Raquel Welch, 'Kansas City Bomber' and roller derby at Comiskey

It's one of the iconic images of the 1970s.

Raquel Welch on the cover of Life Magazine wearing a roller derby jersey with the collar revealingly unzipped. The jersey descends beneath her waist.

With one hand, she clutches a white roller skate hanging from her right shoulder, while the other hand rests against her bent thigh. Her long hair spills over her left shoulder.

Welch, who died Wednesday at age 82, was posing to promote the 1972 movie "Kansas City Bomber," in which she played K.C. Carr, a skater struggling to survive in the gritty world of roller derby.

That year, my family moved from Chicago's Budlong Woods neighborhood to East Rogers Park. I also began attending Roycemore School in Evanston.

That summer, I was obsessed (as usual) with baseball. Both the Cubs and the Sox were in contention in that strike-delayed season, and the Sox, thanks to Dick Allen, were, for the first time in five years, a team that merited serious attention.

It was also the year I discovered roller derby. Today, many would find it hard to believe how big the derby was in those days. There were actually two versions of it. Roller Derby was the older, less glitzy version that started in Chicago in the 1930s.

In 1972, it was dominated by teams like the San Francisco Bay Bombers with Charlie O'Connell and the Midwest Pioneers with the Golden Girl, Joan Weston.

The focus was on the basics: skating, blocking and finesse.

The other version was Roller Games, featuring the sport's version of the Harlem Globetrotters, the Los Angeles Thunderbirds, with Little Ralphie Valladares and Aussie Colleen Murrell.

Roller Games was more like pro wrestling, with ex-Hollywood actor Richard "Dick" Lane peppering his play-by-play with phrases like "bango" and "Whoa, Nellie," outrageous scenarios that always seemed to result in T-Bird victories, and colorful villains like Ronnie "Psycho" Rains.

Both were coed sports, with men's and women's squads alternating on the banked track.

I was captivated by the speed, the cartoon violence, with skaters diving over the rails and spinning across the infield, and the showbiz aura to the point where I actually owned a pair of roller skates and would race around the parking lot near my apartment at Devon and Ridge.

And I wasn't alone. That year, I and fellow fanatics lined up at the Nortown Theater near Devon and Western to see Welch as K.C. Carr. She was sexy and feisty, willing to mix it up and not taking any guff. Her love scenes offered a glimpse into a world that I hoped soon might welcome a more mature me through its portals.

In the skating scenes, I spotted many of the performers I watched on television each week, including the Psycho. Roller Games star Judy Arnold doubled for Welch, and Lane played himself, lustily announcing the action.

My obsession culminated in an event that brought together Roller Derby and Roller Games in a kind of World Series in September, with Weston and the Midwest Pioneers meeting the T-Birds. And best of all, it would be played at White Sox Park, where, for the first time, I wouldn't have to watch my heroes and heroines on a TV screen.

Weston was the focus of the advance coverage, with sports writer David Condon, with tongue in cheek, hyping the blonde amazon: "A new super-star bids for the loyalties of all Chicagoans who are heavy on civic pride." He mentioned her in the same sentence with Dick Allen, Stan Mikita, Billy Williams and Dick Butkus.

Writing from a 1970s male perspective with patronizing prose you couldn't get away with today, he said, "Her roller skates have done more for Women's Lib than anything since the fig leaf."

Condon predicted as many as 40,000 would attend. He underestimated the count - the contest drew 50,000 fans, an amazing figure considering that the Sox had a 50,000 gate only once that year, for a June 4 doubleheader against the Yankees.

My dad and I joined the herd, crawling through Dan Ryan congestion to see my wheeling warriors in the flesh, with the winner proving once and for all which was the superior form of the sport.

In the surviving photos, the lights and exploding scoreboard shine on a field seemingly ready for baseball, the only difference being the banked track around second base.

The reality of in-person roller derby, alas, paled in comparison to the TV version.

From my seat at the ballpark, the skaters looked tiny.

Their antics didn't have the advantage of TV close-ups and audio capturing their traded insults.

The outcome has completely faded from my memory, and the contemporary newspaper accounts apparently didn't think it worth mentioning.

Perhaps that's when I lost interest in the sport, and for once, my timing was perfect. Roller Derby's demise was only one year away, while Roller Games would shortly fade to a shadow of its former glory.

I'm not sure what happened to my roller skates. Every once in a while, I will watch an old roller derby match on YouTube - there is one with Joan Weston and the Pioneers that has Chet Coppock as the announcer. And if I find that "Kansas City Bomber" is on TV, I'll sometimes tune in, and it will bring a wistful smile to my face.