Flipping Out
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Cheerleading has changed since the days when Herkie taught girls to do pom-pom routines to the tune of “Lollipop.” The technical skill and athleticism that are required by squads like Rockwall’s have made cheerleading more than just a popularity contest. At many 4A and 5A high schools, the baseline at tryouts is no longer poise or a pretty face; it is a rounded-off standing back handspring, a technique that only students who have had years of practice in gymnastics can execute. (Splits and cartwheels went out of fashion around the same time as Keds, feathered hair, and “How Funky Is Your Chicken?”) Routines have become so dazzling now that one annual competition is broadcast on ESPN. The acrobatics have come at a price; in the past 22 years, cheerleading has accounted for more than 50 percent of catastrophic sports injuries—that is, injuries involving hospitalization or death—among girls in high school and college. At cheer camp, where instructors stress the importance of safety, it is not uncommon to see girls in splints, hobbling around on crutches, or occasionally pushing the least fortunate member of their squad around in a wheelchair (bedecked in the squad’s school colors, of course). Early last year, a cheerleader at Prairie View A&M University was paralyzed from the neck down when her squad failed to catch her after throwing her in the air.
Because modern cheerleading is so physically demanding, many of its boosters think it should qualify to be a sport in its own right. But just as calling the Miss America pageant a “scholarship competition” elicits eye rolls and snickers, so too does the “Cheerleading Is a Sport” slogan that is emblazoned across so many girls’ T-shirts. School districts have been slow to recognize cheerleading as an activity that is on par with other girls’ sports. If anything, cheerleading suffers from a double standard; while some administrators are “grounding” squads—forbidding their members to perform stunts as a way of heading off accidents— no school districts have benched their football teams as a safety precaution. And so cheerleaders find themselves in a catch-22; the more they ask to be taken seriously, the more dismissive their critics become.
Their detractors have included feminist theorists and academics, who have weighed in with essays like “Postmodern Paradox? Cheerleaders at Women’s Sporting Events” and “Hands on Hips, Smiles on Lips! Cheerleading, Emotional Labor, and the Gendered Performance of ‘Spirit.’” Why, they ask, should girls participate in an activity that still requires them to wear hair ribbons, lipstick, short skirts, and happy faces when Title IX long ago opened up other opportunities? Waving pom-poms at football games was one thing in the fifties, when chanting “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar” provided the only chance for girls to participate in school sports, but another thing entirely, they point out, when their role models are Venus Williams and Mia Hamm.
The argument against cheerleading was most forcefully articulated by Sports Illustrated’s Rick Reilly, who devoted a column of his—“Sis! Boom! Bah! Humbug!”—to the subject in 1999. “I guess this is like coming out against fudge and kittens and Abe Lincoln, but it needs to be said,” he warned his readers. “I don’t hate cheerleading just because it’s about as safe as porcupine juggling. I also hate it because it’s dumb. The Velcroed-on smiles. The bizarre arm movements stolen from the Navy signalmen’s handbook. The same cheers done by every troupe in every state. What’s even dumber is that cheerleaders have no more impact on the game than the night janitorial staff. They don’t even face the game. They face the crowd.” But such criticism has not had much resonance in Texas, where cheerleading is bigger than ever. All-star cheerleading—in which squads compete against one another and exist independent of school teams—is currently one of the fastest-growing athletic activities for girls in the nation, with Texas being home to one out of every four all-star squads. More than four hundred cheer gyms have opened from Beaumont to El Paso, each with a more exuberant name than the last: Atomic Cheer, Spirit Explosion, Cheer Factory, Cheer USA, Lonestar Cheer, Planet Cheer, Tumble Town, Wild About Cheer. The industry that Herkie helped to establish more than half a century ago now generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year. So popular has cheerleading become that the Dallas suburb of Garland has 48 squads, 12 of which are for kindergarteners alone.
A half-hour’s drive north of Garland, at Pro Spirit, in McKinney, I watched a peewee squad practice one afternoon. Pro Spirit is housed in a cavernous metal building on the western edge of town, where the subdivisions start to give way to grassland and the effect is that of entering a place set apart from the rest of the world. The walls are covered with shadow boxes filled with ribbons and medals and photos of girls triumphantly hoisting colossal trophies above their heads. On the day I visited in July, several dozen mothers sat in a darkened room that looked out onto the blue mats where their children were learning how to tumble; above them hung a sign that read “Positive Parents. Positive Coaches. Positive Kids. Positive Results.” The glass partition they sat behind was lit in such a way that they could observe their children but their children could not see them. In sparkly outfits that glimmered under the fluorescent lights, the four- and five-year-olds executed near-flawless routines in miniature; one girl was held up in the air (with the assistance of her coach) by four equally tiny bases. Their mothers gave unseen thumbs-up signs and applauded; the girls gazed back at the opaque glass, flashing their practiced hundred-watt smiles. They had a certain girly glamour to them despite the occasional runny nose. Each girl was honing the skills she would need ten years from now, one mother told me, to win a spot on her high school cheerleading squad.
ALTHOUGH REPRESENTATIVE EDWARDS could not name a specific high school cheerleading squad or incident that spurred him to action, he didn’t pull the issue out of thin air, either. The National Cheerleaders Association issued a warning in 1995 that is still given to every squad that attends its annual competition. “Deductions will be given for vulgar or suggestive choreography, which includes but is not limited to movements such as hip thrusting and inappropriate touching, gestures, hand/arm movements and signals, slapping, positioning of body parts and positioning to one another,” it reads. All facets of a performance, it continues, “should be suitable for family viewing and listening.” (Although the wording is broad, it is far more precise than the definition that Edwards gave his colleagues for overly sexually suggestive cheerleading: “Any adult that’s been involved with sex in their lives will know it when they see it.”) The National Cheerleaders Association issued the warning after its judges began noticing a change in tone at competition. Hemlines had crept to the top of the thigh, and uniforms were showing more and more midriff. Of most concern to judges was the music that a few squads had selected to perform to. (Last year a college squad was cautioned that it would be penalized if it presented the routine it had prepared to 50 Cent’s bawdy “Disco Inferno.”) “We are the gatekeepers,” explained the National Cheerleaders Association’s vice president of marketing, Karen Halterman, when I visited the NCA headquarters, in Garland, this summer. “Our entire culture has been desensitized to explicit sexual content. We don’t want to impose or even define morality, but we must have parameters.”
Whether cheerleaders are singing Big & Rich’s “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” in the locker room or taking up practice time mimicking the dance moves in Ludacris’s “P-Poppin’” video—and what P stands for can’t be printed in this magazine—popular culture has put its imprint on what was once considered just good, clean fun. “If I tell my girls to come up with their own routine and I come back to polish it, my jaw drops when I see what they’ve done,” said coach Billy Smith, of Dallas’ Spirit Celebration. “When I tell them that we’re going to have to change the routine, they’ll say, ‘But this is what Beyoncé is doing!’” And yet contrary to what was argued on the House floor, raunchy performances—at least at the high school level—usually stay off the playing field; coaches know that their squads will be penalized at competition if their routines are off-color, and cheerleading sponsors are not eager to showcase their girls shaking it at games that will be attended by parents and members of the school board. So where are these risqué routines that so inflamed the passions of the Legislature? Over and over again, I heard the same answer from parents and coaches, all of whom were white and asked not to be quoted by name: “It’s a problem at the black high schools.” They read particular significance into the fact that the bill’s author, Representative Edwards, is African American. “Go to an inner-city football game, and you’ll see what I mean,” one coach advised me.
So I went to the first football game of the season at South Oak Cliff High School, in a gritty pocket of Dallas that could not have looked more dissimilar from Wonderbreadland. But at its heart, South Oak Cliff was no different from Rockwall; despite the finger-pointing from the suburbs, there was no bumping and grinding that Friday night, no booty shaking or “dropping it low.” The most offensive move of the evening was one very PG-rated shimmy. The squad had on the most demure cheerleading uniforms I had seen: loose-fitting athletic shorts and matching black tank tops with letters that spelled out “Bears.” Wearing dabs of glittery eye shadow and ponytails secured with white, star-spangled ribbon, the girls beamed up at the crowd as they did herkies along the sidelines. Perhaps there was a cheerleading squad somewhere in Texas that night whose routines would have made our legislators blush, but it was not to be found in South Oak Cliff. Then again, as long as there are cheerleaders, there will always be those who pass judgment on them; they are athletes in short skirts, stranded between the same impossible expectations that all women find themselves caught between. They must be attractive but not too sexy. Fit but not too athletic. Confident but not too outspoken. If the cheerleader is the symbol of perfect womanhood, she will never measure up until we figure out exactly what it is that we want women to be.
None of that mattered on that warm August evening, when the South Oak Cliff cheerleaders called out in unison to the players on the field, “You make the touchdown! We’ll make the noise!” The fans roared back their approval. Little girls studied the cheerleaders, waving miniature pom-poms in the air; lanky boys leaned over the railing, trying to catch their attention. The cheerleaders were beautiful under the stadium lights—young and radiant, with an aura of celebrity to them—and even when their team fumbled and fell behind, they kept on cheering.
