1960s and 1970s In 1960, after Roller Derby had settled into its new home in the
San Francisco Bay Area, former Roller Derby skater Herb Roberts founded the Los Angeles-based National Skating Derby, Inc., and its flagship Los Angeles Thunderbirds team. Some former Roller Derby stars found new fame in the Roller Games, and a handful of skaters simply went back and forth between the two organizations. After 1968, however, the Roller Derby to Roller Games defections were quite few; instead, a handful of Roller Games skaters returned to their roots and began skating for the Derby again. On September 15, 1972, an interleague match between the Los Angeles Thunderbirds of Roller Games (National Skating Derby) and the Midwest Pioneers of Roller Derby (International Roller Derby League) set a roller derby attendance record of 50,118 at
Comiskey Park in
Chicago. The final score of the game was Pioneers 82, T-Birds 79. In 1973, Jerry Seltzer shut down Roller Derby and sold the promotional rights to Bill Griffiths, who immediately disbanded Roller Derby's IRDL and his own NRL, but recruited some of IRDL's star skaters to skate in an NRL successor league, the International Skating Conference (ISC), which was to focus on the Los Angeles Thunderbirds. Teams in the ISC included the L.A. T-Birds, the Eastern Warriors, and several international teams: Team Canada, the Tokyo Bombers, and the Latin Libertadores. The league also featured the San Francisco Bay Bombers in certain games, in which the storylines were built around the Thunderbirds claiming the Bombers were infringing on their territory; the Bombers continued to skate in spite of this. (This incarnation of the Bombers was also unique in that three notable veterans,
Ann Calvello,
Joan Weston, and
Annis Jensen all skated on the same team. Jensen's daughter,
Barbara Baker, also skated for the Bombers.) In 1975, Griffiths shut down Roller Games operations in the face of dwindling popularity, which some attributed to the organization's increasing emphasis on theatrics and entertainment. The organization remained dormant for the rest of the 1990s, although the six teams from
RollerGames still performed for the public in the Super Roller Dome with the same rules. In 2003, former Roller Games skater Lou Sanchez used the T'Birds name in a one-off match,
National Roller Derby League. As of December 2004, the Bob Sedillo-owned Roller Games International (RGI) league still operates a single team, the Los Angeles Thunderbirds (T-Birds). A match between the ARSD's San Francisco Bay Bombers and RGI's Los Angeles Thunderbirds (T-Birds) took place on July 29, 2006 at
Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. The Bay Bombers defeated the T-Birds 81-79. The T-Birds' last home was at the Pomona Fairplex. Several games were skated there in 2007 and 2008. Promotions ceased once trademark owner Bill Griffiths sued Sedillo's Pegasus Media Group. Bob Sedillo died in December 2009. ==See also==