“Hey, you a wrestler?”A Random Homeless Dude Outside Your ApartmentDear Random:Well, I do lift people over my head, but not in order to body slam them. So, no. But thanks for asking. Cheers! Cheerleader Chad
Dear Male Cheerleader:What’s the verdict: Is Fired Up! a … ahem, “camp” classic or an “F.U.” to male cheerleaders?Willing to Settle for the Silver (Screen)
Dear Willing:Well, it’s no Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.If the title was anything other than an excuse for the filmmakers to insert a series of “F.U.” cheers and chants, I missed its significance. (Although I will assign an extra-credit point for fashioning the exclamation point in the film’s Fired Up! logo out of a meg and a pom.)Yes, yes, ambiguously gay dude-o Coach Keith (John Michael Higgins) – who actually claims to have been born doing spirit fingers – runs a cheer camp called “Fired Up University,” but the same pun-pleasure principle applies to that cinematic choice.Nevertheless, it’s to F.U. … um, U. that Nick (Eric Christian Olsen) and Shawn (Nicholas D’Agosto) – Gerald R. Ford High School’s star quarterback and wide receiver, respectively – choose to matriculate, preferring to spend a few weeks at camp getting sweaty with gals in skirts and sweaters instead of guys in pads and helmets.Is it silly? Absolutely.But does Fired Up! also hit the required elements of a silly/sexy cheerleader comedy? Absolutely.In fact, it explicitly pays tribute to the original Bring It On (referred to alternately, with varying amounts of tongue in cheek, as “the Citizen Kane” or “the Godfather of cheerleading movies” in many mainstream reviews of Fired Up!) in a scene in which Shawn and Nick’s so-fired-up-he’s-flaming roommate Brewster (Adhir Kalyan) and the 300-odd chick cheerleaders in camp recite every single line in it word-for-word.It’s no “camp” classic, but – to paraphrase Nick – if being a fool for cheerleading movies is wrong, I don’t want to be right.Cheers!Cheerleader Chad
Eight: Jeff Webb
“Asking spirit companies about their size or their markets is not always much help,” Emily Yellin observed in a 1999 article about the industry. “In typical cheerleader fashion, they all claim to be the best, the leader, No. 1.”
Within five years, however, it would be exceedingly clear who was No. 1: Jeff Webb.
Not bad for a man who ran his company, the Universal Cheerleaders Association, out of his apartment – and, occasionally, his car – for the first three years. Despite those humble beginnings, Webb would eventually eclipse his former mentor Lawrence Herkimer and earn a reputation as “the man who revolutionized cheerleading to be the sport that it is today – complete with athleticism and entertainment.”
His success seems especially improbable because cheerleading was sort of a last-minute thing for Webb. He only went out for yell leader his senior year at the University of Oklahoma, and his decision to delay law school to go to work for the National Cheerleaders Association after graduating in 1971 was made similarly late in the game. But the aggressive go-getter caught the eye of Lawrence Herkimer, who began grooming Webb as a possible successor. Within a year, Herkimer had promoted his protégé to the position of vice president and general manager.
With the passage of Title IX, however, the brand of cheerleading that Herkimer had been building his business upon for a quarter century seemed suddenly out of date. “With greater opportunities for girls to play a wide variety of sports,” Adams and Bettis argue, “cheerleading had to compete for the status that had been accorded to it in the past because it literally had been the only game in town.”
But “there was a real resistance to bringing [NCA] into modern times,” Webb told Sports Illustrated in 1992. “I was out there among the cheerleaders, and I knew that the kids had changed and that we really weren’t providing what they needed. So I decided to do it myself.”
In 1974, Webb left to start a competing company, taking 12 veteran NCA instructors with him. One of them was Kline Boyd, currently the executive vice president and general manager of UCA parent company Varsity Brands. “We thought it could be more than it was,” he said of cheerleading in a 2002 interview. “We thought we had a better way of doing it.”
In his own words, Webb’s way was “to add an athletic component to cheerleading. In those days, there were very few partner stunts or pyramids. We added that entire dimension, including a kind of entertainment aspect, as well.
“You have to remember,” he told Cheerleading Coach & Advisor Magazine in 2006, “that, in those days, there were only two aspects to the spirit industry. There were camps and there was only one uniform company. There were no competitions.”
Within five years, Webb had found enough investors to start the second uniform company, now known as Varsity Spirit Apparel. Its tops and skirts were tailored to the athletic style of cheerleading taught at UCA camps, made of materials that wouldn’t tear while the wearers were tumbling, stunting, or building pyramids. But the camps, while profitable from their first summer, weren’t attracting a large enough customer base to ensure Varsity’s success.
“We were a small organization, especially compared to NCA; they were still the largest by far. We didn’t have the money to expand nationally, and our style and brand were so different that we [had] to create a way for people to see what we were doing,” Webb explained. “So we created the National High School Cheerleading Championship to put it on television for exposure.”
At first, the UCA cheerleading championship ran in syndication. But in 1983, Webb cut a deal with a still-struggling startup sports network out of Connecticut called ESPN. The next year, he created a college cheerleading championship to complement the high school contest. Eventually, ESPN and ESPN2 would air roughly a dozen different cheerleading and dance competitions masterminded – and commentated – by Webb every year.
With the ESPN deal in place, the upstart of the spirit industry now had two things to market through his cheerleading camps: uniforms and competitions. “The camps still create the market for us. It’s a virtual circle of cross-marketing,” he explained to Yellin in 1999. “We know from our research that most kids enter that circle through the camps. And we use our camps to promote our special events – our competitions. And while we don’t sell uniforms at camps, our sales reps come there, meet with customers and make presentations.”
The explosive popularity of competitive cheerleading convinced Herkimer to create his own NCA high school and college championships in the ’80s, as well, but Webb’s ascendancy was assured. Because both NCA and UCA’s parent companies, National Spirit Group and Varsity Brands, have been privately held for much of their existences, their respective revenues are hard to ascertain. By the mid-1990s, however, Varsity’s had surpassed its archrival’s once and for all. In 1997, Varsity’s revenue was approximately $90 million; National Spirit’s, $80 million.
“It was a lucky day for him, the day he met me,” a retired Herkimer said of his prodigal protégé Webb in 2002. “But that’s OK. This business is big enough for two companies.”
But it wasn’t. Two years later, Webb bought the National Spirit Group for an undisclosed sum, leading The New York Times to declare:
“Varsity Brands is to spirit what General Motors was to automobiles in the 1950s. The company, which says it has annual revenue of more than $150 million, now controls 90 percent of the market in outfitting the nation’s estimated 3.5 million cheerleaders. Through subsidiaries that include the Universal Cheerleaders Association and the National Cheerleaders Association, the company also controls the largest camps and the most prestigious competitions.”
Ironically, the man whose success stemmed from the creation of the cheerleading competition has essentially eliminated all competition within the spirit industry. Some might call Varsity Brands a monopoly, but its chairman and CEO prefers another term.
“Varsity is what you’d call a ‘halo brand,’” Webb insisted in his interview with Cheerleading Coach & Advisor. “The individual brands maintain their own identities and nuances, so that our customers have a choice.”
Perhaps the customers have a choice, but I certainly do not: A list of the eight most influential men in the history of cheerleading that didn’t include Webb wouldn’t be worthy of even a UCA white outstanding ribbon. It’s only because I’ve been going in chronological order that it’s taken me so long to award to Webb – who, like Herkimer, was an inaugural inductee into the Spirit Industry Hall of Fame – the eighth of eight Ask A Male Cheerleader Two, Four, Six, Eight Who We Do Appreciate Awards.
Seven: Lawrence “Herkie” Herkimer
Lawrence Herkimer gave a whole new meaning to the term “entrepreneurial spirit.”After a two-year tour in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Herkimer returned to Southern Methodist University in time to become the head cheerleader during the Doak Walker era. After graduating in 1948, he accepted a position as a physical education instructor at SMU, but began moonlighting as a cheerleading clinician on weekends. Early on, one of the schools that wanted to hire Herkimer offered him either a flat fee of $500 or a commission of $1 for every student he brought in. For Herkimer, the choice was an easy one. “I’m a gambler, and I gambled,” he recalled in a 1972 interview. “I knew the kids would come.” The gamble paid off – to the tune of $4,500.Recognizing a need in the marketplace, the gambler decided to put all his money on cheerleading and let it ride. In 1951, Herkimer quit his day job to teach cheerleading camps full time. Two years later, he took out a $600 loan to finance the official foundation of the National Cheerleaders Association. The number of cheerleaders attending NCA camps continued to increase year after year, helping Herkimer to raise the capital to take an even bigger gamble.
He had realized that the real money wasn’t in camps, it was in uniforms. But because cheerleading tryouts were held in the spring, and the then-standard sweaters had to be custom-made to each girl’s measurements in the relatively short period of time before football season started in the fall, Herkimer couldn’t find a subcontractor willing to take on the work. So he placed a $100,000 wager: He purchased a knitting mill. When that paid off, he also acquired an old milk-carton factory and retooled it to produce megaphones.Over the years, Herkimer single-handedly put the “industry” into the spirit industry. “I have a plant that manufactures ribbons and buttons,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “I have a plant that manufactures pom-pons. We have a knitting mill that knits the sweaters and a cut-and-sew factory that makes the jumpers and the blouses and the skirts.” (The prototypes of the pleated skirts so favored by cheerleaders, by the way, were designed by Herkimer’s wife, Dorothy.)By then, Herkimer was self-deprecatingly describing himself as “oldest, fattest cheerleader in the business,” but he got that way by keeping the profits from the cheerleading-camp side of the business purposely lean. In 1972, for example, the man nicknamed “Mr. Cheerleader” grossed $5 million from his NCA camps; he gave $4.5 million of that back to the colleges that hosted them – a deal that no competing company could match. The cost of paying the part-time instructors – mostly college cheerleaders and high school teachers on their summer vacations – he hired on a seasonal basis to teach his students made the camps essentially a break-even enterprise. But Herkimer had recognized their true value: the indoctrination of loyal customers. “Once I have a cheerleader,” he declared, “she’s mine for life.”“Through cheerleading camps,” Natalie Adams and Pamela Bettis write in Cheerleader!: An American Icon, “young women and men are socialized into the world of cheerleading, taught the many tricks of the trade in motivating others, and inculcated with the values of leadership, ambassadorship, and cheerfulness. But, cheerleading camps serve another purpose: They are advertisements for all the other cheerleading products and services.”This is a lesson that Jeff Webb, who in 1972 was vice president and general manager of the National Cheerleaders Association, learned well under Herkimer’s expert tutelage. Perhaps a little too well, in retrospect.In 2007, Herkimer was selected as an inaugural inductee into the Spirit Industry Hall of Fame. But I hope he’ll also make room on his mantle for the seventh of eight Ask A Male Cheerleader Two, Four, Six, Eight Who We Do Appreciate Awards.
Seven: Bill Horan
“You on the end,” the man in charge barked at one of the trainees lined up in front of him, “are you chewing gum?”
A gulp, then an answer: “No, sir.”
“You’re not?”
“No, sir. I just swallowed it.”
The man inspecting the trainees, Bill Horan, had served as a paratrooper in World War II, but this scene described in a 1965 article in Life didn’t take place at a boot camp – although the cheerleaders who had shelled out $45 apiece to participate in his strenuous training program might have argued otherwise by the end of the week.
In 1949, four years before Lawrence Herkimer incorporated the National Cheerleaders Association, the former member of the spirit squad at the University of Miami founded the American Cheerleaders Association* and transformed himself into a “circuit-riding evangelist in the mystique and practice of cheerleading.”
Horan’s strategy was to use military-style discipline – and mile-long runs – to whip in his female charges into shape and “to separate the jellyfish from the real troopers.”
“Most young girls,” Horan told Life in 1965, “are afraid to bring out their leadership qualities. But my girls wind up running their campuses.”
Although Horan’s impact on the spirit industry wasn’t as lasting as Herkimer’s or Jeff Webb’s – the current incarnation of the American Cheerleaders Association is a separate entity, founded in 1998 by former NCA President Lance Wagers – this military man definitely deserves a salute, in the form of the sixth of eight Ask A Male Cheerleader Two, Four, Six, Eight Who We Do Appreciate Awards.
“Great. Just what this team was missing: two old dudes.”
With those words, the Camden High School spirit squad welcomed a duo of “dude cheerleaders” – Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) and his brother Randy (Ethan Suplee). That’s right: Last night, the main character of NBC’s My Name Is Earl crossed another item off of his list by finally letting his burly baby brother go to cheer camp.
The rotund tumbler introduced himself to the enthusiastic campers thusly:
My name is Randy!
And I like candy!
And I like corndogs!
“Corn” was, of course, the stressed syllable in My Name Is Earl’s shout out to spirited dudes. A gold superior ribbon is, however, going out to the writer who thought up the scene in which Earl convinced camp director Kimmi Himmler (Jenna Elfman) to overlook her rule about not allowing adult men to stay in the dorms with teenage girls by slithering out of his “tiny, tight, itchy cheer pants” to seduce her by pensively spelling out the word “L-O-N-E-L-L-Y.”
Skeptical it’s worthy of the gold? Judge for yourself:
Five: Newt Loken
Are cheerleaders athletes?
I don’t know about the rest of us, but Newt Loken sure was.
One of Johnny Campbell’s spirit-squad descendents at the University of Minnesota, Loken earned not only a reputation as “one of the greatest of all acrobatic cheerleaders” but also the NCAA all-around championship in gymnastics during his days as a Golden Gopher.
As his star had already captured an NCAA individual title in the horizontal bar in 1941 and the Big Ten all-around championship in both 1941 and 1942, the late Minnesota gymnastics coach Ralph Piper was reportedly so confident that Loken would win the NCAA all-around in 1942 that he ordered a trophy to be engraved two weeks before the competition took place.
The captain of the University of Minnesota yell leaders, the legendary “Gentleman of Gymnastics” was also selected to the All-American Cheerleading Squad and invited to co-write the seminal manual Cheerleading & Marching Bands.
Loken would go on to a celebrated career coaching both the cheerleading and gymnastics teams at the University of Michigan, where he won two NCAA team championships in gymnastics and two in trampoline. When he retired in 1983, the Michigan Marching Band commemorated his contributions to school spirit by spelling out “N-E-W-T” on the football field during a game.
But that wasn’t the end of Loken’s career on the sidelines. According to The Michigan Daily, an octogenarian Loken was still participating in homecoming as an alumni cheerleader as recently as 2001.
“I have this image of him from homecoming games … on the field with the alumni cheerleaders,” Rich Dopp, a former Michigan gymnast told the Daily. “It may sound a little dorky, but it just makes me want to go ‘Meechigan! Meechigan! Rah! Rah!’”
“A little dorky”? Not at all.
As an athlete and a coach, Newt Loken has already been honored with induction into the U.S. Gymnastics Hall of Fame as well as the University of Minnesota “M Club” Hall of Fame and the University of Michigan Athletic Hall of Honor, but until someone gets around to opening a Cheerleading Hall of Fame, he’ll have to settle for the fifth of eight Ask A Male Cheerleader Two, Four, Six, Eight Who We Do Appreciate Awards.
Dear Male Cheerleader:
Do you ever blog about anything other than cheerleading?
Variety Is the Spice of Life
Dear Variety:
Indeed, I do. Over the course of my journalistic career, most of my published pieces – apart from actual, like, news stories – have been about either literature or cinema. (Not coincidentally, during my undergrad days at the University of Minnesota my major was English and my minor was Film Studies.) Check out this recent guest post on BookFox for a column combining both those interests – and cheerleading.
Cheers!
Cheerleader Chad
Four: Harry Hammer (“H.H.”) Clark
H.H. Clark wrote the book on cheerleading.
OK, OK, he actually co-wrote it, with my fellow former University of Minnesota cheerleader George York. And – OK, OK, OK – maybe Just Yells isn’t the book on cheerleading nowadays. But that manly manual, published in 1927 by The Willis N. Bugbee Co., is inarguably the first book on cheerleading.
Yes, “manly.” During the legendary yell leader John E. Campbell’s lifetime, college cheerleading was an exclusive fraternity – literally. And, indeed, throughout Just Yells, cheerleaders are generically referred to as “men,” “chaps,” and “fellows.”
The importance of these gentlemanly generators of school spirit to the universities of the era is evidenced by their implementation of formal training programs for cheerleading candidates. In 1926, Clark founded one of the first: The School for Yell Leaders at his alma mater, Purdue University. With an enrollment limited to 30, the four-week training program was “composed principally of drill on form and lectures on mob psychology and the handling of crowds.”
It’s this innovation that earns Headmaster H.H. Clark the fourth of eight Ask A Male Cheerleader Two, Four, Six, Eight Who We Do Appreciate Awards.
Honorable Mention: Just Yells co-author George York
Dear Male Cheerleader:
Like you, I am a former college cheerleader who wants to be a “stuntman” again. Unlike you, I am a resident of New York, not Los Angeles. Is there a cheerleading squad for adults that I could tryout for here in “The Big Apple”?
East Side!
Dear East Side:
First and foremost: “West Side!”
Despite the fact that I’ve got Tupac Shakur’s “California Love” set to repeat on iTunes at the moment, I’ll spare you the extended lecture about how “you and I know it’s the best side” and answer your question.
Cheer New York, an adult team “by and for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Straight (LGBTS) communities,” is holding its tryouts later this month.
Cheer N.Y. will host two clinics in late July.
Clinic #1 (Orientation)
Wednesday, July 23
7-10 p.m.
Clinic #2 (Make-Up)
Monday, July 28
7-10 p.m.
Tryouts will be held from 7 to 10 p.m. on July 30, and – like the clinics – will be located in Midtown Manhattan. Contact Cheer New York at either (888) 671-7312 or info@cheerny.org to sign up and get the exact location.
Cheers!
Cheerleader Chad