Fight Club

Slice blows a raspberry and shakes her head. "Yeah," she says. "But that was many moons ago."

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THE DC ROLLERGIRLS WERE FOUNDED IN 2006 by Ginger Park, Shannon Flowers and Katelyn Coram, three women who had each been looking for a way to bring roller derby to the District and who met each other through online message boards. The three posted ads on Craigslist and MySpace, put up fliers on local campuses and held their first recruiting party at the D.C. nightclub the Black Cat in January 2006.

The current grass-roots incarnation of roller derby has come a long way from its origins. The ancestor of today's game was created by businessman Leo Seltzer in 1935 as a variation on walkathons and dance marathons -- cheap, long-winded live events popular with small-town audiences. Seltzer, whose productions included ice-sitting contests and novelty weddings (like one in which the bride was dressed in cellophane), took his Transcontinental Roller Derby on a series of long events along Route 66. Men and women -- all wearing tight satin short-shorts and leggings -- alternated stints on a flat track, averaging 110 miles a day, seven days a week; the winner was the first couple to skate 57,000 laps.

Over time, what began as a novelty of endurance evolved into something more closely resembling a sport, as Seltzer adjusted his game to please his crowds. Skaters began lapping each other to score points; the cross-country format, in which teams essentially played one long game from coast to coast, was abandoned in favor of individual, stand-alone bouts. Seltzer implemented a banked track to increase skater speed (and on-track dramatics). According to Keith Coppage, author of Roller Derby to RollerJam, the modern game, with its formalized violence, was born during a bout in Miami in 1937, when the larger, slower skaters began throwing elbows and body-checking the smaller, more nimble skaters. With spectators in a frenzy, Seltzer called off the referees and let his skaters battle it out.

For the next 40 years, the popularity of the game ebbed and flowed, its fortunes determined in large part by its relationship to network television. After the game suffered a slump in the 1950s, Seltzer's son Jerry revived it with the Bay Bombers, a San Francisco-based team that led sold-out tours nationwide and sparked a craze that lasted until the franchise folded in 1973.

Though derby was coed from its earliest days, women were always the most popular skaters. Management played up audience favorites such as Josephine "Ma" Bogash, a diabetic in her mid-40s who took up the sport with her son in the 1930s, and later turned the sport's comelier stars, such as Joan Weston and the flashy Ann Calvello, into celebrities. On television, female skaters drew a loyal fan base of both sexes. "Yelling for her favorites," noted a team program from a 1950 bout, "gripped by the tension of a close game, the woman, whether housewife or working girl, forgets the numerous petty problems that bedevil her daily and vents her anger on one or more of the skaters."

After the Seltzers' business folded, there were a few attempts to capitalize on the game's entertainment value. There was a musical, "Roller Derby!" in 1985, the (partly scripted) TV series "RollerJam," from 1999 to 2001, and, most recently, "Rollergirls," a 2006 reality show. But for the most part, roller derby lay dormant. It never caught on as a neighborhood game. No one tried to clean it up for school leagues or intramural teams.

And then, in 2001, a man named Dan Policarpo appeared on the music scene in Austin and started distributing fliers around town, looking for roller skaters. "I was living in a car and going to work," he said in director Bob Ray's roller derby documentary "Hell on Wheels," "and at night I would hit the streets and start talking to people." In the film, which opened this year, Policarpo describes his vision for the league -- "a crazy circus with these clowns . . . stabbing each other, bears on fire on unicycles" -- and his plan for procuring skates in a scheme he calls "pretty illegal."

At Policarpo's first meeting, 50 women showed up, eager to skate. But the skaters' vision soon began to diverge from Policarpo's, and he didn't stick around long enough to see the enterprise to fruition. Still, part of his vision, at least, had taken hold.

"We didn't know the rules," says April Ritzenthaler, one of the founders of the Lonestar Rollergirls, a Texas league. "And no one had even seen a full game," but the women had four captains and a willing constituency, and they ended up running it themselves. "We just liked it because it was violent and fast," she says.

Austin's skaters held a bout at South by Southwest, a giant music festival, and were soon receiving national media attention. The sport's tough, sexy aesthetic and do-it-yourself attitude struck a chord among women in their 20s and 30s. (Although there are men's leagues, all-female teams have dominated the sport in this latest resurgence.) For a sport that is evolving and growing, the Internet is its natural home. In the last few years, leagues have sprung up around the country, a word-of-mouth revival assisted by a legion of MySpace and Facebook pages dedicated to the movement.

For all the game's unruliness, there are plenty of rules. The pack is made up of four skaters from each team, who skate counterclockwise around the track. The jammers, one from each team, start a few seconds later, and attempt to skate through the pack to score points. Skaters in the pack act as both offense and defense, blocking the opposing team's jammer and helping their own get through. Jammers score a point for each skater they pass after their initial pass through the pack. Each scoring session is called a jam; jams last two minutes, or until the jammer in the lead calls it off for tactical reasons. Teams skate as many jams as will fit into a 20- or 30-minute period. Bouts are usually three 20-minute periods or two 30-minute periods.