BEEN KEEPING UP WITH THE GOTHAM GIRLS?

Queens Of Pain Take It To The Wire

The Queens of Pain, reigning champions of the Gotham Girls Roller Derby league, will defend their title next month against either the Brooklyn Bombshells or the Manhattan Mayhem.

Star jammer Suzy Hotrod scored five points in the closing minutes to cap Queens’ comeback over the Bronx Gridlock. Meanwhile, recent addition Cheapskate showed the potential to be a valuable complementary scorer, racking up 34 points on 11 jams for her team.

Bronx was paced by Bonnie Thunders, who led all jammers with 43 points on 18 jams.

Queens’ next opponent will be decided by a Nov. 3 bout at the same venue where Oct. 13th’s took place: The Hunter College Sportsplex in Manhattan. In the league’s first action at Lexington Ave. and 68^th St., the Gotham Girls packed the stands with roughly 600 excited spectators, comparable to the season’s matches at Long Island University.

Ana Bollocks, a Queens of Pain blocker who served as producer, said that the league approached Hunter College prior to the season, right after losing the Skate Key in Bronx as a home. “When we lost our original rink, we went on an all-out search,” she said. “It didn’t work out here at first, so we skated at LIU.”

She said that a permanent venue and practice setting for the skaters are both still a ways away, and the next two games will get split between the schools. “We will still be at LIU in the future,” Bollocks said. “The staff at [here] wants to see how this goes first.”

Bollocks could not say if the rough-and-tumble, at-times dirty play exhibited by the Gotham Girls, who have been known to hip and shoulder-check one another into spectators lined up beside the rink, would necessarily jibe with Hunter College’s tradition of female empowerment.

But longtime fan Jimmy O’Connor, who commuted in from Brooklyn, said those kinds of unexpected thrills are exactly what make the league so appealing. “The first time [I saw] Queens and Bronx, a skater landed right on top of me,” he said. “It was fun. It’s cheap, fun, and takes you out of your everyday life.”

While skaters from neither team went flying into O’Connor this time around, the Queens of Pain did come out aggressive, and led by as much as ten shortly before the half. Cheapskate had 20 points by herself, the most thrilling when she sliced through a staunch Bronx defense, including their jammer Pop Rox, on her way to five points.

Meanwhile, Suzy Hotrod racked up 12, but Bronx stalwart Bonnie Thunders outscored her 4-0 in the last jam of the half to close the deficit to 42-36.

During the second half, foul trouble for Queens and shrewd strategizing for Bronx helped turn the game in the other direction. The Gridlock shifted Blissy Sadistic to jammer, who provided a quick spark, literally, scoring seven points on a single jam to whittle the Queens lead to three.

Thunders added three more points in the next jam, while the Gridlock’s defense began to live up to their name. Then Sadistic struck again, fending off the Queens of Pain’s Joey Hardcore for seven more points, tying the score. She would finish with an impressive 14 points on three jams.

As for Thunders, she played jammer for two consecutive rounds in which several Queens skaters were in the penalty box. Capitalizing on the superior numbers, she racked up nine points while her team held their opponent scoreless, giving Bronx a six-point lead – their largest of the game.

Pop Rox nearly sealed the win for the Gridlock with smart play during the second-to-last jam. After the Queens of Pain’s Suzy Hotrod zoomed through the pack, and appeared to be in good position to score some points, Rox swept in and knocked her down. That allowed Thunders to catch up, forcing Hotrod to call off the jam rather than allow Bronx to score points.

But with seconds left in the last jam, Hotrod would get her revenge, skating past all five Gridlock skaters – including Thunders. She passed the latter with less than a second remaining on the game clock to give Queens the one-point win.

Queens blocker/jammer Medula Oblongata, who raced over to congratulate her teammate by the bench, which exploded right after the buzzer sounded, never doubted that the game had been in the right skater’s hands. “She knew [time was winding down],” Oblongata said of Hotrod. “And we knew she could do it.”

When asked to put the excitement of the final jam into words, Queens manager Bust’er Cheatin could barely speak. “I can’t answer that question right now,” he said, clearly on the brink of hyperventilating.

But his voice became steadier when asked about his team’s chances for winning the league championship, and the contributions of their latest jammer. “We’re going to get [team co-Captain] Rolletta Lynn back, and get a lot of people back,” Cheatin said. “We lost five players, and replaced them all with [Cheapskate]. She’s a solid scorer.”

The Queens of Pain defeated the Mayhem earlier in the season, a fact not lost on their manager. “We have no idea who we’re playing, [but] if it’s Manhattan, yeah, we just had a very solid win against Manhattan,” he said. “I like our chances.”