The Rose City Rollers, Portland's all-female roller-derby troupe, begins its 2016 season on Saturday. The skaters, with their showy tats and playful nicknames (Va Va Boom, Push La Tush, etc.), offer fun, rugged entertainment for anyone who likes to watch determined competitors bang into one another.

Derby traditionalists, however, remain a little conflicted about their sport's revival. "You could say that the only way you can compare the derby of the '60s to that practiced... these days is that the competitors all wore skates," wrote the roller-derby aficionados site Derby Life in 2014.

For starters, old-school roller derby -- that is, Portland entrepreneur Leo Seltzer's barnstorming competition, known simply as "the Derby" -- happened on a banked track, allowing the skaters to launch themselves like missiles. Today's version takes place on a flat track. This means the showdowns can be staged cheaply almost anywhere that has a hard floor, but it also cuts down on the athleticism on display.

Then there's the fact that, unlike the current hobbyist leagues, the original roller derby was a professional outfit, one of the very few money-making options for serious women athletes before the 1972 federal anti-discrimination law Title IX slowly changed the sports landscape.

"All I want out of it," legendary roller-derby star Joanie Weston told sportswriter Frank Deford, "is to make good money, get out of it in one piece, and years from now when I say I was in the Derby I want people still to know what it is."

Deford's 1969 Sports Illustrated article about roller derby, later expanded into the book "Five Strides on the Banked Track," has helped guarantee that people still know what roller derby is. Deford's work also fueled the sport's popularity by making clear that Weston, Ann Calvello and other roller-derby stars were talented athletes, not rolling stage performers.

"Ann Calvello was a terrific athlete; that was apparent," Deford said in a recent interview. "You couldn't do that stuff unless you had athletic ability." He said Weston, known as "Golden Girl," was even better.

Roller derby back then featured men as well as women. Charlie O'Connell, who died last March at 79, led the dominant San Francisco Bay Bombers team throughout the 1960s and '70s. He was known as "Mr. Roller Derby." He was a natural athlete, good at everything from football to golf. But he liked to brawl (watch the video below), and so he chose roller derby. "He is to the Derby what DiMaggio was to baseball," film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1972. The San Francisco Chronicle said the 6'1", 200-lbs. O'Connell "was built like a refrigerator with a head and did not take kindly to opponents who had the foolish notion of slipping past him." (A team scores in roller derby when its "jammer" manages to get in front of the opposing squad's wall of skaters.)

The Derby, born during the Great Depression, epitomized blue-collar, industrial-age America: it was action-packed, gritty, dramatic, always violent, sometimes silly.

That made it perfect for Portland in its pre-hipster years. The Derby's biggest teams and stars rolled through the city almost every year, bringing out fans who watched it on TV and relished seeing the sport's high-speed collisions up close. Roller derby made its first appearance in the Rose City in 1938, with The Oregonian breathlessly calling it "the fastest of all sustained speed tests." The paper pointed out that the best part of the new sport was the "jam" because that's where you get "thrills, spills and pile-ups" like in no other athletic event.

"If the crowds don't react it lets you down -- lots of skating depends on the crowds," Carolyn Moreland told The Oregonian more than 30 years later, when her New York Chiefs came to Memorial Coliseum in 1973. Under a photo of a skater -- perhaps Moreland -- flying out-of-control over the railing and into the stands, a caption in the paper reads: "Unwavering Love -- The skater and fan exist for a few moments in a world of unquestionable excitement."

Derby founder Leo Seltzer gave it an even harder sell than that. It was almost a "sexual experience," especially for women, he suggested in interviews. He liked to tell of a CEO's wife, wracked by the tension of the high-wire corporate life, getting a good night's rest for the first time in years only after taking in a Derby tilt. "Rich woman, poor woman, they get rid of their frustrations," he said. (Check out the photo gallery above of roller derby during its heyday.)

The Derby reached unparalleled heights in the early '70s, packing not just Portland's Memorial Coliseum but also high-profile national venues like New York's Madison Square Garden and San Francisco's Cow Palace. In 1971, Seltzer, a Portland boy who graduated from Lincoln High, came back to his home town to talk about the Derby becoming a "countrywide league" like the National Basketball Association and other major sports. He wanted a Northwest franchise that would be the home team for Seattle, Portland, Tacoma, Vancouver and Spokane.

"Years ago I learned that people of an area will always support (a regional team) against a rival area, and that support is much stronger than city representation because there's no city-against-city jealousy," he said. "A Seattle team, for example, would find Portland lukewarm in support, or a Portland team the same in Seattle. But have it represent the area and they'll all support it. I'm amazed that other sports haven't yet learned this truth."

But Seltzer's plan was the pride that went before the fall. The sudden arrival of stagflation, cable TV and other factors doomed the Derby before the decade was out.

Roller derby eventually returned, of course, re-forming in the early 2000s with women-only teams made up of lawyers, graphic designers and copywriters paying homage to their working-class predecessors. It's not the "countrywide" pro league Seltzer envisioned, but the independent city leagues like the Rose City Rollers continue to grow. And roller derby's history proves that you can never tell what will happen next.

-- Douglas Perry