One-Armed Candid

The revival of women’s roller derby in Kansas City began in March with a grudge match. In the opening minutes, a member of the Bionics rounded a corner too sharply, collided with one of the Dogfighting Dames and landed hard.

As the skater regained her feet, someone in the sellout crowd shouted, “Oh, my God, they tore that girl’s arm off!”

Actually, a school-bus accident tore 25-year-old Brooke Leavitt’s arm off when she was 3 years old, but she encourages more fanciful versions of how she lost the limb. It’s just part of the show-business side of the sport, which is ending a far more successful first season than its founders had expected. Part of the credit goes to Leavitt — not only one of the three original players in the local roller-derby revival but also its most aggressive and meanest skater.

“I eat rocks and kick puppies in my spare time,” she growls, playing up her role as “Dirty Britches,” the alter ego she created in derby tradition. But not everything is a put-on. Some of the women who have to face her and the sharp hits from her remaining elbow really do seem to hate her guts.

“She’s kind of a bitch, but the reason she’s a bitch is because she’s so passionate about it,” says skater Eanna Johnson. “She wants to be successful so bad. And she wants to win so bad that she gets a little carried away sometimes.”

Johnson, 21, boasts that her rivalry with Leavitt is more than just make-believe. Johnson and the rest of the Kansas City Roller Warriors get one more chance to throw their own elbows when the season ends this Saturday with a final match at the Winnwood Skate Center.

Leavitt says she became aware that a roller-derby revival was sweeping the country when she saw an Austin, Texas, team featured on Insomniac With Dave Attell last year. Seeing the action on television struck her like an elbow pad to the chin.

“I used to be a rink rat,” Leavitt says. “I loved to skate ever since I was young, and I’m too young to have seen the old games on TV on Saturday mornings.” She thought about moving to Austin to try out but then decided it would be better to start up a league at home.

Leavitt, Johnson and Mandy Durham began practicing in a parking lot before finding a coach, an indoor place to skate and a couple dozen recruits to play along, enough to form the two teams. But there were some glitches. Some women balked when Leavitt and Durham insisted on requiring health insurance and waivers to avoid lawsuits.

“The drama was essentially caused by a group of girls that were more into the tough image of derby than what it actually took to get it off the ground,” Durham tells the Pitch.

But the derby’s success in Kansas City since then has become undeniable. An exposition game sold out — that’s 800 tickets — and the league has donated profits to different charities, setting up bake-sale tables at hip-hop shows and plastering its logo across T-shirts and stickers since then.

Leavitt’s aggressive style is notorious. “My blocks are illegal a lot of the time,” she says with a smirk. “But everyone plays differently…. The refs can still call fouls and penalties, and if you get enough penalties, you’re out of the game.”

Johnson calls Leavitt “One Arm” to her face, but her barbs are tinged with respect. “If not for her, the league wouldn’t be what it is,” Johnson says. “She took care of all the administrative stuff, which is so boring, so retardedly not cool, and she did all of that. She made us an actual, functional company.”

After the league’s first three games, so many women wanted to join the league that the original teams were reshuffled and two new “mystery teams” unveiled: a squad in ninja outfits (the Silent Assassins) and a team of dead brides (the Dearly Departed). Leavitt sat out the two mystery-team matchups because of a sprained ankle earned not from skating but from dancing in a bar after a match. It wasn’t until she refereed a mystery-team game and saw the speed, the danger and the fights from the outside that the thought of injury scared her.

“I could injure my left arm. It’s terrifying, thinking about what I would do with no arms,” she says. “But I’m not thinking about that when I’m skating. I’m thinking about throwing myself in front of someone, checking them, getting in their way, making it impossible for them.”

Leavitt won’t skate in the final match, but she’ll referee (as “Judge Doody”). She’ll also be the halftime entertainment. A couple wanted to get married at a game, so Leavitt became an ordained minister through the Universal Life Church. She sent away for the Ministry-in-a-Box kit and will call herself the Rev. Val Sharkfin of the Church of Roller Derby.

And Leavitt will return to play with the All Star Team, a group of skaters who will come together to face out-of-state outfits sometime after August. Chicago and Tucson are already tentatively scheduled. A second season of the Kansas City Roller Warriors will begin in April 2006.

“It’s less like a sorority and more like a gang,” Johnson explains. “We’re a bunch of girls who spend way too much time together. That’s the sorority part. But the gang element is, we’d kill for each other. And sometimes stab each other just for fun.”

“The girls all look tough, but they’ve all got heart,” Leavitt says. “It’s really a sisterhood. It’s not like, well, I couldn’t imagine being in a knitting circle. Unless we get to poke each other with the needles.”