The Derby Rises Again

Jerry Seltzer, the president of Bay Promotions, Inc., in Oakland, Calif., is still fuming. When the TV show What's My Line? telephoned from New York to ask for one of his girl skaters to appear on the program, Seltzer says, the caller explained that the show was looking for someone with a "weird and unusual occupation--one that is nearly extinct." Obviously, says Seltzer, those isolated New Yorkers did not realize that he was promoting the Big Comeback of that riot on roller skates called the Roller Derby.

The big city's insularity does not really worry Promoter Seltzer all that much. The rest of the country knows all too well what he is doing. Take Atlanta, for example. Last week 3,600 Roller Derby fans jampacked Municipal Auditorium to watch the touring San Francisco Bay Bombers battle the New England Braves. The fundamentals of the game were easy enough to grasp: with men and women alternating, two teams of five skaters each circle a banked oval track in a tight cluster. Then one or two skaters from each team break from the pack and attempt to score points by "jamming" or lapping opponents, who fight them off with elbow jabs, strangleholds and something called the "jumping-hip block." Points are scored by passing members of the opposing team.

At least that was what was supposed to happen. Once the first of eight twelve-minute periods got going, however, the action quickly developed into a free-for-all. Whirling around the track at 30 m.p.h., the skaters shoved, tripped and slugged one another with abandon. The Braves' Ronnie Robinson, Sugar Ray's son and the villain on the current tour, repeatedly locked his arm around an opponent's head and then flipped seat-first onto the track, apparently crunching the noggin under his bottom. He also excelled at kicking rivals in the mouth with his skates and beating them over the head with his helmet.

Scratching Thrown In. Or so it seemed. The press releases like to say that the Derby combines the speed of hockey with the contact of football, but it also has all the hoked-up histrionics of professional wrestling. In most of the "fights," the punches are pulled but they still send skaters sprawling. When the girls roll onto the Masonite track, the contact becomes more genuine--with shrieking, scratching and hair pulling thrown in. The female heavy is Joan Weston, a $20,000-a-year blonde Bomber who sends opponents flipping over the guard rails with one twitch of her mighty hips. As her bumpy, bruised knuckles attest, she can be equally menacing with an uppercut ("I can't keep a long nail," she says). She takes her lumps too, most often from a gang of Braves led by pert Marge Laszlo, a nine-year Derby veteran who has had plastic surgery to remove the scars from a twice-broken nose.

On TV, the spectacle probably should be called "Son of Roller Derby." Seltzer, 36, is the son of Leo ("Bromo") Seltzer, the man who dreamed up the Roller Derby and turned it into a national craze in the late 1940s. In those days, TV programming became so saturated with helmeted skaters that the sport suffered a severe case of overexposure and soon faded to a few games a year, mostly in California.

Breathless Patter. Then, in 1958, Jerry Seltzer took over and, by doggedly promoting brand new TV films of the matches, developed a whole new audience. Last year the Roller Derby played to more than 10 million viewers over 78 different TV stations. In some cities, including South Bend, Ind., and Norfolk, Va., it actually outdrew American Football League games in the opposing time slot. In the Bay Area, the Roller Derby performances are second only to baseball's San Francisco Giants at the box office.

Performance is the word. Much of the Derby's drama depends on the teams' announcer, whose breathless, frenzied patter is not so much an account of the action as cues to the players to liven things up with a brawl or two. The seesaw scoring duels and the inevitable sudden-death overtimes are too common to be taken seriously. Yet the spills and stylized violence are apparently realistic enough to satisfy action-hungry fans. "No matter how badly it is abused," says Seltzer, "the Roller Derby rises again."

In some of the most unlikely places, he might have added. The skating matches have played to large audiences on Canadian TV for the past two years. And recently, Seltzer sold the films of the Roller Derby matches for eventual airing throughout Japan. In October, following his usual sales formula, Seltzer plans to send two teams to Japan to exploit the follow-up market and give his audience a live look at gimmick games, American style.

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