Samantha Zacks, AKA "Barbie Biturate," left, collides with Charlotte Thomas-Davidson, AKA "F’Shizzy Borden," in a match in Providence in May.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

PROVIDENCE –– Gliding into the rink in ripped fishnet stockings and black veils, members of the Mob Squad roller derby team tossed carnations at a homemade tombstone for their opponents, the Old Money Honeys. The theatrics are contrived –– the women on both teams practice together and are friendly –– but the bout that follows is real: shoulder-to-shoulder hits send skaters down, wheels up, to the concrete.

The crowd of about 400 at the Bank of America skating rink on a Friday night in late May oohs at the hardest hits. The Mob Squad captain, nicknamed “Bunnicula,” is carried off the track with a leg injury. Roller derby has rules –– it is more than just athletic women in short skirts smashing together at high speeds, though that is a draw.

The all-women Providence Roller Derby league, established in 2004, now has about 50 skaters, competing through the summer. Most are too young to appreciate Roller Derby as nostalgia –– 1970s hairstyles, cartoon-colored tights and the men and women of the San Francisco Bay Bombers battling all comers on the banked track, on television or at a sold-out venue near you.

For more than three decades, the blue-collar sport invented in 1935 by promoter Leo Seltzer sold out arenas around the country. In that prehistoric era before cable TV, the sport was syndicated on 120 television stations. TV viewership for roller derby in 1971 was estimated at 30 million.

Leo Seltzer’s son, Jerry, shut down the family business in the 1970s. Though a few spinoff leagues clung on through the ’80s and ’90s, it seemed that the sport’s popularity was past, until the rise of women’s flat track derby about seven years ago.

Providence Roller Derby belongs to the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, an organization representing 56 of some 275 leagues founded around the country since 2001, said an association spokeswoman. The underground sport is about to go mainstream: the association last month announced a partnership with a software company on a new video game “to bring flat track derby to life.” A roller derby movie directed by Drew Barrymore is also in production.

Fifty-year-old Gino DiCarlo, of Providence, recalls the first time he saw the original Roller Derby in person: Jan. 31, 1971, the Bay Bombers against the Northeast Braves in the Rhode Island Auditorium. He was 12.

“I walked into that auditorium, saw that huge expanse of track with the lights shining down on it,” he remembers. “It changed my life. It bit me. It bit me bad.”

The sport’s rebirth with all-women leagues may seem a natural fit for the fan base left behind when Jerry Seltzer closed down Roller Derby amid the energy crisis of 1973.

But the new generation of skaters can be dismissive of the original Roller Derby as less honest than today’s game. And some fans of the original –– who call themselves “purists”–– say the new version has little in common with the sport they came to love.

EVERYBODY HAS a nickname in women’s flat track.

Mob Squad skater Christina Johnson, from Richmond, is “Rhode Kill.” Prepping for practice at a recent night at the rink, she wrapped her feet in bright pink athletic tape. “This is for the blisters,” she said. Her toenails are gold. Tattoos run down her bicep. She is 38, and an animal behaviorist.

She had not skated for 25 years when she joined derby for the competition and to meet new friends. “I’m a little bit on the shy side and this pulls me right out of it,” she said.

Nearby, “Kid Ace,” also known as Mary Smith, a 22-year-old University of Rhode Island student, laced up her wheels.

“How’s your bruised [behind]?” Johnson asked.

“Every one of us has a hematoma on our [behind],” said Smith, slapping her own bruise.

Johnson has twice separated her shoulder at derby.

Word spread around practice that Bunnicula, also known as Rue Sakayama, who was carried off the track at the last bout, had popped a knee ligament.

A number of skaters cited the contact as their favorite part of the game.

“I love hitting,” said Johnson. “It was so not in my nature.”

Teammates talked her into being more physical on the track, and she’s now a member of the league’s travel squad –– the Riveters.

Christine Buhagiar, 35, is the Providence Roller Derby league coordinator. On the track, she’s “Burnin’ Helen.”

Buhagiar has never suffered a bad injury at derby. “Nope. I’ve given a couple.”

She started skating for the exercise, and now can’t go without it. Last year, her 36-year-old husband was paralyzed after suffering a life-threatening aortic dissection, she said. They have two daughters, ages 5 and 2. “I would have never made it” without her roller derby friends, she said. The sport “gives me something to focus on that’s not negative.”

And there have been times she really needed to smash into something.

CAPITALIZING ON the popularity of walkathons, Leo Seltzer decided in 1935: “let’s build a track and put the walkathon on roller skates,” said Leo’s son, Jerry, now 76 and living in California. Teams of men and women would skate for days on an imaginary race across the country, with a map that marked their progress as they wound around a track.

Fans liked it when slower teams tried to block faster skaters from lapping them. The rules evolved into a more structured game, where fast players, known as jammers, scored points by lapping members of the opposite team, who would try to block the opposing jammer. Seltzer’s sport broke ground by employing female skaters who alternated periods with the men.

“Roller Derby” became the name of the sport and of Seltzer’s business.

Skaters trained for a year before Seltzer would let them compete on the track, said Jerry Seltzer. The athleticism of the skaters is evident in films of the original Roller Derby, but so are the exaggerated falls and the hyped-up animosity among the skaters. “Roller Derby was not a staged event, but there was a lot of showmanship,” Jerry Seltzer said. “Was it wrestling? Never!”

Dismissed by some as low-brow entertainment, Roller Derby was one of the most popular spectator sports in the country in the 1940s and 1950s when fledgling TV networks were hungry for programming, said Gary Powers, of the Roller Derby Hall of Fame, based in New York City.

Loretta “Little Iodine” Behrens, now 76 and living in Las Vegas, skated Roller Derby from 1950 to 1959 and from 1961 until the late 1960s. “I was athletic when I was young, and I liked the excitement of a sport where women could express themselves,” even if “sportswriters would never accept the women.” When she started in 1950, Behrens made $50 every three weeks plus room and board.

Overexposure nearly killed Roller Derby, but the sport enjoyed a revival after Jerry Seltzer took over management from his father in 1959. “In the 1960s and ’70s, we sold out practically every arena in America,” Seltzer said.

But Seltzer faced competition from Roller Games, a rival league that offered a more over-the-top brand of the sport (“Wrestling on wheels,” says Behrens). With expenses going up, Jerry Seltzer called his skaters together in late 1973 and told them he was shutting down.

“The skaters always thought I had all kinds of money buried in the backyard, but in truth I was going broke,” Seltzer said. “1973 was the last act. The last act of authentic Roller Derby.”

Fans hung on. “We’re still talking about Roller Derby 35 years later,” said Powers.

DICARLO, OF Providence, owns thousands of pieces of Roller Derby memorabilia: pennants, original game jerseys, photographs, videotapes. His Mount Pleasant High School yearbook lists his lifetime ambition: Roller Derby skater. He trained for years, and was crushed when Jerry Seltzer shut down Roller Derby. In 1980, DiCarlo flew across the country to try out for a revived version of the Bay Bombers.

He eventually “made it” in roller derby, first as an administrator for the LA Thunderbirds, part of the Roller Games league that had competed with Roller Derby, and then as commissioner of Roller Games, from 1984 to 1989.

“If Roller Derby was the Boston Celtics, Roller Games was the Harlem Globetrotters,” DiCarlo says.

The original Roller Derby, he said, “had it all –– speed, the contact of football, the pace of hockey.

“Was it all on the up and up? Well, I can’t tell you that, but there are Roller Derby players who can’t walk today because of the injuries they sustained and that’s on the up and up.”

He speaks about a defunct sport with the passion of the most fanatical Patriots or Red Sox fan.

Which is why he can’t call the women’s flat track sport “Roller Derby.”

“It’s like the guy down at the local nightclub,” he said. “Just because he sings Sinatra songs doesn’t mean he’s Frank Sinatra. There’s only one Frank Sinatra and there’s only one Roller Derby.”

Powers, from the Hall of Fame, agrees “there’s a big difference between the original game and the all-girls version today,” such as the flat track, and what he believes is a lack of defensive play. “Many old-time skaters think they should call it something different. Rather than selling the sport, what are they selling? What are the short skirts about? The fishnets? The nicknames?”

Jerry Seltzer worries that skaters of “unequal ability” on the women’s flat track could lead to serious injuries, but believes the current version may have a chance of realizing his father’s dream of getting roller derby into the Olympics. “Roller derby now has more participants than it ever did,” he said. “I give it a yes.”

The skating was better in her day, Behrens says, and she could do without the racy costumes, but “I give the girls a lot of my admiration. They’re paying expenses on their own. They’re organizing. If I was 20 years old, I’d probably be right with them.”When to watch

There are two chances to catch the Providence Roller Derby skaters in action this month.

On Saturday, July 19, the Killah Beez will take on the New Hampshire Skate Free or Die team in a mini bout from 6 to 7 p.m. at the rink in Kennedy Plaza. Then on Friday, July 25, the Mob Squad will take on The Sakonnet River Roller Rats at 8 p.m. The Kennedy Plaza bout is being billed as Scars & Stripes.

For more information and to purchase tickets in advance, visit the Web site www.providencerollerderby.com

marsenau@projo.com