Flipping Out
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These days, the 37 women who are the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders spend much of their time at the team’s headquarters, in Irving, in a chilly dance studio with blond-wood floors and mirrors that extend from floor to ceiling. On the wall is a list of aphorisms that urge them to be better: “Wear a cheerful countenance at all times.” “Look at the sunny side of everything.” “Give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.” On the opposite wall stands a scale. Outside, the foyer is lined with blown-up swimsuit calendar photos in which cheerleaders are pictured in tiny bikinis crawling on all fours across expanses of sand or running their hands through their sea-soaked hair or arching their backs at the water’s edge. The women who are picked to be Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders—more than a thousand audition each year for the honor—must still adhere to the same strict code of conduct and be able to dance for upwards of four hours in sweltering heat (longer, if the game goes into overtime) without ever letting their smiles falter. Each cheerleader must attend rehearsals at least four nights a week and stay at her audition weight or risk getting cut from the squad, a rule enforced with occasional weigh-ins; she must also reaudition for her job at the end of the football season. Although the pay has risen from $15 per game to just $50, no one is complaining. “It pays for gas and panty hose!” one cheerleader told me. “Pretty much every girl who’s come through these doors saw the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders on TV when she was a little girl and knew that’s what she wanted to be when she grew up,” explained former cheerleader Courtney Sparks, who recently retired from the squad. “This is a childhood dream.”
I had visited the dance studio that July afternoon to ask the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders what they thought about the debate over cheerleading. Carefully sidestepping any questions about politics, Laura Beke and Elizabeth Davis sat and talked with me, emphasizing that they and their fellow squad members were always mindful to be “ladies” and “role models” and were proud to be part of “a classy organization.” “We wear more clothes than most people do on the beach,” offered Beke. Several other cheerleaders—women in their early twenties with perfectly sculpted bodies and manes of blond hair—were busy teaching DCC Camp, the cheer and dance instruction that the squad gives to local girls each summer. Over the thumping beat of RuPaul’s “Looking Good, Feeling Gorgeous,” the cheerleaders stood in front of the bank of mirrors, counting to the music (“Step five, six, seven, eight!”) while they effortlessly walked through a dance routine. Behind them, a motley crew of junior high school students—girls with mouths full of braces, pudgy girls with acne, flat-chested girls who hadn’t hit puberty yet, girls with frizzy hair and glasses—watched in rapt amazement. Studying themselves in the mirror with fierce concentration, they tried to follow along. They thrust their chests forward and swiveled their narrow hips back and forth, awkwardly aping the cheerleaders who were dancing in front of them, trying for all the world to look like someone’s idea of sexy.
SEVENTEEN MILES NORTHEAST of Dallas is the suburb of Rockwall, a mostly white, middle-class enclave of big-box stores, chain restaurants, and subdivisions that, as one resident observed during my visit, might more aptly have been named Wonderbreadland. Although its 5A football team, the Yellowjackets, has for years maintained a near-perfect losing streak, its varsity cheerleading squad has given Rockwall something to brag about. In January the girls won second place at the National Cheerleaders Association’s annual competition, where they came in just three one-hundredths of a point behind the Kentucky high school that cinched the title in their division. Rockwall’s success was not unexpected; most of the girls on the squad have taken cheer and gymnastics lessons since they were in kindergarten and can perform the most demanding stunts with such grace and ease that even when they are spinning in midair ten feet above the ground, they seem to be doing nothing more demanding than breathing. The eighteen-member squad includes two sisters, Hannah and Caroline Wilson, whose great-grandmother, Chug Linn, cheered for Rockwall during the 1930-31 school year. Before she died this summer, Linn was able to recollect little of her life through the fog of Alzheimer’s, but she never forgot the Rockwall High School fight song (“For the boys, we’ll yell and yell and yell!”), which she would recite faithfully, from start to finish, whenever she was given the opportunity.
Rockwall’s first game of the season, against the North Garland Raiders, featured none of the provocative sideline moves that had caused so much hand-wringing in Austin. As the Yellowjackets tried to move the ball that August evening, their cheerleaders did back handsprings down the length of the field and stood on the sidelines urging the team on, shouting in unison: “Go orange! Go white! Go ’Jackets! Fight, fight, fight!” Their uniforms were not what one would wear to church on Sunday, but they were hardly offensive, either; a fitted top covered the midriff, and a flouncy skirt, which grazed the top of the leg, was worn over black spandex shorts that revealed nothing more than a pair of well-toned thighs. Climbing onto one another’s palms, the cheerleaders ran through their repertoire—soaring above the field in arabesques and scorpions, bottle rockets and basket tosses—while the boys battled it out on the field below. (Overcome by the heat, the Yellowjackets’ mascot periodically dashed off the field to remove her enormous plush-covered head and gulp down water, wiping the sweat from her face with her furry orange arms.) When one of Rockwall’s players suffered an injury and lay grimacing on the 40-yard line, each cheerleader knelt at the edge of the field and looked appropriately solemn. And during the third quarter, when the team needed a little extra encouragement, they leaped into the air again and again with broad smiles, yelling “Let’s go, Rockwall!” In spite of their efforts, the Yellowjackets still lost, 20—17.
Sitting on the yellow school bus that ferried them to and from the game that evening, the girls talked about their frustration over the way cheerleading had been maligned this spring. “We’re not trying to offend anyone,” Hannah Wilson said. “I mean, the worst thing you can say about us is that we all like to be the center of attention.” Perhaps mindful of the image that they wanted to project, the girls talked at length about the church missions they had participated in, the most recent of which had taken several members of the squad as far as Ghana. “We are truly, truly blessed,” one girl told me. Their sponsor, an upbeat English teacher and former cheerleader named Holli Loveless, drove the point home. “Cheerleading has always tapped into issues like sex and power, but these girls are morally strong,” she said. “They are well rounded in their family lives and spiritual lives.” The squad was particularly exasperated by the way that one of its members, Kristin Turner-Wurm, had been portrayed this spring in the Dallas Morning News’ free spin-off, Quick; a front-page article on HB 1476, which ran under the headline “The Dirrty Rule,” was accompanied by a photo of her performing a stunt in a sports bra. The image had been taken out of context, she explained; she had been photographed practicing at Cheer Athletics, a Garland gym that is famous not only for turning out winning squads but also for toughening up its cheerleaders by making them practice without air-conditioning. “I don’t wear a sports bra when I perform. I wear a uniform,” she said. “They made what we do look bad.”
As the school bus made its way back to Rockwall, the cheerleaders passed around bubble gum and sent text messages to one another in the dark. One girl hunched over a binder, doing her homework by the light of her cell phone. The sound of pop culture filtered through the conversation now and then, as when one girl started singing the Black Eyed Peas’ hit “My Humps” (“What you gon’ do with all that junk?/All that junk inside your trunk?”). But when the bus swung into the Rockwall High School parking lot, the girls all chimed in:
Hail, dear old Rockwall!
How we love you
Ever you’ll find us
Loyal and true.
When they had finished, head cheerleader Bronwyn Hill stood up and yelled, “Make sure to tell the guys they had a great game!”
IN A SIMPLER TIME, before anyone had heard of the booty bill, a Texan named Lawrence Herkimer got the idea to fasten dyed crepe-paper streamers to the end of a wooden stick. He called his invention a pom-pom. (Later, when he discovered that the term meant something rather crude in Hawaiian, he changed it to “pom pon,” but the original name stuck.) In 1956 he and his wife began making pom-pom kits out of their garage in Dallas, and girls across the Southeast soon started clamoring for them. After Herkimer applied for a patent, the uniform business he owned, Cheerleader Supply Company, started producing pom-poms wholesale. And so the cheer industry was born.
“Mr. Cheerleader,” or just “Herkie,” as the 79-year-old Herkimer is called, is credited with creating everything from cheer camp to the spirit stick and for turning Texas into the cheerleading capital of the world. He conceived of his most imitated invention—the herkie—during World War II, when he was a cheerleader himself at North Dallas High School. (The herkie, which involves thrusting one leg forward in midair while crooking the other back at the knee, is still a sideline perennial.) While an undergraduate at SMU, Herkie conducted the first-ever cheer clinic, teaching 52 girls at Sam Houston State University, in Huntsville, the art of public speaking, gymnastics, and rhyme; it was so popular that he made it a fixture at SMU and then at colleges around the nation. When he founded the National Cheerleaders Association in Dallas more than half a century ago, he launched the city’s reputation as the epicenter of all things cheerleader. Herkie has since retired to Miami Beach, where he isn’t quite as limber as the day he performed 38 backflips for a Cheer detergent commercial. (Doing a herkie now, he joked over the phone, would require “a crane and some piano wires.”) On the subject of the Legislature and HB 1476, which I asked him to weigh in on, Herkie was philosophical. “There have always been humorless people,” he said. “They made the same complaints fifty years ago: ‘These girls need to cover up—they’re half-naked’ or ‘It’s disgusting how they are throwing their legs apart.’ You can read something ugly into anything, you know.”
