What do you get when you mix Gen X slacker spirit, a startup sports league on wheels, and a 25-year-old Deadhead-turned-front office exec? Welcome to the wild world of Roller Hockey International (RHI) —and the improbable story of the San Jose Rhinos.
Brad Porteus, former GM of the Rhinos and author of the rollicking new memoir "Roll With It: A Trip Back to the '90s - Gen X Style," joins us to unpack one of the most absurd, glorious, and ultimately short-lived chapters in modern American pro sports history.
RHI burst onto the scene in the early 1990s during the inline skating craze, promising a legit summer hockey league full of high-speed thrills and low-rent spectacle. What it delivered was equal parts innovation and chaos.
Porteus was there from the beginning — drafting players who could barely skate; marketing a new team, league and sport on a shoestring budget; and helping San Jose win an unlikely Murphy Cup championship in only its second season (1995).
But Roll With It is about more than sports. It’s also a love letter to the analog '90s, a memoir of coming of age in an ascendant Silicon Valley, and a tribute to the resilient, underdog ethos of Generation X. Porteus brings us into a time before social media, when careers were launched on little more than a mixtape, a road map, and the blind faith that you could figure it out.
