Roller Girl
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Peter Newcomb
Poor Buffy. That superstrong, ultrablond slayer of all things bloodsucking used to be Amy Whited’s favorite after-work guilty pleasure. (It was actually DVDs of the TV series, but you get the idea.) But Buffy’s been booted, in favor of the smack-mouth sport of roller derby—and those four little wheels on the bottom of Whited’s skate-clad foot couldn’t have felt good.
Save for a few months last winter, when she was sidelined by a broken tibia, Whited (or, if you prefer her slightly suggestive stage name, Joanie Rollmoan) has been spending her nights skating with the Arch Rival Roller Girls (or, if you prefer its aggressive-sounding acronym, ARRG). And after a shortened inaugural season that attracted a few recruits more interested in looking cute than in kicking ass (“That’s fine,” Whited says. “They can join a burlesque group”), the league is rolling into its second season with a committed crew and one blond skater, in particular, who’s itching to hit someone.
I’ve read that this is a different form of roller derby. Actually, if you go back to the origins of derby, in the ’30s and ’40s, it’s much more similar to that than the stuff from the ’70s and ’80s. By that time, it had become like the WWF. Promoters wanted to make it sexy and didn’t have the skaters’ best interests in mind. Now, the leagues are owned by the skaters.
Why did you join? I skated all the time growing up—I was what you’d call a rink rat—and the league seemed really DIY. Girls were doing it themselves, kind of like punk girl bands of the ’90s. And it was a chance to do something cool in my 30s.
Is there a Joanie Rollmoan persona? She’s a rock star. It’s a play off of Joey Ramone’s name, but there’s also a Sleater-Kinney song called “I Want to Be Your Joey Ramone,” which is about girls getting to be rock stars and having people look up to them and hang pictures of them on their walls.
Your MySpace page talks about the sexiness of the sport. How is it sexy? We’re smart, we run our own business, we’re strong and we play a full-contact sport, but we can still be sexy and play up the fact that we’re girls. We can be feminine or tomboys; we could be 250 pounds and still be sexy. We’re the owners, so we can control our image. We’re not being exploited by someone who only wants 119-pound women on the track.
Which part do you like more, the skating or the rough stuff? That’s really tough, because when I found out about it, I was like, “Ooh, I get to skate?” Smart skating will keep you from getting hit or put you in the right place to hit somebody, so in that way good skating helps. You don’t have to be a complete thug if you can skate well. You can be a half-thug.
Which are you? I’m a half-thug. My stuff is legal.
How tough was it to have to sit out last year? It was horrible. I’d skated almost every single day for a year. I was used to the adrenaline from skating and hitting people, so I think I was a little depressed about that for a couple weeks—so I guess I do like the hitting people part.
It’s kind of intense. Do you ever say, “I’d rather be at home watching TV”? Yeah. I was lying in bed one night, and I was like, “I’m going to all these practices, and I’m going to all these events, and you know what, maybe I just want to go to work and come home and be Homebody Girl. Maybe I want to be boring again ... nah, I don’t want to be boring again.”
And the tattoos? Are they a requirement? No, I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s that if you’re OK with the pain of getting tattoos, you’re OK with the pain of getting hit. It’s, like, “I can do what I want to do. I’m a girl and I can hit people ... on the track.”
Derby Dates
AARG's three teams—the M-80s, Stunt Devils and Smashinistas—will skate in seven bouts this season at the All American Sports Mall
- May 26: M-80s vs. Stunt Devils
- June 23: Stunt Devils vs. Smashinistas
- July 21: Smashinistas vs. M-80s
- August 11: M-80s vs. Stunt Devils
- September 8: Stunt Devils vs. Smashinistas
- October 27: Smashinistas vs. M-80s
- November 24: Championship
