The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Reality Show Ends Its Run on CMT
‘Making the Team’ was the cable channel’s longest-running reality program. After sixteen seasons, why did it decide to pull the plug?
Sarah Hepola is the author of the New York Times best-seller Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (Grand Central Publishing). She lives in Dallas.
‘Making the Team’ was the cable channel’s longest-running reality program. After sixteen seasons, why did it decide to pull the plug?
By Sarah Hepola
The drama that’s swept up Jerry Jones’s former right-hand man says a lot about the distorted values of America’s Team.
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Host Sarah Hepola counts down her favorite moments from our series on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
By Sarah Hepola
The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have navigated scandals and cultural shifts in the last few years. What is their future in this new world?
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Dana Presley Killmer joined the squad at the peak of its popularity, but the $15 game rate hadn't changed, and wouldn't for many years.
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From honey shots to swimsuit calendars, sex has long been part of the cheerleaders’ brand. But is the provocative tease a relic of another era?
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It’s not just about being the right weight. It’s about having the right hair, the right skin, the right boobs, the right legs. Only a very particular kind of beautiful woman gets to wear that uniform.
By Sarah Hepola
One former Cowboys cheerleader tells the story behind her epic encounter with Danny White, in a picture that was quashed for 25 years.
By Sarah Hepola
Being a Cowboys cheerleader has always meant living by a long list of rules. But do those rules help protect the cheerleaders or control them?
By Sarah Hepola
A dynamic professor, a feisty seamstress, a firebrand dancer, and the other underappreciated architects of the phenomenon that transformed the NFL.
By Sarah Hepola
The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders uniform is iconic, a symbol of Texas culture for half a century. But its origin story remains remarkably unsettled.
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Tami Barber became a sweetheart of the seventies-era cheerleaders. But she also had—and still has—a rebel streak.
By Sarah Hepola
They were at the center of a scandal that rocked the NFL. More than forty years later, would they finally tell their side?
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A group of former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders pose topless in Playboy, and the Cowboys go to court to protect their brand.
By Sarah Hepola
Shannon Baker Werthmann got more fan mail than any woman on the seventies squad. We talk sexiness, fair pay, encounters with Roger Staubach, and getting fired by Kelli Finglass.
By Sarah Hepola
Vonciel Baker still holds the record for most years on the squad.
By Sarah Hepola
The cheerleaders enjoy the glamour of sudden fame, while grappling with low pay and the dangers that celebrity brings.
By Sarah Hepola
The modern Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders launch in 1972 and rocket to national fame.
By Sarah Hepola
Inside the wild, glamorous, and complicated saga of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, an institution that changed sports, entertainment, and countless childhoods of boys and girls like me.
By Sarah Hepola
Mobile City was incorporated in the early nineties to facilitate alcohol sales in a dry county. Now residents—especially its devoted mayor—fear for the fate of their accidental utopia.
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In their new book, ‘The Sober Lush,' Austin writers Amanda Eyre Ward and Jardine Libaire offer a booze-free road map to a rich, full lifestyle.
By Sarah Hepola
“Six feet away” can be very, very sexy.
By Sarah Hepola
But for heaven’s sake, the best-selling author, unapologetic cusser, and fifth-generation Texan would rather not be called that.
By Sarah Hepola
Update: Hours after this story was published, the Dallas Cowboys announced that Making the Team would not be returning to CMT and that the show looks forward “to continuing the exclusive journey with ‘America’s Sweethearts’ on a new platform,” according to a press release.“We could never have anticipated the outpouring
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In the war against campus sexual assault, why are we not talking about drinking?
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How I’m learning to love the Cowboys. And the Mavericks. And the Rangers. And the Stars. And . . .
By Sarah Hepola