Arts

More Than Just Hot Tattooed Chicks on Wheels

What Whip It gets wrong about roller derby.

  • Posted: Friday, October 2, 2009 7:40am
  • By Zach Dundas

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.

Tags: drew barrymore, ellen page, film, roller derby, sports, whip it

Zach Dundas is a journalist based in Portland, Oregon. His first book, The Renegade Sportsman, will be published next year.

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