num_pages: 211
description: ((from the dust jacket flaps)) Five Strides on the Banked Track is the incredible chronicle of the most acutely neglected and misunderstood entertainment in America—the Roller Derby. Part sport, past spectacle, part murderous put-on, the Roller Derby attracts an audience of well over twenty million per year in person, and who know how many million through television.This is the story of the fans' passion and of the flashing, whirling people who create it, the heroes like superstar Joanie Weston and "Bomber Great" Charlie O'Connell, the villains like flamboyant Ann Calvello, who appears with a different hair color every night — including red-white-and-blue polka dots.This is Roller Derby as it really happens, both on and off the track: the speed and violence and adulation of the arena — the one-night stands and Holiday Inns, Laundromats and greasy spoon diners, the loneliness and boredom of the road. Five Strides on the Banked Track examines the history, personalities, and idiosyncrasies of every facet of the Derby and of all those connected with the Derby: the promoters, the fans, the phantom "Commissioners," the eager trainees, but, most of all, the players, the hard-driving group of men and women who every game night abandon their personal shyness and nonviolence to slam each other around the track in glorious mayhem. And then quietly dismantle their own track and carry it, with their puppy dogs, to New Haven to Chicago or MOline, where they set it up again for the next night.Frank Deford, the author, is a senior editor of Sports Illustrated. Assigned by the magazine to do an article on the Derby, he soon became fascinated by what he saw, and Five Strides on the Banked Track is the result. Anayltic, perceptive, and offbeat, his book is the definitive work on the sport Variety called "cathartic, dramatically structured, fast-paced, and classic as a John Wayne movie" — the Roller Derby.
language: English
title: Five Strides on the Banked Track: The Life and Times of the Roller Derby
publisher: Sport Illustrated Books; Little, Brown & Company