Back to the Derby Part One.

Roller Derby seems to come into my life at decade intervals.

I saw it on ESPN every morning at my grandmothers old house on the south side of Des Moines every morning before I boarded the school bus for a long cross town trip to McKee Elementary School. I remember the ladies of the L.A. Thunderbirds with their poofy hair done with what looked like a vat of hairspray.  Looking back I remember the sheer pro-wrestling quality of it all. Women were either bad asses or virtuous athletes who occasionally had to do a dirty trick to overcome the evil of whichever team they were playing. Men were conquerors of the banked track, complete with cartoonish braggadocio.

 I remember my father calling to inform me that he had tickets  to the Thunderbirds match when they came to town. I remember how disappointed I was when my dad called to tell me the show had been canceled. No, disappointment is too nice. I cried like a little wuss. Soon ESPN began getting more and more big name sports and fun oddities like Roller Derby and Australian Rules Football went by the wayside.

Fast forward to 1999. My father, who is a bit of a derby enthusiast, rushes home one day (I was living with him in suburban Chicago while I was attending college) and commands someone (probably me) to turn on TNN (The Nashville Network, now known as Spike TV) because something was coming on at 8 p.m.

The appointed time came and there it was. RollerJam. Updated for the turn of the century. You still had a banked track but everyone wore inline skates over the traditional quads. Everyone that is except the legendary Mark D’Amato- God rest his soul.

For a season and a half, my father and I had a bonding experience watching this RollerJam. We loved it. Still cheesy. Obviously made up. There were moments where you had to laugh and shake your head at the ridiculousness of it all.  But still it provided a bit of excitement and organized anarchy. The players had that same professional wrestling cartoonish quality (no one was better than D’Amato).  Yet, at the same time you could not help but enjoy the athletes prowess. More often than not they successfully cast the illusion of reality in their physical actions, even though you knew it was fake.

Something happened though about the middle of the second season, as I remember. Things began to get really weird on RollerJam. New “characters” were being introduced. One of them was known as “The Prophet.” Apparently, according to the storyline anyway, the Southern Baptist inspired Fundamentalist Totalitarian felt that he could secure his ideal vision of world utopia by seizing control of the “World Skating League” as it was known.  It was almost overnight that the program took this bizarre turn toward professional wrestling waters. Jams were becoming less and less. Weird stories and plot lines were on the rise-culminating in D’Amato and California Quakes men’s captain Sean Atkinson were brothers. The show reached its peak just before the second season, in the year 2000, when members of “The Bod Squad” (Jamie Conamac, Amy Craig and Olewein, Iowa’s own Stacy Blitsch) appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to being canceled at the end of the third season in 2001.

 There was no good reason to completely change the format of that show. Whoever came up with the idea of changing the show format should have been strung-up, hung and then shot. My father and I are still pretty bitter about this.

Little did we know at the time that a completely new wave of Roller Derby was taking off among a group of females in Austin, Texas around the same time that the pre-stupidity RollerJam was running its course. I do not  know who these girls are and since I am not getting paid to write this I am not going to find out.

I knew nothing of this until the annual Friendly Sons of St. Patrick Parade in downtown Des Moines. Two friends of my father’s ran the parade and since my wife Angie and I had the rare day off at the same time, we decided to take our three-year-old son Max on the two hour trip from Waterloo to see it.

In the middle of the parade, with its prerequisite candy tossing, marching bands and fire trucks (the presence of which never fails to blow Max’s mind), something blew my mind.

There she was, I believe her skating alias was M.O.A.B. (Mother of All Bombs). She was skating in uniform and on quads handing out business cards which contained the words “Des Moines Derby Dames” and http://www.dmderbydames.com

I could feel my heart leap with enthusiasm.

“They have roller derby around here?” I asked, my voice almost pleading that this was true.

“Yeah,” M.O.A.B. said with a warm smile. “First bout is April 10. You should come check it out.”

She skated off. Did that just happen? Was that an angel in quads? I didn’t even know I missed Roller Derby. I hadn’t brought it up in years. The transaction from M.O.A.B to me unleashed a torrent of intense feelings toward my  favorite long-lost sport. The Derby Gods, or in this case, A derby goddess named M.O.A.B. bade me to come.

Once I got back to Waterloo, I did some research. My mind was racing with the singular question: what the hell happened? Here is what I made out:  the women who came up with the idea in Austin, Tx. had unleashed a revolution. Women’s teams began to spread out through the county. Yet this particular form of roller derby that began to explode across the country was not the professional wrestling fueled wackiness that fueled the L.A. Thunderbirds and ultimately destroyed Roller Jam. 

The presence of that knowing ridiculousness is still there, but it is limited to the names and attire of the athletes. For instance, the ladies of the Dames tossed off their everyday names and equipped themselves with monikers like M.O.A.B., Toxic Moss, Meggar Bomb and Cosmo Disco. The matter of dress  below the waist was a different proposition. Some wear fishnets. Others wear shorts. Others still wear short dress bottoms. You might even see an occasional  tutu.

Further proof of this divine intervention of Derby into my life was that the weekend of the Dames first bout fell on that rare weekend where I neither had to work Saturday night nor Sunday morning. The opening home bout for the Des Moines Derby Dames was slated for Saturday night April 10^th at the legendary Val-Air Ballroom in West Des Moines. The Dames would play against the River Valley Roller Girls from Wausau, Wisconsin.

My wife announced that she would be heading north with her mother to crawl through the retail jungle that is IKEA for a certain dining room table and chair set that thus far had been as elusive to her as the holy grail is to archeologists. She wound up taking our three year old son with her. I had already telephoned my friend Noel to go to the match with me.  Something told me that this would be his kind of scene.

The choice was obvious to Noel and I. The question was not whether we should take the crazy action of driving the 110-plus miles to Des Moines to watch a Roller Derby match, but rather if we could gun it fast enough to cover the distance between us and the Val-Air between 5 p.m. when Noel got off work to the 7:30 start time in West Des Moines without dealing with the potential consequences of driving 85 in a 70 mph zone.

There comes a time in a man’s life where larger voices call him to drastic and necessary measures. This was one of them. Noel got off work on time. We went to his house where he fetched some caffeinated water and then we pointed my 2001 Saturn in the direction of Des Moines.