I Was a Rebel Cheerleader
Chapter One: Tam in the Front
Sneakers squeaking on the waxed wood floor and the boys are warming up, white
Mill Valley boys and black Marin City boys running the court in the same lowriding shorts
and the beats are scratching on the speakers as the popcorn stand rolls to the sidelines and
the senior girls are snacking, jutting their hips in lowrise jeans and the boys are looking,
laughing, looking, taking draws of the clear liquid in their old Coke bottles, hiding them in J.
Crew sweatersleeves when Principal Gold is strolling by with walky-talky clenched, and the
moms, enfleeced, are filing in with their red-and-blue blankets and the dads looking lost in
their wire-rimmed glasses and suit pants and ties, but they are all taking their seats now, the
long wooden bleachers are filling up and the freshman girls are squealing to each other now,
Where are the parties going to be after?, the coaches are pacing now, yelling Get warm get warm get it
warmed up! and the basketball boys are thud-thud-thudding down the court and up, down the
court and up, and when the first successful shot swishes, it nearly lands on my head.
I duck it, expertly.
I’m Captain of the Varsity Cheerleaders, so I sit under the hoop. My body torques in
the ideal position: one leg folded in front and one tucked behind. (As one loony cheer camp
photographer described it, “Make a swastika!”) Red, blue, metallic, my pom-pons1 shimmer
in front of me, and Lindsay Lockwood’s poms shimmer in front of her, and Ashley’s poms
and Thea’s and Erica’s and Anna’s and Ariana’s and Gina’s and Jenée’s poms shimmer, all
the way down the line. Together, we are an attractive display of jewelry.
“Straighten up, straighten up!” I yell. It’s the freshmen who slump, new girls stuck at
each end of the line who think no one can see them. But I’m a sophomore, and I’ve been in
front of crowds for eight years now. I am wise enough to know that people are always
looking at you when you’re wearing this particular uniform, and nobody’s sorry to see a
cheerleader slip.
The freshman in question, Sandyah, rolls her eyes but pulls up.
Thea leans to look at me over her poms. “Okay, Drill Sergeant.”
“I’m starving.” Freshman Rashea says, and the girls begin to mumble, but there’s no
eating at these games; that’s my rule. Officially, we prohibit food to avoid stomach cramps,
but really I just hate the sloppiness of it, girls slurping nachos in the uniform. It is seven
o’clock at the start of this basketball game; we’ve been practicing since four, and we’ll eat
when we get home at ten.
“What’s our next cheer?” I ask Lindsay Lockwood, my best friend and sometime coCaptain. She pulls the cheer list from her skirtband. Calling cheers is technically my job, but
I’ve found it takes two of us to do it right. It’s easier in football, a slow-moving, methodical
1
Originally called “pom-poms” (and frequently misspelled as such), pom-pons were introduced in
the 1950s by Lawrence Herkimer, one of the fathers of modern American cheerleading. Herkimer
(for whom the famous “Herkie” jump is named) changed the name from “pom-poms” to “pompons” upon discovering that U.S. troops stationed in the Pacific were using “pom-pom” (which is
also a name for an anti-aircraft gun) as a slang word for sexual intercourse.
game. A football cheerleader has time to anticipate: We’re on third down now, the goal in reach, a
time out—it’s got to be “We Want a Touchdown.” But basketball. The swirl of Nike swooshes and
the stench of rubber, the boys sweating streams down bare arms, leaping for long shots, the
rank shock of their armpit hair. Boys bounding up and down and up the court. Boys passing,
teasing, stealing from each other. Offense switches to defense, and defense switches to
offense, and you find yourself doing “F-I-G-H-T” time after time just to be sure you’re not
rooting for the wrong team. I am a football girl, all the way.
Now Lindsay is looking at me, waiting, her eyes bright blue even in the yellow glare
of this old gym. It’s like when we were little, before Middle School, before she got pretty and
I got gawky and everything changed between us. Now this, cheerleading, is the only context
in which she waits for me.
I scan the list, as if I’d find anything new. The old favorite. “‘Tam2 in the Front’ at
time out, you and Thea preps, Ariana pop.”
“You always want to do that one!”
I shrug. “Everyone loves it.”
Lindsay shakes her head. “Fine.” She turns to tell Erica, and I turn to tell Ashley, and
in that way my order passes down the line, a grown-up game of telephone.
“Tam in the Front,” which I first learned as “People in the Front,” was one of the
first cheers I ever did—so I’ve been performing it since 1989. It was one of the few cheers
to survive my 1994 purging of the Tam cheer list, when I condemned such classic sexist
romps as “Wooh Baby!” and “Roll Call,” infamous for their incredible, inimitable lines:
We don’t play with toys, we’re checkin’ out the bo-oys!
We don’t play hockey, the boys think we’re foxy!
I saved “Tam in the Front” because it isn’t demeaning—no mention of the “bo-oys”—but
also because it always makes me happy. Unlike so many other cheers, it’s lasted. Nothing can
dull its particular magic—not even millions of performances by millions of cheerleaders at
millions of games with millions of fans. Perhaps that’s because it asks so little of everyone—
all the cheerleaders have to do is step-clap3; all the crowd has to do is clap along.
When the buzzer sounds, I give the nod, we’re on the floor, line up, space out, ready
position. Smile, smile. No one claps for us, save for a few desperate Leadership kids trying to
ramp up some rah-rah school spirit that died sometime after they shot American Graffiti in
this very gym. Fathers knot their foreheads, perplexed; Mothers raise their eyebrows. I scan
the crowd, find only the blur of bored faces. I know my mother’s here somewhere with a
2
The name of my school, “Tamalpais High School,” bears some explanation. Frequently misspelled
and mispronounced (and once memorably misinterpreted as “Temal-Tamal Dais” on a cheer
competition roster), the word Tamalpais derives from a Miwok word meaning, depending on whom
you ask, either “Land of the Tamals” or “Bay Mountain.” The word is properly pronounced TamAL-Pye-ISS. For short—and particularly for the purpose of delivering cheers—we shortened it to
“Tam High” or just “Tam.”
3
“Step-clapping,” which looks just as it sounds, was the first thing a 1980s or 1990s cheerleader
learned. It’s the foundation of hundreds of cheers.
water bottle for me, and I know my father is not. My friend Dorothy is here cheering for us,
and my boyfriend, Jason, is not. I’d be scared if I had time to be, if I weren’t shielded by my
uniform, flanked by my squad. But we cheerleaders move too fast to worry what people
think of us, we’re too busy praying, Don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up the stunt.
Deep breath in through my diaphragm. Blow it out in one loud burst: “Ready!”
Slap-clap.
Tam in the front, let me hear you grunt—huh!
Tam in the back, show us where it’s at—right here!
Tam in the stands, stand up and clap your hands!
clap, clap, clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap
clap, clap, clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap
On the second round, we move into the stunts I ordered: Lindsay Lockwood and
Thea rise in their extension preps4, and my group sets for Ariana’s pop. It’s really called a
“basket toss,” but we like “pop” better, it’s more evocative; we call Ariana “The Popcorn
Kernel.” Sienna and Jenée clasp wrists and squat, Ariana perches on their knuckles and grips
their shoulders, and I grab her from behind. Our stunt group moves up and down like one
being, like breath: Clap (one-two), Set (three-four), Down five-Up six, Down seven-THROW. We toss
her into the air. Arms raised, I watch her in flight, up and up, toe-touch and down, and I
turn my head away, close my eyes, throw my body under hers. Thump—her back against my
chest. I’ve caught her again. Stunts like this make us athletes. They are exhausting. They are
scary. If the timing is off, even a bit, a stunt will fail. The girl will fall. It will only be a matter
of how hard.
The buzzer rings, and Ariana bounds from my arms. We’re throwing spirit fingers
and running, we are down and we are slapping the waxed-wood floor, though our palms are
burning red now, shoe-grit bedded in the heels, we are smiling, we are chanting:
T-A-M! (slap-slap)
A-L-P! (slap-slap)
A-I-S! (slap-slap)
TAMALPAIS!
T-A-M! (slap-slap)
A-L-P! (slap-slap)
A-I-S! (slap-slap)
TAMALPAIS!
“Shut up!” someone yells, and I turn my head to see who is after us this time. The girl
basketball players, sweaty from the game they played just before this one, are stalking by us
in their big loose shorts, laughing.
4
In an “extension prep,” or “prep,” three cheerleaders, two “bases” and one “back spot,” lift the
“flyer” to their chins, and she stands on their hands. It’s called a “prep” because it often leads to a
“full extension”: the bases straighten their arms, thus pushing the flyer up above their heads.
Chapter 2: The Fearless Indian
When I entered high school in September 1995, I had six years of cheerleading
experience.
This was kind of astonishing, considering that in our rich-hippie paradise called Mill
Valley, California, putting on a skirt whose hem landed just below your bottom (the rule was
two index fingers’ space on the thigh below the kickpants5 line) and cheering on somebody
else’s kid—some boy—was a strange idea, even offensive. It made my own mother queasy;
she let me join my second-grade Pop Warner squad only after my prolonged campaign of
begging, pleading, and endless performances of the cheers my friend Jennee had taught me
on the sly. My mother found it sexist, degrading, little girls dancing for little boys. It
embarrassed my father, who came to one competition in ten years and stood in the back the
whole time, arms crossed over his chest.
—
In his own high school days, my father dubbed himself “The Fearless Indian” and
peered out at the world from the back page of the Napa High Injun-eer6. In each month’s
issue, amid cheery ads for Rough Rider slacks (“You’ll look lean as a tiger—the trimmest
fellow around—in these Action-tailored traditional slacks”) and A&W burger (“”Best Root
Beer in Town”), The Fearless Indian critiqued the campus, needled the football players,
and—this seemed to be its main purpose—documented every flutter and flub of the Napa
High School cheerleaders.
—
At Napa High in 1963, the context in which my parents first met, to be a cheerleader
was to be a popular girl—a pepped-up, pom-pon-wielding object of desire. As my mother
put it, “They were nice girls that were out there to have a lot of fun, but it was never a sport.
You were a cheerleader because you were cute, and all the boys would think you were cute,
and you would get a lot of attention.” Back then, gymnastics were just starting to pep up
cheer routines, the vinyl pom-pon was a fascinating new innovation, and cheerleaders were
girls whom the student body had voted onto the squad. No wonder my parents were bitter.
Cheerleading was literally a popularity contest.
—
Originally, cheering was a masculine endeavor, a training ground for idealized uppercrust American citizenship: the cheerleaders of today were the good strong American leaders
(read: men) of tomorrow. In fact, four U.S. Presidents once held their megaphones high:
Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush.
5
Commonly called “bloomers,” these are the colored polyester underpants that cheerleaders wear
over their underwear, under their cheer skirts.
6
Tam High’s mascot used to be the Indians, too. In 1989, the mascot was deemed inappropriate,
and the student body voted on a new one. Rumor has it that the students were ardent fans of RedTail Ale. Thus it was that on March 16, 1990, after eighty years, the Tamalpais Indians officially
became the Tamalpais Red-Tailed Hawks.
As told by Natalie Guice Adams and Pamela J. Bettis in their book Cheerleader!: An
American Icon, it all began at the first intercollegiate football game on November 6, 1869,
when Princeton fans started a cheer called the Princeton Locomotive:
Ray, ray, ray
Tiger, Tiger, Tiger
Sis, sis, sis
Boom, boom, boom
Aaaaah!
Princeton, Princeton, Princeton!
Then, in the 1880s, the adorably named Princeton grad Thomas Peebles brought the
concept of crowd-leading from his alma mater to the University of Minnesota. UM
undergrad Johnny Campbell built on the idea, forming the first official college cheerleading
squad that chanted those infamous lines: “Rah, rah, rah! Sis, boom, bah!”
I like to think of these early cheer boys in front of their crowds, yelling heartily for
the football teams they loved. I imagine them strong-jawed, deep-voiced, in pressed slacks
among fall leaves. On November 12, 1898, the Minnesota student publication Ariel named
the lucky guys who would “lead the yelling today: Jack [sic] Campbell, F.G. Kotlaba, M.J.
Luby, Albert Armstrong of the Academics; Wickersham of the Laws; and Litzenverg of the
Medics. These men would see to it that everybody leaves the park today breathless and
voiceless, as this is the last game here.” I like the sound of that: breathless and voiceless, the last
game here. Even their names sound friendly, tinged with nostalgia for an America I sometimes
wish I knew. I think I could fall in love with Albert Armstrong of the Academics, and we
would live in a Midwestern suburb where the leaves changed with every season and the
clouds passed slowly by and the boys played baseball cleanly in the street, and he’d work in a
suit pressed neat as a sheet and I’d cook in an apron frilled at the knee, and we’d dine
together every night at six, gathering ‘round an old oak table, and on Saturdays we’d attend
the local games together, I can see us now: in the sepia tint of my imagination, we are
huddled, Albert and I, under one wool blanket on the wood-planked stands, watching our
daughter cheer.
—
My father did not share my yearning for these idyllic days. As The Fearless Indian, he
dubbed the yell-leaders and pom-pons girls the “Fairy Princesses” and teased them
ceaselessly. Reporting, for example, on a football game in October 1963: “The cheerleaders
did a fine job of yelling, ‘Push ‘em back, push ‘em back’ every time we had the ball. Or
yelling ‘We want a touchdown’ just when we were forced to kick on fourth down. That’s all
right, I don’t know too much about weaving baskets. Consider us even.”
Daring to challenge The Fearless Indian’s sour views was pom-pon girl and future
valedictorian Jane Dickel. (“My special interests are school spirit, and Mike Lawler,” Dickel
confided when featured as a “Senior Celebrity” in the November 1963 issue. “My pet peeve
is when some of the pom-pon girls are late to the games.”) Dickel’s missive to my father,
headlined “REBUFF?”, was published in December 1963:
“In view of the last article of the famed ‘Fearless Indian,’ I have a few things to say.
First of all, if this wiseguy is so fearless, why doesn’t he use his name? Not that it would
mean much to many students. The main gripe against this article is the way the football team
was degraded. Notice the author of the article pushed off an NBL title as ‘no big thing.’ He
probably did this because the team was so great that he couldn’t think of any way to criticize
them. His reputation of never complimenting anyone had to be upheld so he avoided saying
anything about the team. The football team sweated out hours after school every day at
practice, they sloshed in the mud to bring an NBL title to Napa High. You’d think that after
all this that maybe this wastebasket digger could have said a few words of praise for the
team. Who does this guy think he is to judge the football players and criticize the team? If he
is such an expert, why wasn’t he out for football? A question of guts, maybe? I’d like to take
this opportunity to express the feelings of many students who take an active interest in their
school. We think the football team was great and we’re mighty proud of it. They were truly
champions and we appreciate all the work they put forth to bring us the NBL title. Let’s
hope the basketball team will do as well, right Dave? As for a last statement to my good
friend, the Fearless Indian, I’d like just to say that we all enjoy a good joke or ribbing once in
a while, and I’m sure no one minds getting fun poked at them sometimes, but let’s give
credit where credit is due, OK?”
From behind his wall of words, The Fearless Indian fired back:
“It seems this poor fairy princess has had her wings crumpled up a bit and has
needed an excuse to bite back. From what the letter said, I think she’s kicking a little, too.
Okay, Madame Butterfly.”
Those games are long over now, the paper brittle and yellowed—but there he is, my
dad. Sarcasm, snobbery, the humor that makes you like him anyway.
—
When I first read the things The Fearless Indian wrote to poor Jane Dickel, they
sounded familiar to me, though I had never read my father’s columns before. They were
familiar because he’d said the same things to me, again and again, no matter how hard I
kicked or bit back.
“When are you going to quit that garbage and play a real sport?” he’d say as I came
through the foyer in uniform, flushed from a game.
“When are you going to leave me alone?” I’d snap. My mother told me my father
loved me, that he meant well, but I couldn’t understand him. I didn’t want to understand
him. I stood there in my pressed red-and-blue uniform, ribbons in my hair, and wished for
him to notice. Like old Jane Dickel and the cheerleaders of Napa High, I wanted him to tell
me that I looked cute, I was one of the cute girls.
What he said instead was, “Why are you wasting your time?”
I inherited a lot of things from my father: his talent, his sarcasm, his stubbornness,
his nose. Even now, I’m not sure if I would have even continued cheering if it had not
pricked so precisely the weave of expectations he had for me. Though he hovered around
my high school newspaper office, handing down judgments and offering suggestions, the
world of cheerleading, with its spangled uniforms and curled ponytails and incessant
perkiness, was a place my father dared not go.
—Lindsey Lee Johnson