The obit was in the NYT on August 20 and written by Richard Sandomir. Since Mr. Sandomir is fairly new to the obits desk, my guess is the piece was written on deadline. Anyone who passes away at 98 is usually is sent off with an updated advance obit that is generally written by Robert McFadden, Margalit Fox, or Bruce Weber. No matter.
Gerry is a woman who started skating in the Roller Derby as far back as the late '30s. It occurred to me, and probably Mr. Sandomir, that there is likely a very huge segment of the population that knows nothing about Roller Derby. Maybe they've heard Jim Croce's song "Roller Derby Queen," but probably have no idea what the sport looked like. And it was sport, with teams comprised of males and females, skating separately, but on the same team nonetheless. In that sense, Roller Derby was waaaay ahead of any movement that exists today.
As with almost any obituary I read, I come away knowing something I didn't know before. In this case, there is a children's book that came out in 2014, "Roller Derby Rules" that depicts the on-track rivalry between Gerry Murray and Midge (Toughie) Brasuhn.
I was looking for a sport-themed children's book for my 8-year-old granddaughter who definitely shows signs of being competitive, if not somewhat aggressive, when as early as 4-years-old she told some older kid who wanted her to get off the swing that, "No, I was here first. Wait your turn." Schoolyard rules learned and applied early. Roller Derby with an elbow in the ribs might just be the sport she'll be looking for.
Turns out Gerry and Toughie were enemies on the track, but friends off the track, even though Toughie once sent Gerry flying into the rail giving her a serious leg injury. Roller Derby, much like hockey, permitted fighting, even encouraged it for crowd appeal. And like hockey, it was penalized. There were actually penalty boxes the skaters could be sent to, a three-side cardboard enclosure with a stool in the middle of the rink. Roller Derby might have been a bit hokey with a wrestling atmosphere, but the fans loved it.
Roller Derby came to Madison Square Garden in 1971, playing to a packed house that already knew everything about the sport from the broadcasts on Channel 9. I was there, and so was Robert Lipsyte, a NYT sports reporter who wrote a piece in the Sports of the Times column the Thursday after the Sunday afternoon event.
Lipsyte was one of my favorite sports writers. You never really knew what angle he was going to take. Perhaps he was a "Gonzo" journalist, but that doesn't matter. His take on Sunday's event had nothing to do about the teams that were competing, or even the score. There is only one skater's name mentioned, and it's Mike Gammon, who is mentioned as being as being Gerry' son, a then-current star who even skated with his mother on the same team when he was a teenager.
Bob spins a beautiful column that is more about the psyche of the crowd—"that screamed and jumped without stop"—than the sport. He theorizes that women (there were plenty in the crowd) love the sport because they can show aggression.
In an exchange with Jerry Seltzer, the son of the founder of Roller Derby, Leo, Bob adds his interpretation to the story that Jerry tells of the wife of an executive, suffering from tension and sleepless nights who was able to stop seeing her psychiatrist after watching the matches from her box seats for a year.
Bob: "Are you saying Roller Derby is a sexual experience for women?"
That was Lipsyte. Reading him was like playing golf in your bathroom: you never knew where the ball was going to come from.
Laugh, but Lipsyte was more right than sexist. Gerry Murray is quoted in her obit as admitting that as a female who was shy and athletic..."the kid wakes up and learns it's great to bounce, people off their feet and onto their heads." All the things you'd like to do in the subway, but would probably get arrested for. No wonder the Garden was filled that Sunday afternoon.
I of course saved Bob's piece. Re-reading it he tells of how the portable track was placed in the center, over the covered ice for Ranger games. The cold popped screws out of the assembly. But they were fixed, and the match proceeded.
Being a Rangers season ticket holder at the time and someone who just about got their mail at the Garden, it occurred to me how small the track looked, seemingly not much bigger than the center ice face-off circle.
A banked track is a doozy to skate on. I never got the opportunity, but an older fellow we played Roller hockey with, Tony (older: wife, two kids), who was a smooth skater in the schoolyard, told us of trying out for the Roller Derby and falling flat on his ass. He didn't make it. Couldn't handle the banked track. Armories were generally where matches and tryouts were held.
Gerry told the story of trying out on the banked track at a fairgrounds and didn't believe she could ever get good enough to compete on it, did, with encouragement, get good enough to become a star on the circuit.
In Flushing, there was neighbor across the street whose son I used to play with, who told me his mother tried out for the Roller Derby. She didn't make it, but she had the right name: Dorothy, known as Dottie. The Roller Derby was filled with women named "Dottie, Joanie, Shirley, Wanda, and like wrestling, they generally had nicknames.
The names I remember most are Charlie O'Connell, Joanie Weston and Ronnie Robinson, the son of the champion boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. Roller Derby was big in the '70s, even seeing Raquel Welch in a movie, Kansas City Bomber. Raquel is perfectly casted. Gerry Murray had red hair as well.
Serious people wrote about the sport, even as far back as 1958, where Richard Sandomir in Gerry's obit quotes from a piece by Gay Talese of the NYT describing Gerry:
"a female terror swishing around the track at 30 miles an hour, hipping her opponents, zigzagging recklessly, her red hair, tied in a ribbon, winging along behind her."
Frank Deford had a book in 1971, "Five Strides on the Banked Track." There was a documentary, "Derby." I saw that documentary in the theater. Charlie O'Connell stands in Madison Square Park (23rd Street, Flatiron district) and points to the pond's iron-fenced oval that he skated around as a kid. He tells us that is where it all started for him.
The pond is still there, and whenever I go by it I see the iron fence that is no longer there and think of the Roller Derby. I can see why someone would skate in circles around it. But the kids are in the fenced in playground, dedicated to a deceased female police officer who died in 9/11. Kids still play.
I remember how the match ended that Sunday, between the two teams whose names I can't remember—Bombers-something for sure—when the "home" team was behind and miraculously won when all the team members squirted through the "picket fence" defense, ducked down low on the inside, and scored the winning points. We win! We win!
The ending had all the makings of something that was fixed. Lipsyte writes:
[The press] were surprised to find themselves lifted out of our seats, as if by overhead magnets, in the closing moments of the Roller Derby.
But the crowd loved it. Robert Lipsyte was right.
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