They call each other “girls,” even though they are grown women now, some of them grandmothers in their 60s. Few look it: most are lithe and fit from a lifetime of exercise. Early this morning they convened for a variety of fitness classes, including a “twerkout workout,” a “hot heels dance class,” and “cheer Zumba,” followed by a panel on the “Good, Bad, & Ugly” of cosmetics procedures. Now they are buzzing around a banquet hall set up in a club-seating deck on the upper level of Nissan Stadium in Nashville, home of the Tennessee Titans. There are nearly 500 former N.F.L. cheerleaders—Washington Redskinettes, Seattle Sea Gals, Chicago Honey Bears, Buffalo Jills, and the queen supremes, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. (“When they walk in, you can just tell,” says one alumna.) They have gathered for the biennial National Football Cheerleaders Alumni Reunion, and the room is crackling with the bubbly brand of energy that many of the girls call “sparkle,” which also serves as an implicit dress code. There are sparkles on dresses, sparkles on earrings, sparkles on stilettos. “It’s awesome to get re-united with my cheer sisters, as we like to say,” gushes Jennifer Hathaway, a former Atlanta Falconette whose eyes are dusted with sparkly shadow.
The ex-cheerleaders have been drawn here by their shared past—a collective nostalgia for their days on the sidelines, their moment in the spotlight. But despite their giddiness at being re-united, they know there is no escaping the present. Over the past year, the N.F.L. has faced a rash of lawsuits and ugly allegations over its treatment of cheerleaders. Five former members of the Washington Redskins squad say the team flew them to Costa Rica in 2013, stripped them of their passports, and required them to pose topless before wealthy fans. In March, former cheerleader Bailey Davis sued the New Orleans Saints for firing her over an Instagram photo she posted of herself in a lacy bodysuit. And in June, six former cheerleaders filed a federal sex-discrimination suit against the Houston Texans, alleging they were paid less than the state’s minimum wage and relentlessly body-shamed by the squad coach, who called them “jelly bellies” and “crack whores.” “I had no idea that once I became a Houston Texan cheerleader, all of my dreams would slowly be shattered,” one of the plaintiffs, Morgan Wiederhold, said at a news conference.
The teams have all denied the allegations, and the N.F.L. insists that it “supports fair employment practices.” The cheerleader alumni assembled at the reunion, meanwhile, aren’t eager to discuss the league’s #MeToo moment. “Since we’re being real and honest with each other, the last couple of years, there have been some controversies in the N.F.L.,” the evening’s co-host, Lisa Guerrero, chief investigative correspondent for Inside Edition and a onetime Rams cheerleader, acknowledges when she takes the stage. “I know that some of these controversies have been painful, and some of them have been difficult for us to deal with as a unit. But what I like to say to people is that had it not been for the background I had in the N.F.L., there’s no way that I could have been on television or have the sisterhood that we all have. We’re here to celebrate.”
Some women at the reunion say privately that they experienced similar mistreatment during their time in the N.F.L. But rather than sympathize with their modern-day “cheer sisters,” they seem intent on siding with their old teams. “None of this conversation about the pay, and the discrimination, and the treatment—none of that is new to me,” says Cathy Core, founder of the now defunct Chicago Honey Bears. “My feeling is that when you come into a group, you sign a contract. You know what you’re getting into. Nothing that you’re gonna cry about is gonna make it any different.”
None of that is new. Such dismissals contain a tacit admission of a deeper reality. The low pay, the body-shaming, the Draconian rules about appearance and behavior that apply to cheerleaders but not to players—these are not the work of a few rogue coaches or lecherous owners. The N.F.L.’s current crisis, in fact, is the result of a series of carefully crafted marketing plans put into place by teams across the league in the 1970s to sell sex on the sidelines. One by one, front offices from Buffalo to San Diego gave N.F.L. cheerleading an extreme makeover designed to tap into the fantasies of male fans. The move took place at the very moment that pro football was transforming itself into the world’s most lucrative sports-entertainment behemoth: All together, the N.F.L.’s 32 franchises are worth an estimated $80 billion, according to Forbes. To woo TV viewers, court sponsors, and boost their brands, teams systematically set out to turn their cheerleaders into sex objects—ones who would serve as cheap labor in the hope that the opportunity would rocket them to stardom in Hollywood or the media.
“They own you,” says Debbie Kepley, a personal trainer in Los Angeles who performed as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader during the boom years of 1976 to 1978. “Even though they wanted you to be a representative of the Cowboys, you were still just an accessory—a sideline accessory. It’s like being a Miss America—you will do anything they say to be a part of all of the glitz, the glamour, the cameras, the excitement and hope. That’s where they take advantage of people.”
Three sisters who joined the Cowboys squad after Kepley—Stephanie, Suzette, and Sheri Scholz—put it even more succinctly in their 1991 tell-all memoir, Deep in the Heart of Texas: Reflections of Former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. “It was a business,” the sisters observe, “and we were the merchandise.”
In the beginning, cheerleaders were neither modest women nor sexy women. In fact, they weren’t women at all. As college football took off in the early 1900s, enthusiastic male students in the then all-male Ivy League organically spilled out of the stands and onto the sidelines, becoming the first “yell leaders” and “rooter kings.” Perhaps not coincidentally, when cheerleading was a predominantly male activity, it carried considerably more weight. “The reputation of having been a valiant ‘cheer-leader’ is one of the most valuable things a boy can take away from college,” The Nation wrote in 1911. Though male cheerleaders endured at some upper-crust schools (think George W. Bush at Yale), there was a Rosie-the-Riveter-ing of the sport during the Second World War: as men shipped off overseas, women stepped into their saddle shoes.
Cheerleading hit the big leagues in 1954, when the Baltimore Colts cheerleaders became the first full-time squad in the N.F.L. Their look was more Jackie than Marilyn—letter sweaters, bobby socks, and homemade pom-poms. They got dressed in the stadium’s boiler room, recalls one Colts alumna at the reunion, all huddled around a single mirror. In what would become an N.F.L. tradition, the founding Colts cheerleaders were paid exactly nothing. Other teams soon followed suit, debuting cheerleaders of their own, including the Dallas CowBelles & Beaux , a group of coed high-school students who tumbled and made human pyramids.
Cheerleading retained its girl-next-door innocence until one fateful day in November 1967, when a Dallas burlesque performer named Bubbles Cash sauntered through the stands at a Cowboys game wearing a micro-miniskirt and carrying cotton candy. Photos from the game show the men around Cash going nuts; local newspapers crowned her the “belle of the football.” Cash, a canny crowd-pleaser, blew kisses to her admirers.
The unexpected sensation did not go unnoticed. Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ general manager, shared Cash’s flair for marketing. “Schramm was known as the P. T. Barnum of the N.F.L.,” says Dana Adam Shapiro, director of Daughters of the Sexual Revolution: The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. “He was the one who had the initial vision for showgirls on the sidelines of sporting events. He realized there’s a lot of downtime in football. It couldn’t just be guys on the field running into each other. You had to turn it into showbiz. And the cheerleaders were one of the ways that he turned it into the greatest show on earth.”
A former executive of CBS Sports, Schramm had already tailored the game to the TV era, helping to pioneer instant replay and create the Super Bowl, America’s most valuable sports brand. Now, inspired by Cash, Schramm re-invented the cheerleaders as sexy, glamorous, scantily clad showgirls, dressing them in the now legendary royal-blue halter tops, star-spangled vests, hot pants, and white go-go boots. “We had to tie the knot a certain way to give us the most cleavage,” recalls Kepley, who made the team in 1976. “Very few people had fake boobs back then. They were just starting to hit the market.”
Raised a scrappy latchkey kid by a single mom, Kepley was working as a clerk at federal bankruptcy court when she heard an ad on the radio for Dallas cheerleader tryouts. Women were asked to come dressed in short-shorts and halters, and to free-dance to disco music while the judges subjected their bodies to unabashed assessments. “We were supposed to be wholesome but sexy,” Kepley says, “like a Barbie doll.”
The new cheerleaders, in fact, were deliberately cast to fit a wide range of male fantasies. “Each girl’s ‘look’ was a part of the big scheme,” the Scholz sisters wrote in their memoir. “There was the long-haired blonde, the girl with the ponytail, the pigtail girl, the tall brunette, the perky little brunette, the bouncy blonde, the sultry redhead.” Guys in the stadium would fixate on their preferred type. “Men would be yelling down, Shake it, Stephanie! Shake it!” recalls Stephanie Scholz, who started out as a pageant queen in Lubbock before moving up to the Cowboys squad.
The new image was engineered especially for TV. Andy Sidaris, the director of ABC’s Monday Night Football, patented the “honey shot”—the practice of cutting away from the game between plays and beaming appreciative shots of the Dallas cheerleaders to millions of viewers across the country. “I got the idea for honey shots because I am a dirty old man,” Sidaris admitted from his control room in the 1976 documentary Seconds to Play. “You gotta show some girls—and occasionally we’ll get a football play in there.”
The N.F.L., meanwhile, looked on without objection. Schramm had personally given Pete Rozelle, the league’s commissioner, his first job in football, on the P.R. staff of the Los Angeles Rams. “Rozelle courted and massaged the television and Madison Avenue leaders,” Richard Crepeau, author of NFL Football: A History of America’s New National Pastime, has observed. Like Schramm, Rozelle “knew that sex sells.”
With the league’s blessing, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders—known reverentially as the D.C.C.—exploded into an all-out pop-culture sensation. They were featured on playing cards, inspired a TV movie starring Jane Seymour, made cameo appearances on The Love Boat and Family Feud, and circled the globe on U.S.O. tours at the express request of the Defense Department. And thanks to another of Schramm’s marketing schemes, they appeared on a splashy, unequivocally sexy poster meant to rival Farrah Fawcett’s famed 1976 pinup. The Cowboys tapped Bob Shaw, a Dallas-based freelance photographer, to stage and shoot the poster. Shaw says it was clear what Schramm was thinking: “We can get a million impressions out there. Maybe we can make a dollar.”
For ambience, Shaw fired up a smoke machine and rigged his studio with neon lights inspired by the lightsabers in Star Wars. He positioned five of the squad’s cheerleaders in a V formation, with their feathery Fawcett hair and barely-there uniforms, making bedroom eyes into his lens. “God, we got a gold mine here,” Shaw recalls thinking. “It was electrical.”
The poster was printed by Pro Arts, the same company that distributed Fawcett’s, and was sold nationwide among the whoopee cushions and fake poop at Spencer Gifts, wallpapering the bedrooms of teenage boys across America. Shaw received $14,000 for the shoot, and the Cowboys made at least $1.8 million from the poster. But when I ask Shaw if the cheerleaders shared in the revenue, he bursts out laughing. “Oh no,” he says. “I paid them more than anybody with nice catering. They didn’t get anything.”
At their peak, the D.C.C. as a unit were, by some calculations, nearly as famous as Fawcett herself. But while they were brand ambassadors and game-day draws and razzle-dazzle performers featured on nationwide TV, they were paid around $100 per season, before taxes—barely enough to cover gas to the stadium and dry cleaning for their iconic uniforms. As one former cheerleader told filmmaker Dana Adam Shapiro, “We became million-dollar showgirls who made $15 a game.”
The Dallas model of sexing up the cheerleaders sparked what Sports Illustrated called “the Great Cheerleading War of 1978,” as rival teams raced to match the Cowboys in displaying “belly buttons, busts, and backsides.” The Bengals dressed their squad in sarongs decorated with hand-painted tigers. The Chargers replaced their old uniforms of white leotards, pleated skirts, and tennis shoes with white briefs, blue satin halters, top hats, and gold lamé boots. “Everyone is trying to out-Dallas Dallas,” an assistant Falcons manager said at the time.
In Chicago, Bears owner George “Papa Bear” Halas declared that he wanted to have his own set of “dancing girls” on the field, to distract fans from a losing season. The team tapped Cathy Core, who had left a convent to coach cheerleaders for a church middle school, as founder of the Honey Bears. Halas, Core says, “knew right from the beginning that he had to give the people something more for their dollar.” According to Core, the team intentionally dressed the Honey Bears in a white one-piece leotard with a lace-up front to accentuate “the type of body we wanted to see in that particular costume: girls who could be a little more endowed on the top.”
Former cheerleaders say that while the teams dressed them like hookers, they were expected to comport themselves like virgins. To maintain the proper balance between sex and sparkle—to protect, in effect, the particular brand of fantasy they were creating—the Cowboys and other teams implemented a host of stringent rules. Most were pioneered by Suzanne Mitchell, a former P.R. executive whom Schramm put in charge of the D.C.C. Ostensibly meant to “protect” the cheerleaders, the original rules laid the groundwork for the kind of rigid policing that has sparked the present-day backlash among many millennial cheerleaders. No chewing gum. No wearing blue jeans. No appearing drunk in public. And absolutely no love handles.
In a precursor to today’s “jiggle tests,” Mitchell set rigorous body standards before “body-shaming” was even a concept. She instituted regular weigh-ins. “You would stand there and they would say, ‘O.K., I want you to turn around one inch at a time,’” Scholz recalls. “I am five foot five. I weigh 105. And they still wanted me thinner.” Mitchell created lists of what she considered problem areas and circulated them to the entire squad. “I was always on a list that said thighs,” recalls Dana Presley Killmer, who joined the team in 1980. Other lists singled out those who needed to slim their midsections, those who needed to lose 5 pounds, and those who needed to drop 10—all within days, or else risk being benched. “There were a lot of girls who got into eating disorders,” Scholz says—or diet pills and cocaine. Some lived on salads, yogurt, and beef-bouillon cubes plopped in hot water, when they ate at all. To shed last-minute water weight, Killmer encased her thighs in Saran Wrap, pulled on plastic dance pants, and rehearsed for hours. “We would go home and shower and be four pounds lighter,” she says.
Another of Mitchell’s rigid rules had a lasting effect across the N.F.L.: a ban on interactions between cheerleaders and players. Enforcement of the prohibition, however, was often skewed by gender. “A lot of the guys were cheating on their wives with the cheerleaders,” Kepley says. But if they were caught by the team, the cheerleader would usually take the fall. At the Honey Bears, Core recalls, “we had to let one of the girls go because she was in a pretty serious relationship with one of the guys.” But when it came to the player, the team did nothing. “Do you think I’m gonna bench him?” Jim Finks, the Bears’ general manager, scoffed at Core. “He’s not gonna lose his job.”
Dallas also pioneered the practice of boosting its bottom line by having the cheerleaders make paid appearances at events like car shows and golf outings. But as millennial cheerleaders now allege, serving as the team’s de facto ambassadors alongside fans, V.I.P.’s, and sponsors didn’t always feel safe. Mitchell banned appearances where alcohol was served and sent along bodyguards, but cheerleaders still remember how uneasy they felt at such events. As the Scholz sisters recount in their memoir, “One man flew a group of cheerleaders to Memphis to make an appearance at a huge indoor arena.” But that night, when they arrived, “there wasn’t anyone there except eight or nine of his close buddies rolling around in this huge building that held about 10,000.” The man “was loaded and just wanted to have his own little private personal appearance.” At one point, a fan began stalking Stephanie Scholz, waiting for her after games and calling her at night. “I can definitely relate to the MeToo movement,” Scholz says. “I was horrified. I had to change apartments and telephone numbers.”
Sometimes cheerleaders made extra money for such appearances—as much as $500 for an event. But in a trend that continues to the present day, they were paid little to nothing for their work on game days. For the Honey Bears, it was as little as $10 per game. In San Diego, “the girls were not paid a dime,” says Rhonda Crossland, former director of the Chargettes. While the team racked up millions, the Chargettes held car washes and bake sales to pay for their uniforms and travel to away games.
Lynita Shilling, who joined the Chargettes in 1977 at age 20, overlooked the lack of pay because she was an aspiring actress who hoped the squad would launch her career. “Now I see that the amount of time I put into it, the amount of dedication, the amount of volunteering for public appearances—it was just totally inappropriate and inequitable,” she says. “Man, they were getting a sweet deal.”
Back then, however, there were no N.F.L. cheerleaders filing lawsuits over pay. “I mean, what are you going to sue for? Back wages?” Shilling says. “There were no wages.”
In fact, it didn’t take long before N.F.L. cheerleaders began to fight back against the low pay and inequitable rules. Kepley’s breaking point came in 1978, when the Cowboys defeated the Broncos to win Super Bowl XII. After the game, the D.C.C. were rushed off the field at the Louisiana Superdome and ushered onto a waiting plane, where they were forced to sit for hours, without food or water. “I think it was because they didn’t want us back in Dallas celebrating, going to nightclubs,” Kepley says. “You still can’t convince me to this day that they didn’t keep us on that plane on purpose.” To add insult to injury, Kepley and her fellow cheerleaders were not paid a cent for appearing at the Super Bowl: their wages, it turned out, only applied to home games. “These guys get these $10,000 rings and these big bonuses, and they couldn’t even give us our $14.12,” Kepley says, referring to what the cheerleaders made for each home game, after taxes. “By that time a lot of us said, ‘This is shit.’”
That night, sitting on the runway in New Orleans, a group of disgruntled cheerleaders formed a rogue unit called Texas Cowgirls Inc.~Within weeks they were suiting up in shiny blue unitards and marketing themselves for public appearances. They served as the opening act in actor Gabe Kaplan’s Las Vegas show, and they re-created the official Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders poster for Playboy—minus their tops. The shoot featured Kepley opening a metallic jacket to flash one of her breasts. Cheerleaders from other teams also took part. Shilling, the Chargette, posed topless, seductively biting her lower lip. The motivation was simple: “I was getting paid,” Shilling says. “And I wasn’t getting paid for being a cheerleader.” Shilling received more than $1,500—as much as she would earn in 10 seasons on the sidelines. The check helped pay for her wedding.
The Playboy pictorial hit the league like a bombshell. The Chargettes not only fired Shilling, they disbanded the entire squad, even though the front office had known about the shoot in advance and encouraged the cheerleaders to participate. “I went straight through the front door,” recalls Jeff Cohen, the photo editor at Playboy who coordinated the pictorial. “I wasn’t creeping around trying to find these girls.” According to the article that accompanied the photo spread, San Diego was among the teams—including New England, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Seattle—that “extended Playboy every kind of courtesy.”
The Cowboys, who had originally recast the cheerleaders as objects of sexual desire, lashed out when others tried to capitalize on their newly sexualized image. Dallas spent an estimated $1 million suing the distributor of the porn film Debbie Does Dallas over unauthorized use of what looked like a D.C.C. uniform. The team also successfully sued Playboy photographer Arny Freytag for making the poster featuring the topless Texas Cowgirls. The lawsuits weren’t about protecting the cheerleaders from unwanted exposure—they were about protecting the team’s brand. As Freytag recalls, “I had to sit there and listen to the Cowboys’ lawyer saying, ‘Our cheerleaders are schoolteachers, and they’re churchgoers, and how dare this guy sexualize our group of perfect, innocent young women?’ And I’m like, ‘Wait a minute—you can’t put ‘em in these little skimpy outfits and have no problems with TV cameras being up their skirts half the time on the football field and blame me for it.’ That’s pretty hypocritical.” Or, as Playboy observed in a statement defending the disbanded Chargettes, “the Chargers—and other teams—have wrapped these enthusiastic young ladies up like candy every weekend on national television. All we did is ask them to remove the wrapping.”
The cheerleaders themselves understood what was at stake. “It’s an issue of ownership and power,” says Shilling. “Anything that takes away from their power and control is threatening to them. When we were featured in Playboy, it was a bad reflection on management.”
The key difference between Dallas and Playboy was one of audience. The Cowboys, who operate in the heart of the Bible Belt, were careful to package the cheerleaders to appeal to male fans, without drawing the ire of their wives or ministers. “The Cowboys weren’t dummies,” says Cohen, the Playboy editor. “Here they had big hair, big boobs, bouncy, smiley young women parading up and down the sidelines. They were well aware of what was necessary to get them the notoriety they were looking for—to drive ticket holders, drive eyeballs to TV, drive advertisers. They knew exactly what was going on.” Sex might sell, but when it came to the cheerleaders, the message was clear: the only ones allowed to sell it were the N.F.L.’s owners.
Ironically, as the years passed, the N.F.L. shifted in Playboy’s direction. Over the next three decades, the cheerleaders found their uniforms getting skimpier and skimpier—hot pants made hotter with V-shaped dips at the waist. Seductive posters gave way to swimsuit calendars and lingerie calendars. The pay, on the other hand, remained as low as ever, even as the league’s profits soared. In 1995, one squad of cheerleaders decided to do something about it. The Buffalo Jills became the first and only squad to unionize, demanding better pay and equal treatment. “We were just tired of being used and abused,” says Erin McCormack Oliver, a co-captain who helped spearhead the unionization drive. “We were unique, intelligent, talented women, and we wanted to be respected for that.”
The Jills, who were paid nothing at the time but one ticket per home game and a parking pass, managed to negotiate a paycheck of $25 per home game or personal appearance. But the victory proved short-lived. The squad’s sponsor, Mighty Taco, dropped the Jills after they unionized. “Just being professional was a bridge too far for them,” Oliver recalls. A local restaurant owner eventually agreed to step in, on one condition: the Jills must drop their union affiliation. Without the protection of collective bargaining, the Jills once again found themselves at the mercy of the owners. “We were back at square one,” says Oliver, who left the squad in 1999.
In 2014, the Jills made news again when they became one of the first N.F.L. squads to sue for back pay. The Oakland Raiderettes, who also sued, reached a settlement awarding them $1.25 million in back pay, or approximately $6,000 per cheerleader. But like the Chargettes before them, the Jills discovered that speaking up carried a heavy price: rather than settle, Buffalo simply disbanded the squad. Four years later, the case is still inching its way through the courts.
It’s impossible to determine how much money the N.F.L. makes off its cheerleading squads. The sale of swimsuit calendars, posters, and other cheerleading merchandise represents a relatively tiny source of revenue for most teams, according to Ray Katz, who worked as the N.F.L.’s director of marketing for 15 years. The chief money-making potential is corporate sponsorships for cheerleading squads—deals that can draw as much as $500,000 for a blue-chip organization like the Dallas Cowboys. Given the league’s outsize wealth, Katz says, it’s a “terrible business practice” to be paying cheerleaders as little as $25 for a two-hour appearance. He says the league should provide cheerleaders with a fair wage for game-day performances, and create a clear revenue-sharing plan for personal appearances.
In a sense, the true value of the cheerleaders is woven into the very fabric of the N.F.L. The league profits from selling a retrograde notion of masculinity—big, strong men, unafraid to take a hit, surrounded by enthusiastic, scantily clad women. In this model, paying cheerleaders next to nothing isn’t just a way to keep costs down; it’s an essential part of the N.F.L.’s brand. The cheerleaders don’t do it for the money. They do it because they love the team. They are where they belong, on the sidelines, ready and willing at every moment to support the warriors who are battling for supremacy on the field.
That’s why, 40 years after the N.F.L. decided to market cheerleaders as sex objects, it continues to police the personal appearance of squad members. Bailey Davis, the Saints cheerleader who was fired for posting an Instagram photo in a lacy bodysuit, says she was told it was “trashy and inappropriate. Meanwhile I’m posing for the team’s swimsuit calendar, and they’re making money off of it.” On the other end of the spectrum, Kristan Ann Ware, a cheerleader with the Miami Dolphins, clashed with the team for being too chaste. In a lawsuit against both the Dolphins and the N.F.L., Ware alleges that team management ordered her to stop discussing the fact that she is a virgin who is waiting until marriage to have sex because of her Christian faith. “We’re just trying to help you develop into a real woman,” Ware says she was told. (The Dolphins say they “do not discriminate” on the basis of gender or religion.)
Cheerleading alumni from the old days note that the outfits and routines have become more risqué than ever. “To me, they dance like a bunch of strippers,” says Kepley, the former Cowboys cheerleader. “They’re twerking on TV. It feels like lighting dynamite: When’s it gonna explode?”
The N.F.L., for its part, is exploring ways to turn back the clock. Over the summer, representatives of the 26 teams that have cheerleading squads were summoned to a closed-door meeting with N.F.L. brass to discuss the recent rash of lawsuits and allegations. In a reversal of what teams set out to do with cheerleaders in the 1970s, the league discussed making their image “less saucy and more family-friendly,” according to a source familiar with the meeting. Some teams are traveling even further back in time: this fall, the Rams and the Saints debuted the first male cheerleaders in N.F.L. history.
But teams continue to profit from marketing their cheerleaders as sex objects. A reality show on CMT called Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team, now in its 13th season, manufactures drama from body-shaming young hopefuls trying out for the D.C.C. Candidates with 20 percent body fat—well within the normal range for a healthy woman—are pressured to lose weight. In one episode, a team-hired “body-image expert” pinches the belly of a slender woman with flat abs. “You don’t want to put that body into that little tiny uniform,” he tells her.
The N.F.L.’s approach to cheerleading is out of sync with the future of cheerleading itself. Competitive cheerleading—a demanding sport that requires the athleticism and skill of professional gymnastics—has soared in popularity over the past decade. Today there are 1.25 million competitive cheerleaders in the United States, with competitions broadcast on ESPN to 100 million homes in 32 countries. “As someone who has been part of the cheerleading community my whole life and is immersed in advancing the sport, the recent wave of allegations from N.F.L. cheerleaders has been upsetting,” says Nicole Lauchaire, a spokesperson for the Universal Cheerleaders Association, the sport’s top organization. “However, in many cases, what these women are doing is not what we consider modern-day cheerleading; they’re entertainers.”
The former cheerleaders gathered at the reunion in Nashville don’t dispute that characterization. Many got into cheerleading because they enjoyed the way it made them feel about themselves. They did it, they say, for the same reason women rush sororities—for the gossip sessions and the post-breakup shoulders to cry on amid the clouds of hair spray in the locker room. What they remember most isn’t the way they were harassed or exploited or shamed. It’s the sense of sisterhood they felt. “When people ask me if I would do it again, I always say, ‘Absolutely,’” says Killmer, the Cowboys cheerleader who was ordered to lose weight in her thighs. “It was one of the best experiences of my life.”
Even Davis, who was fired by the Saints, speaks fondly of the way her Saintsations sisters would huddle together and support each other through all the abuse and the discrimination and the lousy pay. “This is horrible. I’m not coming back next year,” she recalls grousing with her squad-mates. “And then we kept coming back—for each other.”
