Published by Touchstone (Simon & Schuster)
Cover photo by Michael Osborne.

Excerpt from
Rollergirl: Totally True Tales From the Track

PREFACE

Flat Track Derby is a dazzling carnival on wheels.

Hosted by sideshow barkers, it's a sport of speed skating pin-up girls and brutal body-checks, played out against a backdrop of headbanging rock. The spectacle drives fans into a hormone-and-beer induced frenzy.

Flat Track Derby is loosely based on the banked track roller derby that aired on late night TV in the seventies. But we took the way the old game was played--both on the track and behind the scenes -- and cut it up like a concert t-shirt.

We play on a Flat Track -- an oval, outlined in lights, on a standard skating rink floor. No rail separates us from our fans, and no barrier keeps us from playing anytime, anywhere.

Forget the league owners and promoters of the past who traded skaters like collectible dolls. The new leagues are DIY and skater-owned. We answer to ourselves, and skate or die by the credo "By the skaters, for the skaters." All the jobs required to manage our leagues -- from athletic training to event production, finance to marketing -- are done by the skaters. We work and skate for the fun and the glory, not a profit. In 2005, leagues across the U.S. formed the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) to govern our sport.

The game isn't the only thing we've re-invented. When we lace up our skates, we take on new names and alter egos, like Rice Rocket, Misty Meaner, Raquel Welts, and Triptease. All the better to kick an opponent's ass and not feel guilty in the morning.

There are thousands of Rollergirls across the country. In New York. Chicago. Huntsville. Detroit. Albuquerque. Seattle. Las Vegas. Denver. Raleigh. Kansas City. Dallas. Madison, and more. The Flat Track revolution started with my league, the Texas Rollergirls, in Austin in 2003. Just a year later, there were more than 40 leagues up and rolling all across the country. In February 2006, the first National Flat Track Derby Championship was held in Tucson, Arizona; since then, the tally of grassroots leagues has grown to more than 100. Suddenly, we’re all over TV and magazines and newspapers.

But behind the hype and the hysteria, the shiners and the smeared lipstick, the fishnets and the fury, are the girls. Beautiful, athletic, strong, smart, relentless Rollergirls. I’m going to introduce you to them, and tell you how it all started, deep in the heart of Texas.