Three years ago, Michele and I were in China – Shanghai to be exact – on the weekend of the Bahrain Grand Prix1 wondering where to go to see the race. A week or two before, we had seen the Chinese Grand Prix in our hotel room near Wulingyuan National Park. Even though I am a Formula One nut, it was not a very satisfactory experience watching the race, alone in a hotel room, in Chinese. Michele suggested that we try a expat sports bar where the energy should be much higher and the broadcast in English. We ended up at the Big Bamboo – Your Favorite Sports Bar & Grill – and had a great time. As sort of a remembrance, I bought a hat which I proudly wore for about two years and eleven months when, somehow, I lost it.
About a week ago, I emailed Big Bamboo to get a replacement and they sent me not one, but two new Big Bamboo hats. Thank you very much! If you are ever in Shanghai drop by, I see that today the Big Bamboo is featuring the St. Louis Blues at San Jose Sharks (game 3) and the San Antonio Spurs at Golden State Warriors. I wish I was there.
We went to a Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby meet last Saturday night with almost no preconceived ideas. It was delightful.
I first heard about the revival of Roller Derby in an article titled Revolution on Eight Wheels by Diane “Lady Hulk” Williams – the Lady Hulk part is very important, it turns out – in which she talked about going to a match thinking it might be exploitation and falling in love with the sport and the team. After going to one game, it seems easy to do.
I am fascinated by the way our culture is changing – especially in regard to women and minorities – and I am fascinated by the way that change is reflected back into the culture by our public stories, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I know, technically, that Joss Whedon wrote Buffy so it could be called non-public, but Buffy ran for seven season because it resonated with society’s changing image of women. So going to a Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby match? game? roll-off? seemed right up my alley. It was in Oakland and we went with Courtney Gonzalez.
Courtney , Michele, and I met for dinner at a local pizzeria called Pizzaiolo – although calling Pizzaiolo a pizzeria is a little like calling a Bentley a car – and then went over to the Oakland Convention Center to see the B.A.D.’s – B.ay A.rea D.erby girls – All Star team, The Golden Girls, play the Austin Texecutioners _whose colors are black and blood – as part of a Roller Derby tournament. Dinner was slower than I expected and I was getting agitated that we would be too late but we ended up getting to the game just in time. I had expected that we would walk into a packed house and not even be able to see the track.
It turns out that Flat Track Women’s Roller derby is not packing in the crowds…yet. But it will. It has everything, sexily dressed women, real hard-driving athletic competition, high scoring, and a warm family outing sort of atmosphere. Oh! and it is very casual: for example, each player, of course, has a number, but the numbers have no rhyme or reason. The San Francisco numbers are 11, 101, 666, 1619,16, Ohh, 170c, and so on. And each player has a stage name? porn name? Some of my favorites were Astronaughty, Ivy Profane, Huck Sinn, and Aunti Christ on the San Francisco team and Lucille Brawl, The Killa Sal Monella, Belle Starr – her number is 1889, the year of Belle Starr’s death – and Vicious Van GoGo on the Austin team.
The persona of Women’s Roller Derby – flat track, atleast – is of tough, maybe even nasty, women. It is anything but. Maybe because the teams are owned by the players, which means women, or maybe it is for some other reason, but the atmosphere is nonthreatening. Very nonthreatening in a counter culture way. It is as if they pretended to be tough to hide their tender, vulnerable, welcoming selves. But the games are rough and tough. Women get knocked down, they get hurt, they get knocked out of the game.
Scoring is based on – very roughly – a jammer starting behind the scrum – for lack of a better name – fighting through the scrum, going around the track and catching up with the scrum, and then getting one point for each opposing player the jammer passes. Here are a few shots:
The Golden girls won by a landslide – the first time they have beaten the Austin Team.
This Nike ad, -directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of Amores Perros and Babel, among other movies – is really an amazing short film. It is so quick and so frenetic that it is hard to follow at first. It took several viewings and some Cliff Notes before I got the story line.
The players envision real-world consequences of their plays….after
sending a pass that gets intercepted by Ribery, Wayne Rooney stares
himself down in a mirror and throws a bottle at his reflection; the
stock market crashes in England; the papers diss Rooney; he grows a
beard and a gut and winds up cutting grass in the stadium; he lives in a
trailer under a billboard of Ribery. Back on the pitch, we see Rooney
shake off this hallucination, chase Ribery down and tackle him.
I am not a big soccer fan and, like pro-football, I think that the vignetted scenes with Wagnerian music and a deep base voice-over make it much more dynamic than actually watching a game. But the world cup is a big, big, deal; maybe bigger than the Olympics.
The other night, some friends came over for dinner and part of the conversation revolved around how our myths or stories no longer fit a new reality. Mankind – well, the USA and Russia for sure, and probably Britain, France, and China – have the ability to detonate enough nuclear weaponry to destroy mankind and yet we continue to act as if that were not the case..
I remember reading an article about two traditional Afghan villages getting in a Hatfield-McCoy fight sometime after the Afghans drove the, then, Soviets out of Afghanistan. The feud had been going on for many years in a cold war sort of way. To patch things up, the daughter of one family – let's say Delbar (meaning sweetheart)Durani – was married to the son of the other family – let's say Fariad (meaning outspoken) Mamadzai.
A couple of months later, Delbar did something that pissed Fariad off and he beat her. Now Delbar, who had perhaps been too coddled as a child, did not like being beat up. The second time Fariad beat her, she snuck away and returned to her village. This put the Duranis in a bind, they either had to take Delbar in or return her. If they returned her, she would probably continue to be beat up; if they took her in, then the Mamadzais would be dissed.
They took her in and the feud was renewed. But this time, both families had AK47s and rocket grenade launchers. This time, the fight was short and lethal. The majority of the men of both villages were simply wiped out. The rules hadn't changed, the stories they built their lives around hadn't changed but the equipment had. The old ways no longer fit the new reality.
So, I sit here watching the Olympics and thinking about how every contest is a zero sum game. This high ideal – this lofty gathering is for somebody to win – for some nation to win. And that means somebody – some other nation – has to lose. And I thought how much that reflected almost everything in our modern world.
Everything is about winning. I read recently that most people would prefer to make $100,000/year if everybody else was making $80,000/year compared to making $150,000/year with everybody else making $200,000/year. Think about it: we would prefer to make less – be able to buy less – if it was more than the next guy.
And that led me to thinking about how much different it would be if the Olympics were about cooperation rather than conflict. What if cooperation were the ideal. What if everybody doing better were the ideal.
How about a bobsled contest in which a gold medal would only be awarded if the average time of all the competitors were were no more than 2% higher than the fastest competitor. In other words, to win a gold medal, the fastest guys would have to make sure the slowest guys went faster. How would that change our story of what a winner is?
