Big Mike: These Women’ll Kick Your Ass

Got an email photo from my pal Crystal the other day. Crystal works with me at The Book Case. She calls me Buddy. I call her Tough Guy. Every Monday through Wednesday, we spend some some five hours together lugging boxes of books, shelving them and trying to cajole customers to part with precious cash for same.

Sometimes, in the cramped quarters behind the checkout counter, we collide. When she’s in a rush or is otherwise determined to get where she’s going, she might give me a hip-check, the aftereffects of which make me feel as though I’ve been hit by a Bloomington Transit bus.

It’s not that Crystal is necessarily mean or unusually massive. It’s just her hobby that has turned her into the equivalent of a 14-ton vehicle.

Crystal has been working diligently for months trying to be drafted by a team in the Bleeding Heartland Roller Girls league.

Is it just me or is the sport of roller derby growing faster than the nose on Dick Cheney’s face? I know a good half dozen women who skate in women’s roller derby leagues. For instance, there’s Tyler, a property manager who sits near me on most days at Soma coffeehouse. Tyler’s built like a greyhound — not the bus but the actual lean, sinewy, speedy critter — and possesses the single-minded determination of Madonna. I call her Type-A Tyler — and she likes it! She’s a coach for the Bleeding Heartland Rollergirls. She has frequent meetings at Soma with starry-eyed young women who want to spin around the track with their sisters.

Type-A Tyler (whose track name is Kaka Kaliente) slaps that starry-eyed-ness out of them before they can finish telling her how eager they are to lace ‘em up. She paints a lurid picture of grueling workouts, heavy investments of time and energy, and hard-nosed demands by none other than their peerless leader — her. Bill Belichick looks like a lily compared to Kaka Kaliente.

Then there’s an old pal named Rachel. I met her some fifteen years ago when she started dating another old pal of mine. At the time, Rachel was a delicate little redhead who looked upon walking her little pooch named Otter as the apex of physical exertion. Rachel was pale, pleasingly plump and sensitive. She designed hats which might have been worn by art students and other such impractical souls. I never would have guessed that in a thousand lifetimes she’d become competitive and, well, hard.

But today, Rachel — still redheaded but no longer delicate nor plump — is a member of the Gotham Girls Roller Derby league. When she was selected for a team last fall she crowed about it on Facebook as if she’d been named the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

One of my dearest pals, Anna, has skated for the Windy City Rollers under the track name C.H.U.D. We worked together for a few years at Whole Foods Market in Evanston. Anna was the store artist (yes, WFM is one of the few non-advertising corporations in the nation that employ full-time artists) and maybe tipped the scales at a hundred pounds. Maybe. Once I was lolling in her office with my shoes off. She decided to put my shoes on — while she was still wearing hers. We got quite a kick of her as she plodded around in my gunboats, looking like a nine-year-old. That night at roller derby practice, she went out and knocked several women on their asses.

Anna’s sister Heide got her into the sport. Heide’s facebook page once once carried a photo of her showing off her latest ugly bruise. In the pic, Heide — helmeted, elbow-padded, and blancing smartly on one skate — pulls down her tights just enough to display a hideous purple/yellow/green ecchymosis that covers her left hip joint. There’s no pain registering on Heide’s face — only pride.

I spoke with a number of skaters for the Derby City Roller Girls during my two years in Louisville. That gang was so popular they even put out yearly calendars.

You can have Megan Fox or Siena Miller. They’re perfect — if perfect’s your thing. You can find a vacuous, Photoshopped ideal of 21st Century male masturbatory fantasy in any edition of FHM magazine or on “One Tree Hill.” A lot of American men watch NFL games and hope to catch a glimpse of barely-clad cheerleaders. Who am I to criticize their tastes? I only feel sorry for their wives and girlfriends who can never achieve that level of pre-cast, surgically-enhanced, genetic lottery-winning perfection. I also feel sorry for those guys — they’re never, ever, ever gonna get one of those mythical creatures in their beds.

Oh, all right — I really don’t feel sorry for them. They brought it on themselves, the idiots.

Anyway, I’ve liked every one of the roller derby women I’ve met. They have brains and drive. They actually talk about things. They don’t spend every moment of their day in hopeless pursuit of the perfect body so they can attract lunkheads. And guess what — they’re really attractive, too!

That is if your tastes run to the models on suicidegirls.com or godsgirls.com (both NSFW.)

Funny thing is, I’ve never met a roller girl yet who has expressed even the tiniest amount of admiration for, say, Sarah Palin — who, like them, is driven and determined. I suppose it’s because the Palins of this world play to that lunkhead image of attractiveness — be cute, giggle, wink and never, ever let people think you’ve got a brain.

I suspect most roller derby girls don’t place too high a priority on whether they’re attractive or not — and that’s the most attractive characteristic of all.

Here’s my tip — go out and catch a roller derby match soon. It ought to be the next big thing in sports. The mainstream media should gobble it up in a nanosecond what with the excitement, the backstories, the reality-TV-ness of it all. That is, if the lunkheads who run mainstream media had any brains.

I have brains. That’s why whenever I see Crystal heading my way with a full head of steam on, I give her a wide berth.