Cheer

My wife insists that, while our daughter may look like her, she has my personality one-hundred percent.  That helps explain how Clare and I decided, without telling one another, to start watching the six-part Netflix documentary “Cheer,” about a community-college cheer squad in Corsicana, Texas.  

The danger is to generalize about college cheerleading from this particular story.  I want to call cheerleading redneck ballet, and I think it is in Texas along with other points south and west.  That said, one of the people followed throughout the series is from Chicago’s West Side by way of suburban Naperville (interesting backstory, that).  And correct me if I’m wrong but all the Big Ten schools have cheerleading squads that do much of the stuff shown on “Cheer.”

And how do I explain what’s shown?  That, my friends, is one tough question.  At least in softball, virtually every player comes away with a batting average and/or an earned-run average; in cheer, all the participants are running and jumping and tumbling in pursuit of perfection as determined by some very subjective judge(s).  Great cheerleaders are like great offensive linemen.  If you can pick out one, you can pick out the other.  Maybe.

The football analogy fits, though, because cheer is one injury-prone activity.  Consider that one of the routines involves forming pyramids 2-1/2 people high (the half because the top person rests on another person’s thighs as opposed to her shoulders) and the people on top are called “flyers” because they fly back down to earth once the routine finishes.  They also crash down if anyone beneath them buckles or for some reason doesn’t catch them during other routines.    If you love concussions and joint injuries, cheer is the sport for you.

The level of conditioning is extraordinary—everyone has muscles, to the point I’d argue female participants have less body fat than classical ballerinas and more muscle, as you might expect with gymnasts.  Because the female cheerleaders are going 20-25 feet into the air (for example, they do a somersault to the ground after being held up by male counterparts who are holding them, with hands above their heads, to put the flyers up into the stratosphere), they tend to be smaller than ballerinas and thinner than conventional gymnasts.  And they do all this without ever having a chance to record a base hit or strikeout.

Again, the danger is to generalize from the story at hand, and even that one requires care.  A number of the male participants are gay.  How many?  More than in football or basketball or baseball or softball?  I can’t honestly say.  But at least three of those other sports, the male-dominated ones, have never been known for tolerance in matters of sexuality.

Cheer is different.  For me at least, it was fascinating to watch the interaction of straight and gay athletes in pursuit of a common goal.  After the national competition in Daytona, one of the cheerleaders considers joining the military, both for himself and his country.  “I love America so much,” he says.  Watching athletes in high school and college, I always got a strong sense of patriotism.  The person who professes his love of country in “Cheer” is gay.  There may yet be hope for the future.

All of which brings us to the coach; here I can generalize.  She is a type, as all coaches are, and she happens to be one who will have her people do pushups when someone makes a mistake.  And like all coaches with a hint of humanity about them, this one cares about her athletes, to a point.  She sincerely wants them to succeed in life, just as she wants them to avoid injury.

But like any other coach of a sport (and this documentary has convinced me what these people do is a contact sport onto itself), she’s willing to put her people at risk in the name of winning, and she’s willing to push the envelope, to be creative, in finding the right routine that will win her squad a trophy.  Coach doesn’t want anybody to get hurt, but she’s ready to improvise when it happens.

Clare played for people like that.  I watched her play for people like that.  Only the action on a baseball or softball field is contained.  What cheer squads do is controlled chaos, bodies in seeming perpetual, gravity-defying, motion until the music stops.  You won’t ever hear me knock the sport of cheerleading in its modern, 21^st century form.

Neither will that virtual clone of mine, I’m sure.