Valorie Vega
District Court Judge
By Lisa Ferguson
Las Vegas Sun
You can almost hear the ching, ching of the metal wheels meeting the pavement as District Court Judge Valorie Vega describes her third pair of roller skates. She was 5 years old and, unlike the first two pairs of skates she wore as a toddler (plastic and metal-wheeled soles, which tightened onto her shoes), this pair was "really cool," she recalls, "because they had the boot actually (mounted) on the metal wheels and you laced them up." She wore them while zooming around the back yard patio of her childhood home in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. "I used to go out there and skate that thing in circles for hours, and then I'd skate the other way," Vega, 43, says. "I'd take little toys and different things and make an obstacle course, and I'd go in and around, and make up different games to play."
The skates were smaller, but similar to the pair Vega sported from 1980-86, when she skated for the championship-winning Los Angeles Thunderbirds Roller Derby team (also called the T-Birds). The gig helped fund her law school studies at the University of Southern California Law Center. Vega wore No. 7 on her green and yellow Thunderbird jersey and a flower in her hair, which became her trademark and earned her the nickname "Tokyo Rose." (Vega can be seen skating in some reruns of Thunderbirds games that air on ESPN Classic, Cox Cable Channel 70.) "It was just an idea," she says of donning the flower, about which fans said "it made it easier for them to watch me out on the track, to pick me out of the dog pile" of skaters. She favored white carnations "because I found it was kind of big and round and fluffy and it didn't wilt so quickly and the leaves didn't fly out as fast."
Vega was the co-ed team's "jammer," whose job was to score points. The highlight, she says, was when she'd "pass every single person on the other team and get a point for everybody that's up there. That's really fun." The style of Roller Derby that Vega skated, however, was a slightly different game than the sport's latest incarnation. The show "Rollerjam," which began airing earlier this year, is a hit for TNN (Cox Cable Channel 29). It features the same fast-paced skating, but seemingly more elbow-jabbing, body-slamming stunts -- by such teams as the Nevada Hot Dice, Florida Sundogs and Texas Rustlers -- than the old derby, which enjoyed its heyday in sports arenas and on television from the late 1950s through the early '70s. Having seen a couple of "Rollerjam" installments, Vega says, "I think the old Roller Derby was more of a sport."
She notes how one of the biggest changes that's occurred since she skated was the switch from quad (4-wheels) to in-line skates, which also affected the dynamics of the game. "You've only got one edge and you can't bank the track as severely because gravity will take you downhill; you have nothing to support yourself or catch yourself from falling, so they had to flatten the track out," thus reducing some of the skaters' speed, she explains. Also, she says, it seems the newfangled Roller Derby features "a lot more one-on-one fighting action than the old Roller Derby did." Still, she was "impressed with the level of skating" that she saw on "Rollerjam." "But they do seem to be doing more kind of wrestling stunt stuff in with the game."
Learning the ropes
During the early '80s, Vega often tuned in to Roller Derby games with her grandmother, who "loved" the sport. It was while watching a televised Thunderbirds game that she learned the team was recruiting skaters. "I thought, 'If I'm ever gonna be able to do it, I have to do it now because once I start practicing law and getting involved with a professional career, I'm not going to be able to.' " At the audition, "they put us through a series of different maneuvers and things on a flat track and then they took us one at a time up on a banked track. "I felt like Bambi on ice," she says, "where the legs are just going everywhere. I got up on that banked track and the skates just didn't work the same as they did on the flat track." After a couple of shaky laps, she adjusted. "I got going pretty good and they said, 'OK, you can come back.'"
An intense training program followed. For about six months before she was hired by the Thunderbirds (alongside her longtime friend, Nancy Grand), Vega skated free lance for other teams, including the Detroit Devils, called to fill in when other players were out sick or on leave. Roller Derby is "a lot harder than it looks," Vega says. "What you really don't get a sense of when you're watching it on TV is the pitch and the angle of the track and how awkward that is. "You also don't quite get a feel for the speed at which everybody's traveling," between 30- and 60-miles per hour, she estimates. "You get that more from being in the audience, live, watching it, because you can see from one end to the other of the track, whereas with TV, you're just seeing parts of it."
While in law school, Vega divided her time between her studies, her clerk's job at a Los Angeles law firm and practice sessions and games with the Thunderbirds. For the most part, it was an easy schedule to juggle, she says, except for one semester when an international law class interfered with mandatory Thunderbirds practice sessions. Given L.A.'s perpetual traffic congestion, Vega knew she'd never make it from school in time to be suited up and on the track when practice began. The solution: Wear her Thunderbirds uniform -- sans skates -- to class. "The first time I walked into that class and took a seat, this professor ... watched me walk through the door, and his eyes watched me travel all the way to my seat. He was looking at me like, 'Are you really a student in this class?' "The other students in the class, they already knew I (skated in Roller Derby) -- that was old hat to them, but not to him. He never could quite roll with it."
Vega traveled on the road to games with her textbooks in tow. On several occasions, though, her studies forced her to miss games in Japan, the Caribbean, Guam and at New York's Madison Square Garden. "I had to stay close to home because I really couldn't afford to miss my classes. I had my priorities," she says. Team owner Bill Griffiths, she says, was supportive of her academic pursuits. "He was almost like an uncle. He was very encouraging of my educational pursuits, and thought it was pretty neat that I had this athletic side and this educational side."
"I thought it was marvelous," Griffiths, who has owned the Thunderbirds for 40 years, recalls of Vega's studies. He explains that she lent credibility to the team and the sport. "You got so sick and tired of listening to people ... (who) used to deride (Roller Derby) as having all of the bozos and bimbos." Vega, he says, was one of many skaters responsible for turning that opinion around. "Because she was a very attractive young lady, with her mind set for serious things and not just skate talk all of the time. You could carry on a very uplifting conversation with her."
Tackling the competition
At 5 feet, 3 inches tall, Vega was for two years the most petite skater in the sport. She coupled that asset with the gymnastics training she had received in junior high, high school and college, and incorporated tumbling tricks into her moves on the oval track. "I was able to do some maneuvers that a larger, heavier person couldn't," she says. "Some of those folks, I could leapfrog and I could jump around them, and my safety was in my speed because I was faster than they were. They couldn't catch me after I embarrassed them, which was good." Usually.
Vega recalls a run-in with one marauder who "I had scored on a bunch of times during a game (and who) kind of got frustrated, came over and picked me up and threw me down on the cement. My manager went over and punched her in the nose and broke her nose." Most of Vega's derby injuries, however, occurred during practice sessions. "That really surprises people, but the trainings are very rigorous -- more rigorous than the games ever are," she says. "They put you through everything ... because they figure if they maximize all of your potential and you know what your limits are, then you can perform best on the track."
Often more entertaining than the Thunderbirds skaters' antics, though, were those of the team's fans. Vega recalls a couple of die-hards: One, named Josephine, was a season ticket-holder. "Everybody knew her: She was the rubber-chicken lady," she says with a chuckle. "When the other team would back off of a fight or something, she would hold that chicken by its feet and wave it around in the air and yell and scream." And cluck.
"Then we had this gal ... she looked like she could be anybody's grandma," Vega says. During games, she'd sit in an aisle seat, clutching her handbag. "When the opposing team would come out of the locker room and have to come down that aisle to get onto the track, she'd hit them in the back with her purse. It was filled with bricks."
Vega recalls a game played in an open-air, Tijuana, Mexico bull-fighting arena, in the center of which a skating track was set up. "That was a really good crowd, but they decided it was a good idea to throw things," she says of the spectators. "They'd be eating fried chicken and they'd finish with the bones and they started throwing them at the team they didn't like. So, all of this stuff was flying through the air." She still encounters fans who recognize her from her skating days. "Mostly they'll say, 'Oh, I remember watching you. You were so fast; you were so good. I love the T-Birds.'"
Legal ease
Vega continued skating with the Thunderbirds after graduating law school in 1982 and moving to Las Vegas, where her law career was getting under way. She spent a year as a law clerk for Judge Carl Christensen, followed by a year working as an associate at a private law practice here. In 1985, she began a stint as Clark County's deputy district attorney. Meanwhile, Vega continued training by herself at a local roller rink and commuted to games around the West with the team on weekends.
Griffiths recalls a game the Thunderbirds played at the Showboat hotel-casino that year. "I was so surprised when (Vega) popped up" ready to play, he says, thinking of her day job. "I said, 'Of course, you can never skate for us again,' and she said, 'Why not?' And lo and behold, she appeared in uniform, and the D.A.'s office and all of the people in it just thought it was marvelous."
But by the following year, her career had so advanced that Vega was prosecuting "some pretty time-consuming, serious cases ... and I just didn't have the time to keep up with the training and the practicing ... to be prepared for the games," she says. After hanging up her skates professionally (she still skates for recreation), Vega -- wife of local advertising executive Howard Stutz and mother of a 4-year-old daughter -- spent 10 years as a Las Vegas Municipal Court Judge. She settled into her District Court seat earlier this year. Her time in Roller Derby, she says, "was good discipline." Between studying for law school, working and skating, "I really had to budget my time effectively, so I learned some skills that also taught me to keep a good balance.
... "It's important to have a well-rounded, good balanced life," she says. "Everything falls into place when you have that."