The Sporting Scene

You'd never recognize the demure little old pastime of roller skating the way they have it fixed up nowadays. If you haven't already thrilled to the daring intricacies of the Roller Derby through television (and this is well nigh impossible to avoid if you watch TV in the evening for any length of time), they are on view nightly at the Mechanics Building.

After the evolution of ordinary street hockey, the inevitable introduction of plain speed racing, and a dubious form of amusement in which the participants dance while on roller skates, there didn't seem to be much left for people to do on wheels. All this failed to daunt one Lee A. Seltzer, an athletic-minded Chicagoan who figured that the millions of Americans who roller skate and the millions of Americans who wrestle ought to be thrown together in one merry mob. The Roller Derby originated in Chicago in 1935.

For approximately 13 years after that, hardly anything was heard about Seltzer's contribution to organized Armageddon. Then, aided by an increase in the number of television-owners, the Roller Derby all of a sudden sprang full-blown, much like Canasta. The true aficionado knows at least a few of the regular contes-around quite so fast as the men, who hit 35 m.p.h., but they provide more action, past performances and thus he knows who is good and who isn't, who the rough one are and who the fast ones are. This, of course, heightens the interest when he actually gets to see his heroes in action.

The Roller Derby is a watered down potpourri of several sports. It combines the speed of racing, the jamming of a six-day bicycle race, the blocking of football, the checking of hockey, and the team-play of basketball. It is played on an oval, highly-banked maconite track, 16 laps to a mile, by two teams of five players each. Each club has two teams--one of men, one of women--which race for alternate 15-minute periods. Two halves of four 15-minute periods each constitute a night's competition.

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Points are scored every time a player on one team laps a member of the opposing team. A "jam" is an effort to score a point and occurs when one of the faster men on a team is shaken loose, usually on a crack-the-whip maneuver, and tries to steal a lap on the opposition. He is given two minutes to do this and the number of points he gets depends on how many of the opposition he passes. In the meantime, the skaters on the team that has a jammer out try to slow down the members of the other team to keep them from catching the jammer; and when the jammer comes around, his buddies get set to block for him. The enemy, of course, does its all to dump the guy, since this is the only way it can prevent being scored on unless time runs out on the jammer.

By definition, then, the sport is bound to get rather fierce at times. Elbows are thrown with reasonably gay abandon and spills are frequent. But there wasn't a genuine body check all evening the night I went (this is surprising in a game like this) and the girls were more violent than the men. State Representative William A. Glynn (D--Boston) must have come away with the same opinion, because he filed a bill the other day seeking to bar women from wrestling matches and roller derbies, claiming these events are too rough for feminine participants. The girls can't get tants by sight and/or name as he watches the goings-on on TV. He is familiar with

Indeed, there is a lot about this business that seems fishy. The physical contact is not what it might be and points are traded back and forth too evenly. More than one jam reminded me of the jockey's query, "Where's number two? Let him through; let him through." There is also the attempt to infuse the Roller Derby with a big-time sports atmosphere (cf. announcing halftime scores of other matches, which nobody honestly cares about).

But all in all, the Roller Derby is good entertainment. It can be fairly exciting and if you pick a night when the competitors happen to be in a particularly surly mood, I suppose it could be downright dangerous. The Roller Derby appears to have more staying power than another Seltzer concoction, the Marathon Dance, and is no doubt worthwhile observing--mainly for chuckles.