia. This time the film is green, so everything’s different. The home team is trailing again, with New York up 10-8. One of the girls loses her helmet quickly, and keeps skating. They’re advertising the NJ/Philly series, so I guess this happened a week or two earlier. Whatever, I’m too lazy to revise this.and make it seem like I watched in the opposite order.
The women’s period starts off as a defensive affair, with neither of the two jammers able to score a point in their first two plays. Murray, New York’s jammer, closes in with Virma (?) as an escort, and scores a point. (Look, I’m just getting at most of these names — there are no graphics, and the commentator speaks very quickly.) Things continue along this defensive path until a girl gets knocked down and there’s a bit of a fracas. Things are so chaotic that even the commentary goes dead, ending my hope of making sense of these. Apparently Philly gets a point somewhere in the madness.
The men’s period starts out with a dude trying a flying hip attack, and a moment later a guy throws an elbow and knocks both himself and the other man off his feet (18:00). Philadelphia’s Mike Jones, who is somehow wearing glasses during this, finds a way to get points by ducking under the outstretched arms of two blockers. New York shuts the door with a two-point jam by Billy Bogash. So, the overall theme of the week is that Philadelphia sucks.
What I thought: The recent resurgence of roller derby as a kind of post-feminist post-punk recreation has always sort of interested me. In a way, it fits my image of what sport would be in an ideal world: rooted in the amateur and the local, but accessible to all. I’ve never really checked it out much though, both because I’m too uncoordinated to skate (I can barely walk sometimes) and it seems like a creepy thing for a single guy to get into.
These two roller derby broadcasts from ABC are actually the first TV sports broadcasts we’ve watched (as opposed to filmed versions of events that also aired on TV.) And roller derby was very much a sport in this era, with the more theatrical sports-entertainment brand not taking over until later decades. These broadcasts are very much right-to-the action, without the kind of spectacle or human interest segments that we see attached to even mainstream, legitimate sports today.
I don’t know how representative these broadcasts were of how sports were televised in 1949, but they’re the best we’ve got. We can already see some of the formatting of a typical sports broadcast, such as the jump back and forth between a desk announcer and a play-by-play guy on the track, and of course the ubiquitous beer ads. On the other hand, the lack of on-screen graphics is a big departure from the sports presentation I’m used to. There are also moments like the referenced write-in campaign to name the teams that remind you just how local and small-scale this whole enterprise was.
At the time, roller derby probably didn’t seem like a worse bet to become a big pro sport than, say, basketball. The broadcast is a little confusing, but at the same time there’s plenty of action and enjoyable physicality. It translates very well to television, and Leo Seltzer had set up a fairly legitimate six–team league (as big as the NHL, for one.) Along with boxing and wrestling, roller derby was a go-to for cheap content in the early days of television. Unfortunately, their deal with ABC would eventually dissolve, and with TV coverage becoming spotty the public quickly lost interest. These broadcasts, then, are the lost Eden of roller derby, promising a mainstream future for the sport that never arrived.
One of the most striking aspect of these games is the co-ed nature of the sport, with male and female teams alternating to score points. There’s no reason why you couldn’t do the same with other team sports, but in the following years men’s and women’s sports would be firmly segregated, in different leagues and venues, almost always to the detriment of the women. In this, too, roller derby is a tantalizing example of a road not taken.
So I salute the men of roller derby, their masculinity undeniable but somehow different from that of the football jocks, despite the sometimes brutal nature of their sport. I salute the glasses-wearing, freckle-faced skaters who somehow, briefly, found a place in professional sports. Maybe one day, if I work up the guts and the footwork, I might join them.
Coming up next: One of early television’s most memorable disasters.
The Eternal Couch Potato 