Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders put in the hard yards to enact meaningful and lasting change

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of their most famous album, My Chemical Romance turned Black Parade into a theatrical show at the Hollywood Bowl last week. In this lavish production, the emo icons cosplayed as a marching band trying and failing to overthrow the evil dictator of a totalitarian state. On one of the nights, their efforts culminated in the band being mowed down by a squadron of demented cheerleaders brandishing machine guns, clad in skin-tight blue and white uniforms.

That attention-getting plot twist immediately yielded a cease-and-desist letter from the Dallas Cowboys because women in those colours are synonymous with only one NFL club. And you do not mess with Texas. They might not have been the first to introduce a troupe of ladies waving pom-poms on the sideline to add some presumed cabaret to the proceedings, but they are the most famous of the genre. A brand in a league of its own with three seasons of a hit Netflix reality show, a signature Barbie doll, and, as of last week, a freshly minted trade union, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Association.

A cultural phenomenon beyond sport, the Cowboys cheerleaders now fighting for better pay and conditions came into being when the club’s first general manager Tex Schramm had a chat with a local high school teacher and part-time model named Dee Brock. Scrambling to add some ersatz glamour to a team about to start its second season in 1961, the innovative Schramm charged Brock, the wife of a Dallas Times Herald journalist, with assembling a squad of young girls capable of reciting cheers to accentuate the atmosphere, just like at local high school games. He had asked the right woman.

“Brock had once landed a spot as a ‘bathing beauty’ in a Dallas summer musical, where she turned heads as one of only two women audacious enough to wear a bikini,” wrote Sarah Hepola in Texas Monthly. “That revealing number made her a celebrity in local modelling circles. She wanted her cheerleaders to get that same kind of attention. She also wanted the cheerleaders to be dancers, to put on a show.”

Evincing a shrewd eye for what the predominantly male and increasingly voyeuristic fans wanted in the Swinging Sixties, the Cowboys eschewed the traditional conservative outfits high schoolers wore back then and went for a much racier look. The hip-hugging hot pants and cleavage-revealing bolero top tied just under the breasts, an ensemble that now hangs in the Smithsonian as a historical artefact, inevitably raised the hackles of many in the Bible Belt.

“This is showbiz,” said Brock, in response to the prudish critics, “this isn’t cheerleading.” As if to prove her point, she then brought in a former Broadway dancer to teach her proteges proper footwork and synchronised leg kicks straight from the chorus line. Pre-match entertainment would never be the same again, especially after one of the ladies winked lasciviously at the camera during Super Bowl X, causing every half-cut football fan watching at home to think she was looking directly at him.

The earliest iteration of the Dallas cheerleaders was supplemented by a quartet of men and, against Brock’s wishes, styled as “The Cowbelles and Beaux”. The unwieldy name and the lads were eventually jettisoned, as the women were on the way to being known and loved nationwide as “America’s Sweethearts”, and Brock was using her own influence to effect serious political change. In 1965, at a time when a lot of Dallas remained segregated as per the rules of the Jim Crow South, she hired Frances Roberson, an African American choreographer, and then forced the Cowboys to hire black cheerleaders for the first time.

“Had it not been for Brock’s insistence of having someone of colour on the team, it would perhaps have taken even longer,” said Eunice Taylor-Cicero, one of those who broke the racial barrier. “She had such a warmth and such a way of making you feel part of the team, and, trust me, in the ’60s, it was very different, very turbulent.”

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When Brock died a few weeks back at 96, her obituaries were inevitably headlined by the way she changed the sidelines of the NFL forever. A part-time gig worth just $600 a month dwarfed everything else on a lengthy resume. But in the other half of her life, the native of Oklahoma had an even more enduring social impact. Having got a PhD in English, she became a founding faculty member at El Centro Community College in Dallas, and then dreamt up an entire slate of classes in different subjects that ran for free on public television channels across America for decades. In the pre-internet age, her vision and imagination made accredited third-level telecourses accessible to those stuck at home and transformed tens of thousands of lives.

Befitting somebody capable of making that type of impression, Brock eventually gave up the Cowboys and moved to Washington to bring her knowledge of educational programming to PBS, the most cerebral of America’s television networks. Still, her contribution to gridiron lore was never forgotten. Four years ago, a squad of cheerleaders past and present boarded the team bus and made pilgrimage to the home where she had retired. Acknowledging the key role she played in changing all their careers, they buzzed affectionately around their founder and presented her with a lifetime achievement award. A bedazzled football glittering with rhinestones. Because Texas.