For the first time in years, roller derby is back in the mainstream. Whip It, Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, tells the story of a teenage beauty pageant contestant (Juno’s Ellen Page) who casts aside glitz and glamour for the rough-and-tumble world of roller derby. While the coming-of-age girl-power flick might not be tearing up the box office (it earned only about $4.9 million in its opening weekend), the movie, like the sport itself, will likely find an audience.
But Whip It is hardly the first sign of a roller derby resurgence in the United States. Director Mark Woolen’s Jam—which hit DVD earlier this year—followed former roller derby star and founder of the American Roller Derby League (ARDL), Tim Patten, for seven years in the late-1990s through the early 2000s as he and a group of veteran skaters attempted to pull the sport from obscurity. The film won a Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at South By Southwest, the Austin-based film and music festival.
In the film, Patten candidly shares his experiences living with HIV in front of the cameras, which only intensify when his partner, David, dies from AIDS-related illness.
Today, the 57-year-old—who was diagnosed in 1983—spends much of his time recruiting skaters and running the website for the Bay City Bombers, the league’s heart and soul. He’s also a writer, having self-published a novel called Roller Babes: The Story of the Roller Derby Queen under the pen name D.M. Bordner.
POZ caught up with Patten to discuss Jam, the future of roller derby and the role the sport has played in keeping him happy and healthy.
POZ: How would you explain the sport of roller derby to someone who’s never heard of it?
Tim Patten: Roller derby is hot chicks on roller skates knocking the crap out of each other!
Well, that’s as good an explanation as I could ask for. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] I think for somebody that doesn’t know anything about it, the more you explain it the more confusing it is. But you’re definitely going to see a lot of Jerry Springer catfights.
I’m in! What would you say—you may have just nailed it, in this case—but what would you say is the primary appeal of the sport for fans as well as the skaters?
Well, for the players, it’s the love of roller-skating. But to the fans, there is this deep, cultural curiosity about the battle of the sexes. Like, can women honestly do everything that men can? So with roller derby, the women skate a 10-minute period and then the men skate a 10-minute period and on and on and on until the end of the game and the points are accumulated. The audiences get to see—right before their eyes—women doing the same thing with the same rules as men.
In the film, you say that roller derby has kept you going through the years. Where does that drive come from?
I think everybody has this. And I think it’s something deep inside, somewhere in your gut. It’s the will to live, the desire to survive. But I don’t know if everybody taps into it. I think that HIV, for me, forced me to look for this. Back in those days I thought, “If I’m going to die, why should I live?” I just have things that I want to do, and I have certain things that I have a passion around. I wanted to do this roller derby stuff, I wanted to write a novel about it, things like that.
So instead of getting depressed, I decided that I would just deal with these really deep…they’re almost dreams that we had as children. Simple dreams. And try to make them come true.
When did you start skating?
I started in 1973. I was a speed skater. Like I said before, players love to roller skate. I was one of those geeky kids that went to the roller rink. And I was good at it. It felt good, it was a rush. And that grew to competitive flat-track speed skating, and then that opened the door to, “Okay, the next thing, I guess, is to be in the show!”
And at the time, according to the film, televised roller derby was pulling in more viewers than Major League Baseball.
Oh yeah. It was hugely popular on television. You know, TV was so different back then. It wasn’t owned by big companies and controlled so much. All these independent stations would run roller derby all weekend, and I would watch four or five of them every Saturday and Sunday.
Do you see roller derby coming back?
It certainly is growing, but I’m not a fan of thinking that things can come back the way they were. But it can move forward, and it can change. And it is pretty big right now. The Bombers draw thousands of people to every event now. And there’s a lot of interest in roller derby. I think it is primed for television if someone is willing to add a few things to it to commercialize it.
You say in the film that if you let go of pursuing your passion, “the disease will take over.” Would you say that staying passionate about something—no matter what it is—is an important part of overcoming any illness?
Yeah I do. I think it’s one of life’s great secrets. And I learned this when I was in college many decades ago. And I read this goofy little book. It said that if you are doing something you dislike doing, you’ll physically break down. But if you do what you like to do, your body will never break down. And for whatever reason, I held on to that idea. And I’ve been fortunate. I’ve always been able to find passion in everything I’ve done. For me, it’s one of the things that’s kept me alive. No doubt.
And in the film, you had to cancel the team’s 2000 season to focus on your own health. What was it like to be away from the sport for a whole year?
Well, something that I didn’t allow access to happened in there, and that was that I got very sick and was put on hospice. And my world became very small. When your health has problems, that’s your whole world. And I just went to nine different specialists and then we came up with this kind of unusual infusion that I had to pay for out of pocket, because the drug companies wouldn’t pay for it. It was thousands of dollars, and it worked.
But this all happened during the period when I had to take a break. And it was hell. I turned to trying to write a little bit every day to try to tap into that passion, but it was hard for me to do that. If I could write an hour a day I was lucky.
In the film, your partner David’s health begins to suffer and he passes away. What was it like going through that in front of cameras?
This is kind of a touchy part. They have a crew of seven people, several cameramen, lights, a portable light tent, the clapper guy and of course the director. And they’re all in your flat. So I had to figure out if I wanted them in this part of my life. Because this is really private. It was probably the most devastating time of my life. And I declined a lot of visits. Then one weekend, I allowed them access right after David passed away. And I wasn’t even shaving or anything. I was just hanging out in bed trying to figure out, What’s the meaning of life? What’s the meaning of all of this?
But I got numb to it. I thought, “Eh, whatever. Come on over!”
And looking back, are you happy that you were able to include that in the film?
I am now. There were other things that happened during filming. I had very bad hospital visits and side effects. They wanted to have access to some of that and the doctors had agreed, and then, again, I got so sick that I couldn’t call them and say “Hey, come on up! I’m really sick!”
I wish some more of that was captured. Because I don’t think that’s the path for HIV-positive people now. I was suffering from a lot of medication side effects. But the meds are so much better now. So yeah, I wish more of that was caught.
There have been quite a few roller derby films in the past. Raquel Welch in Kansas City Bomber immediately comes to mind. Which is your favorite?
It’s gotta be Jam! [Woolen and his crew], when I met them, I thought they were young and really bright guys and they wanted to do a documentary. But the documentary looks a lot like a [feature film]. All unscripted.
You played a small role in the Whip It production. Tell me a little bit about that.
The producers contacted the Bombers website—which is me—and the sound people wanted raw track sounds, so we had the rink set up in San Francisco, we were training, and they came in and recorded track sounds. The rumbling, people falling, all that. And those sounds were used to sweeten the movie here and there.
And how involved are you with the team today?
I’m not directly involved. I never go to the games, but I do look for new skaters and forward them to the training people. I just got contacted by another TV show last week. I love it, but boy is it an emotional drain. So I can’t go there.
Plus, I have a lot of memories of friends that I skated with who are passed away now. When everybody was dying from AIDS, somebody was dying every week. And I think I just need to keep distance. But I do love being involved in the business aspects of it. I think I’ll be involved for the rest of my life in some form.
Watch the trailer for Jam below.
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Previous Comments:
comments 1 - 2 (of 2 total)
George Maris, Charlottesville VA, 2009-10-30 10:27:20
what a positive way to deal with an emotional issue(gut wrenching)Being in the forefront of HIV/AIDS, I can see how this can escalate into a growing and beneficial cause.I love the courage that this comes from.
Loretta Little Iodine Behrens, Las Vegas, 2009-10-12 22:45:01
Im am a retired roller derby skater who in Tim Patterns book is the kid from the bronx new york, the tomboy as he has it .Tim has gone out of his way among many others to keep the histroy of the orginal roller derby alive.
Seeing Roller Gals taking on the name of the Derby, seems to be a great lead for there being so popular.
Now I would love to see them skate the derby as it was a game, with bank track and rules to be followered like any other sport.
Derby was a true sport
