Bazooka Joe

Bazooka Joe jamming for the Dirty Dozen. Photo by Blocky Horror; September 16, 2017.

Bazooka Joe #49 (he/him/his) was the first ever men’s derby player as the cofounder of PVRD with Pink Panzer. He played for 11 seasons, from 2006 to 2017, and never missed a bout. Within PVRD, he went by his human name, Jake.

Read his full interview below!

Can you give a loose overview of your derby career?

Within PVRD I was the Co-Owner and Co-Chair of PVRD’s LLC version from the time it was founded in 2006 until the LLC was dissolved in 2014. When PVRD became a non-profit, I served on the Board as the Treasurer until I retired from derby in 2017.

I played for 11 seasons between 2006 and 2017. I didn’t miss a single bout during that time. According to my old PVRD records, I played in 68 public bouts.

I was a decent player. If I was the worst player on a team, that team was in great shape. If I was the best player, then that team wasn’t doing so hot. I loved playing offense. I liked to line up close to opposing players at the start of a jam and try to get them to pay attention to me. If I heard someone say “watch out for Jake¹/Bazooka Joe” I knew I was doing my job because they were already thinking about me instead of my jammer. I am barely medium-sized, so I had to play crafty and squirrelly instead of going for big hits.

I wasn’t the greatest jammer, but I was OK in a pinch. Towards the end of my career, when the Dirty Dozen was struggling I had to play jammer often. I did it, but I didn’t love it. I looked forward to blocking, but I stressed about jamming.

I hurt one of my knees early on and it would act up every so often. It was probably a case of minor to moderate ligament damage, though it was never officially diagnosed. I never broke anything serious, though my nose was shattered by an illegal hit at practice once.

Sarah and I founded the first derby club with a men’s team. I was the first male flat-track roller derby player, and the first male name on the old roller derby name registry. I lobbied to have PVRD included in the “First 100 Derby Teams” poster issued at Rollercon 2006, despite it originally being promoted as solely for women’s teams. I was invited to speak as a representative of men who play derby at Rollercon 2007. I spoke about how to grow the sport and work with the women’s teams at the first Men’s Derby Conference. I helped set up the Men’s Derby Coalition, and its successor the Men’s Roller Derby Association. I was a PVRD rep for MRDA for a few years.

Sarah and I are mentioned in 2 or 3 different books about roller derby. Some of my PVRD bout posters have been included in books compiling derby art. Along with other members of my team, I am featured in the documentary “This is How I Roll”. The roller derby Lego minifigure was made with my number as a thank-you from a friend who I helped start Hartford Area Roller Derby.

I got to play derby in at least 11 states. I played in front of audiences ranging from a couple dozen to over a thousand. At the peak of the Dirty Dozen we were ranked #2 in the world.

Early on we (the men) often had to take gigs as halftime shows or agree to set up/clean venues in exchange for the privilege of playing mixed scrimmages.

Do you remember how you first heard about derby?

Sarah and I had a friend […] who lived in Northampton. She and her boyfriend moved to Providence some time around 2002 or 2003. In 2004 they came to our annual Halloween party. The next morning we went out for breakfast and [she] told us that she had signed up to play roller derby with a team that was forming in Providence after seeing their info table at a craft fair. (Providence Roller Derby was the first team in New England – it was formed by someone who had played on the world’s 2nd flat-track derby team in Arizona and later moved to Providence for grad school)

We didn’t know much about roller derby in general, much less about the fledgling flat-track version that had just started up. In the summer of 2005 we went to Providence to see [her] play and we were hooked instantly. 

When did you decide you wanted to play?

We almost immediately decided we were going to try to bring derby to the Valley. At first I just figured I would be helping out, but it wasn’t long before I brought up that I would like to play too. Sarah and I decided that we would have a men’s team. That would have been sometime in late 2005.

Did you do much roller skating or any sports in your youth?

By the time we started PVRD I had only ever skated once – at a birthday party for the above-mentioned friend when she still lived in Northampton. I had never put on skates at any point in my childhood. I played organized soccer for a season when I was about 5 or 6, but I didn’t stick with it. After that I played informal team sports in my neighborhood, but never in any kind of organized club.

What issues did you face in establishing a men’s team?

We didn’t know if it would stick. We were faced with the uphill battle of not only putting a team together, but convincing men elsewhere that they also wanted to play. If no other teams formed, we would have nobody to play. Fortunately, that didn’t take long as others started having similar ideas.

We did get a moderate amount of backlash from the derby world when it started to come out that we had men playing. We received hate mail and sometimes got heckled at other clubs’ games. Some people we had previously been social with from the Boston and Providence teams cut ties with us. On online forums people from all over the country declared that we were ruining roller derby, stealing a movement, co-opting what belonged to women etc. In mixed scrimmages at Rollercon 2007 I got some dirty looks, snide comments and I definitely was made a target for a few overly enthusiastic hits.

While it is important to note that those things happened, it wasn’t universal. The majority of reactions ranged from indifference to mild curiosity to occasional support. The ratio improved as the years went by.

Do you think playing a “female-dominated” sport had any affect on you or the culture of the team?

I think it kept the level of toxic masculinity pretty low – on both the local and national levels. Either because the types of men that were OK getting into a sport widely thought of as a “women’s sport” were by nature not likely to be that way, or because they kept it under wraps. That side effect gradually lessened as men’s derby grew.

Many people today think of women’s and men’s derby as having somewhat different play styles. Did you notice that as it developed? Do you think that was different for the Dozen than for men’s teams that did less mixed practicing?

I think it took a few years for those differences to reveal themselves. When we started, the sport in general was in its infancy. There wasn’t a lot of high-level skill or strategy. Everyone, regardless of sex, was kind of figuring out how to play all at once. 

As things developed people started to notice that the men tended to have a different stance. Higher than the women. We were said to favor shoulder hits instead of hip hits. I think for the most part the strategies were basically the same on the men’s and women’s sides. Though it is worth noting that a men’s team from Florida was probably the first to really bring skating backwards into the game. They were mostly former jam skaters and brought a whole new style into derby. Before that nobody blocked facing backwards. 

For the first few years the Dozen had an advantage due to our built-in sparring partners. We had people to practice and scrimmage with. No other men’s teams were built as part of a larger club like PVRD. They would occasionally be able to do mixed scrimmages with local women’s teams, but we were practicing and scrimmaging consistently every single week.

Gradually our format came to be seen as a disadvantage in some circles. Some of our players began to feel that practicing with women was “holding them back” and after some unfortunate drama, we saw a large portion of our team leave for the team in Central Mass. I don’t really know what the current thinking is. I stand by the idea that we benefitted from being part of a larger club.

PVRD has a huge proportion of trans and/or non binary players at the moment. Do you know when that demographic shift happened? Was it that way from the beginning?

It was not that way at the beginning. I think it was at least 3 or 4 years into PVRD’s history before we had a trans member. Early on in derby, trans players were not common and the attitudes in the community were very different from what they are now.

I don’t remember exactly when the demographic shifted as you say, but it was probably somewhere around 2014 or 2015.

Do you think the future of sports is segregated by sex or gender?

That’s a difficult question at best. Even in roller derby, probably the most integrated sport on the planet, opinions range from one end of the spectrum to the other. Even as cultural attitudes towards these issues shift, I think integration in most sports is going to be a sensitive topic.

I think if I had to guess, I’d say that any sports where any kind of money or compensation is involved are going to continue to be segregated for the foreseeable future. I could be wrong though.

Responses from interview over email, April 23, 2021.