Yesterday some friends of ours had to cancel a planned get-together
due to illness, and so with our suddenly and unexpectedly open
schedule we went to see a nearby roller derby game, our first one
ever. We had serendipitously learned that it was happening earlier
in the week and had been disappointed to realise that it clashed with
our pre-existing plans, so when the opportunity presented itself
to go after all, we seized it. We went in not really knowing what
to expect, only roughly familiarising ourselves with the rules the
night before, and ended up having a really good time. The sport is
not huge here, the league is small and games in our home town seem
to happen pretty infrequently, but we'll definitely try to attend
future ones.
Pretty much every aspect of the event had a very strong grass-roots,
low-budget, DIY, punky volunteer community kind of aesthetic. It
took place a school gymnasium, entry to the game was donation-based,
and there was a pay-what-you-can/want bake sale kind of event on
site as well to provide snacks. Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed
this aspect of things. What was however surprising to me, though,
was that I actually genuinely got caught up in the game, and found
myself invested in the outcome and excited to watch things unfold.
It would be difficult to overstate just how far out of my previous
experience this was. I am pretty darn confident that I could
count the total number of live sports events I have witnessed in my
adult life on my fingers and probably have an entire hand spare.
The only reason I'm qualifying that statement with "pretty darn
confident" and "probably" rather than making an absolutely certain
claim is that I'm well aware that organised/team sports of any
kind have always been just so entirely uninteresting to me that
it's extremely plausible I have completely and utterly forgotten
about some events that happenstance may have taken me to.
What I've written so far I guess might leave some of you wondering
why on Earth we went in the first place, generally not being sporty
types and also not even knowing the rules of the game before hand.
It wasn't a completely arbitrary decision; my wife can and does
enjoy both roller- and ice-skating, although she hasn't done a lot of
either in a very long time, but recently went to a local roller-disco
event with some friends. She is squarely alone in this. I tried
ice-skating as a teenager, was completely and utterly miserable
at it, have never tried it since and would presumably be even more
likely to hurt myself if I tried it again today. We do also enjoy
watching figure skating sometimes (I don't really personally think
of this as "watching sport" - okay, it's an athletic undertaking and
there's a scoring system, but somehow it doesn't really feel like
the same kind of thing as team sports, maybe because of the heavy
artistic component?). So there was some kind of prior grounds to
expect this might appeal.
The very minimal expectations I brought to the game were informed
by what little I'd absorbed via cultural osmosis from the American
incarnation of the sport. Apparently in Europe there is much less
of an emphasis on the costume side of things. Nobody was in tutus
or fishnets here, all the players were dressed quite practically
for sports. They did all have carefully chosen punny "derby names",
though, which I'm glad for because I do enjoy a good pun. They
rarely seemed to skew anywhere near as far into obscene territory
as seems to be in the norm in the US though, but then maybe those
kind of names are just over-reported and not ubiquitous even there?
Anyway, not much more to say. Lots of fun, will definitely do
it again. Continuing to enjoy experimenting with new ways to spend
time offline.
