Rockin' The Rink

BY SPENCER CAMPBELL
BRISTOL HERALD COURIER

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. – Welcome to the roller derby.

That’s the team flying around the track, dressed in its typical punk wardrobe: fishnet stockings, mini-skirts, knee-high socks.

The practice facility feels like a child’s playhouse. The rink is painted sky-blue, the walls purple and arcade games chirp every few seconds.

In a few minutes, Michael Jackson’s “I am the One,” will begin blaring from the Johnson City Skate Center’s loudspeakers, followed shortly after by Wham’s “Wake me up before you go-go.”

Bonnie “Rock Nasty” Matera skates around the track, screaming, “Get her off the line anyway you want. Knock her off, drag her off … .”

After more than a year of practicing twice a week, suffering incalculable bruises, countless breaks and a litany of skid marks, the Little City Rollergirls, Johnson City’s all-female roller derby team, will officially compete for the first time on Nov. 9.

Standing in the middle of the track is the referee, Eli McEndarfer, complete in a black-and-white T-shirt. On his back is a paper sign identifying him as “Elvis Refley.”

“This cement floor isn’t very forgiving,” McEndarfer said. “It’ll leave a skid mark on you.”

McEndarfer’s words have barely escaped his lips before two ladies tangle skates and drop. Their bodies hit the cement rink, but very little skidding occurs.

Instead, they stick like hamburger meat thrown against, well, cement.

But the unforgiving part rings true. The two ailing skaters don’t even roll around in agony. They just lie there. Statues. One on her back, the other on her hands and knees.
McEndarfer doesn’t appear to be too concerned. He explains that the one on her back has already cracked her tailbone a few times. This is probably just another chip in an already cracked vase.

One of the fallen is back on her feet and skating in no time. But the other, the one McEndarfer misdiagnosed with a tailbone injury, has banged up her knee.

The bad news is levied by a teammate carrying her off the floor: “You’ll know if it’s an ACL when you put weight on it.”

She spends the rest of practice on a plastic chair, an ice pack covering the wounded knee. Practice continues.

Welcome to the roller derby.

The Derby
Roller derby has always had a complex relationship with reality.

It became a boom sport in the 1950s after TV brought it into the homes of Americans, and it came close to extinction in 1953 when TV overexposed it.

The 1950s incarnation of the derby was skated on a banked track, using men and women often on breaks from boxing or construction work.

The Derby has undergone several facelifts, always doing whatever it takes to be liked. In 1990, a syndicated TV program called Rock ‘N Roller Games included a figure-eight track, a “Wall of Death,” and an alligator pit.

TNN debuted a program called Roller Jam in 1999 that featured in-line skates and skin-tight uniforms. The show often dissolved into a mass scrum of beautiful women pulling one another’s hair.

The roller derby played by Little City is related, but not too closely, to these ancestors.

Little City skates on a flat track and the only man on their team is McEndarfer. There is no punching, grabbing, kicking, jabbing, or “blocking with the head” allowed.

It says something about the sport and the athletes who play it that, “blocking with the head,” must be specifically regulated.

In today’s derby, five girls from each team race around the track. One skater from each squad is the jammer, the point-scoring player. The jammers start each jam 20 feet behind the rest of the players.

After the jammer laps all the skaters once, she can begin racking up points with each opponent she passes. Of course, the opposite team attempts to impede her progress.
Jams last for two minutes or until the lead jammer calls it off. A bout is 60 minutes of unlimited jams.

“A lot of people think it’s the WWE-style wrestling,” Matera said, “and a lot of people are disappointed that it’s not. But once you get into that first period and realize girls are still getting hit really, really hard, they leave happy.”

‘A third butt cheek’
And, yes, girls still get hit really, really hard.

Jenni “NoliChuckya” Cocchia, one of Little City’s founders, once broke the ball joint area at the top of her leg during a bout. The bruise it created covered the entire top half of Cocchia’s thigh and grew as hard as a rock.

“It was like she had a third butt cheek,” Erin “Chick Norris” Fenley said. “It was probably one of the most pictured, text-messaged injuries of August.”

For the record, Cocchia finished the bout.

Everyone on the Little City roster seems to have a story about how they snapped, twisted, fractured or poked something of importance while skating.

In Terri “Toxic Materryal” Christian’s second practice, she tried to do a little too much. The skates gave out, her hands hit the blue cement, and her elbow broke in two.

Fenley sometimes plays for Knoxville’s Hard Knox Roller Girls. An opposing skater named, “TankHerA!!!” kept coming after her during one bout, hitting her in the same exact spot again and again. And TankHerA!!!, as Fenley puts it, “is a really big girl.”

“TankHerA!!!” had snapped one of her ribs. Fenley, a creative director at an advertising agency, worked the next few weeks with a dagger stabbing her every time she breathed.

But injuries aren’t so much feared at the derby as they are celebrated.

Toward the end of practice, one Little City skater passes close to McEndarfer, smiles wide beneath her black helmet, holds up her thumb and says, “I got my thumb run over. It feels great.”

On the derby Web site viaderby.com, a “Wall of Pain” has been created to showcase the sport’s most severe bruises, its hippest tattoos and its most gruesome wounds (bodies opened and insides showing readily acceptable here).

“At first, I thought I was going to die,” Fenley said. “Be maimed and destroyed. You’re crashing into people and people break bones and people get paralyzed. We enjoy the physical contact and those are the risks we’re going to take.”

The ninja
“I love being an athlete. I love to rock and roll. I like music, I like to be outrageous, I like people that are outrageous and weird and different and you find a lot of that.”

Suddenly, a teenager in a plastic skull mask, shimmering in fake blood, pops his bony face up right next to Matera’s.

She doesn’t blink.

“He scared me coming in,” she explained.

The mask is appropriate for the derby, because it appears that anyone involved with it wears one while they’re here. Or, more appropriately, they remove the one they wear in the real world.

The most noticeable manifestation of this alter ego is the use of nicknames. Anyone associated with roller derby must use a moniker when they’re skating. These names are registered and never duplicated.

In the real world, Terri Christian is a Johnson City cop who works the night shift. In roller derby, she is Toxic Materryal, a bruiser who’s going out for a few beers after practice.

Jennifer Boggs is a neuro-stroke nurse who wakes up at 4 a.m. to take the kids to grandma’s house, catches the bus to work and then goes to school after work.

At the Skate Center, she has a nickname that can’t be printed in the newspaper and partakes in something, “completely and totally different and opposite from your mundane, everyday life.”

Fenley said that, “Crowds adore roller derby girls,” and it’s easy to see why.

Most of the Little City team wears short mini-skirts and fishnet stockings. Knee-high socks grace the legs of every skater and some are more decorated than others. (For instance,
Matera’s socks are red-and-white striped and have skulls and crossbones logos on the calves.)

“It’s funny, like when people wear fishnets and then they get kind of bruised or a rash from their fishnets, then it leaves fishnet marks on their legs,” Fenley said.

Fenley doesn’t go for the fishnet-short skirt combo. It’s just not her. Instead, she wraps on little black gloves and is transformed into the star of “The Delta Force.”

“I’m kind of more ninja,” she says. “A little bit more of a Chuck Norris.”

Matera doesn’t believe in the alter-ego theory. Instead, she thinks “Rock Nasty” is the woman she was always meant to be.

As a broker at Coldwell Banker, Matera spends most of her day being “proper.” She’s learned to stifle the creature inside of her that loves to “rock and roll,” in order to succeed at work.

And then she’s on the track. And she’s feared. And she’s strong. And people say, “You can’t give Bonnie an inch, because she’ll take a mile.”

And two thoughts hypnotize her: “Just barrel through from the bottom to the top, and knock as many girls as I can. Like a wrecking ball,” and, “Destroy their jammer. Kill her. Kill the jammer. Kill their jammer.”

The bout
Matera was sitting at home carving pumpkins when Fenley sent her the program for the Nov. 9 bout.

Seeing her picture on the cover, the date etched in stone, her teammates’ pictures and their alter egos laid in black and white before the Tri-Cities, Matera couldn’t control herself.

She screamed until her throat hurt.

In the fall of 2007, a friend of Fenley’s from Asheville, N.C., told the future “Chick Norris” all about roller derby.

“That sounds perfect,” Fenley said. “Whatever it is, I want to do it. I don’t know what it is, but I want to do it.”

She went to a skating rink in Hendersonville and rented some skates. Surrounding her were pre-teens jam skating (dancing on skates). Fenley got more comfortable and more comfortable and began thinking, “Yeah, I can do this.”

She immediately fell and broke her tailbone.

When she met Cocchia through an acquaintance at an Unknown Hinson show (the singing vampire), she found a kindred spirit.

They created a MySpace page and gathered hundreds of friends supporting Johnson City roller derby. But when they had their first practice a few weeks later, only five people showed.

While their enthusiasm was bursting, the team didn’t know anything about roller derby. So practice was held during the rink’s regular business hours.

Fenley and her ‘mates spent two hours twice a week skating in circles with no real purpose, dodging dive-bombing kids and shouting to each other over the blaring music.

“It was awkward at first because no one out here really knew what they were doing,” Matera said. “Everybody was just trying to figure it out for themselves.”

When they finally got enough skaters, they began to rent the Skate Center on Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons. Team members went to Asheville and Knoxville to learn how to practice and play.

During the past year, several Little City girls have improved to the point of inclusion on the Hard Knox and Blue Ridge teams when those squads need bodies. Matera has become so intimidating that teams sometimes double- and triple-team her during bouts.

But they’re still short of skaters. A team needs 14 names to boast a full roster, and right now Little City’s stands at 11. So, they’re forced to absorb players from both Knoxville and Asheville just to field a team for the Nov. 9 match.

It’s not just ladies that the team needs for survival, either. Little City needs men to coach, referee and keep stats.

“What guy wouldn’t want to hang out with a bunch of women, two, three days a week,” Matera said, “and watch them fall and hit each other?

“It’s like ‘Rock of Love,’ but full contact.”

All of the team’s needs – its future plans, its survival – rest on the upcoming bout. Should roller derby rise, and become relevant in the unlikely hamlet of the Tri-Cities, the team can expand its alternate reality.

Should it fail – prove too dangerous, too violent, or, worse still, not violent enough – how long can the Little City core keep its lightly-attended practices afloat?

“This will be the No. 1 event that’s going to get the word out for us throughout the Tri-Cities,” Matera said. “We need more girls to keep the league going. That’s the bottom line.”

scampbell@bristolnews.com|(276) 645-2543