More Than Just Hot Tattooed Chicks on Wheels

Whip It, the Drew Barrymore-directed roller derby flick that opens Friday, is designed in every way to melt the cool indie heart. Ellen Page plays a disaffected teen trapped in a flyspeck Texas town, the only kid in high school who wears ironic Stryper T-shirts. She finds her escape, and glory, in the scruffy sport of roller derby—a strange confection of post-punk irony, earnest feminist self-discovery, and full-on girl-on-girl violence. Only a true churl could dislike this bouncy, dewy-eyed she-pup of a movie.

But for all the charm, Whip It misses something crucial about its sport of choice. In Whip It, roller derby’s underground cool is conveyed by all the trappings—dyed hair, tattoos, uniforms that look like variations on fetish gear, and a hint of grrl-power politics. But the most interesting thing about derby has nothing to do with fashion, sex appeal, or even self-actualization. In real life, roller derby has become the goliath of underground athletics because it challenges the status quo of American sports. Spunky, loveable, and predictable to the last atom, Whip It skimps on the real radicalism of America’s most revolutionary sport.

True to its cultural roots in underground rock, roller derby is like an alternative-universe version of corporate American sports. It operates on something like the values of a commune—players really do play for love, and the good of the sport really does come first. At less than a decade old, derby has created a full-blooded internal world—and has done so without corporate cash, deep-pocketed owners, or even a shred of attention from mainstream sports media. This has come to pass not because it is so totally awesome to see hot, tattooed chicks on skates attack one another—though I admit that the appeal therein is not lost on me—but because these particular hot, tattooed chicks on skates have seized control of their own sport to a degree no other American athletes can claim. Compared with derby’s empowered amateurs, the highest-paid NBA or NFL star is just a pampered serf.

Simply put, the players own roller derby. The motto of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, the sport’s bootstrapping national organizing body, is “by the skaters, for the skaters.” Players own roller derby’s teams and leagues and vote on every aspect of the sport’s direction in a big, messy, and surprisingly effective grassroots process. A national sport, entirely run by players, with no fat-cat owners, corporate backers, sports-marketing specialists or entrenched, Olympics-style sports bureaucrats pulling the strings? Scan American sports history and you will see only one other attempt at such a thing: baseball’s Players’ League, a rebel circuit launched during an 1890s labor dispute. The Players’ League lasted all of one season but did, to its eternal credit, include a team called the “Cleveland Infants.” Since then, self-dealing cabals of team owners have controlled all our major leagues, and provided the model for all our minor ones. So while roller derby may look like gonzo fringe entertainment—perfect fodder for an inch-deep movie frolic—it actually deserves far more credit and acclaim for breaking that mold.

Urban lore dates roller derby back to the 1930s, when legendary sports journalist Damon Runyon decided rollerskating races—a popular diversion in those pre-Tivo days—could use some body contact. By the '70s, derby became a low-rent curiosity and staple of grainy, Z-grade television. This original incarnation of the sport more or less died out in the '80s. Then, about a decade ago, a bunch of punk-rock-inclined women in Austin reinvented the sport, accessorizing it with sexy/aggro pseudonyms, goofy costumes, and a beery rock-and-roll social vibe. This concoction unexpectedly caught on, as women around the country—usually of a type more closely associated with nonstandard body piercings than Title IX—formed teams. Today, the WFTDA confederates more than 40 city leagues, which attract hundreds of dedicated players. Many of them are attracted to the sport because it offers a sense of ownership, not just a chance to suffer visible contusions.

“It’s pretty rare for a sport to maintain its independence,” a Chicago player who calls herself Kami Sutra once told me. “Just about every sport ends up being owned by someone. But any hint of that in derby, people just freak out. I think we’re especially sensitive, because back in the old days, roller derby was completely controlled by sleazy promoters. There’s been a very conscious effort to avoid that.”

I saw the impressive results of this collective enterprise two years ago, when I visited Austin for the first true WFTDA national championship tournament. Whip It depicts the heroine’s team as a small, scrappy group of about a half-dozen women. But the real-life all-star squads that battled for derby supremacy in Austin rolled in force—miniature armies complete with well-organized traveling fan bases, coaching staffs, youth teams, and complex roster rotation strategies. The film boils derby track tactics down to stagy choreographed trick plays. In reality, the sport is as complicated and demanding as the Tour de France peloton. (The current WFTDA rulebook runs 35 pages.) Matches between the tournament’s strongest teams—the hometown Texecutioners, the sport’s scary traditional powerhouse; Seattle’s alternately smooth and vicious Rat City Rollers; the fierce Kansas City Roller Warriors, who ultimately took the championship in an upset—achieved a maniacal intensity level worthy of any sport, anywhere. Bodies caromed off bodies, limbs buckled, skin abraded, and a headache-inducing good time was had by all, not just because there was a fully licensed bar at either end of the arena.

The WFTDA’s unique player-controlled structure means the derby’s consumerist side feels different from that of other sports, too. Among other distinctions, this is probably the only sports league in history to demand that manufacturers produce vegan-friendly and sweatshop-free gear. Off the track, mercifully removed from the sour, wet-fabric, hockey-locker room stench that is roller derby’s unofficial smell, the Austin scene was just as impressive. Hordes of derby women from cities across the country thronged a bazaar-like array of merchandise tables, pawing through derby-specific magazines, fashion accoutrements, and equipment offerings. To an outsider, the whole affair seemed a bit self-involved, but in a good way. Admittedly, a plucky coming-of-age tale makes more ready fodder for a movie than the question of who owns the means of production. And it’s only fair to note that the derby world seems ready to embrace Whip It. The screening I attended was packed with rollergirls, and the WFTDA website gives the movie “four out of five skates.” Still, when you consider that derby may be the first and only national sport organized along anarcho-syndicalist lines, the body piercings seem like a mere bonus.