created by Switch_Empty on 24/05/2023 at 02:35 UTC
70 upvotes, 2 top-level comments (showing 2)
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Comment by Georgy_K_Zhukov at 24/05/2023 at 14:51 UTC*
60 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Cheerleading as we know it developed in the late 19th century as part of collegiate sporting contests, and those contests were [American] *football*. The nature of those sporting events lent itself to accompanying spectacle, and by the early 20th century, much of the conventions that surround college football today were quite entrenched, with marching band performances, drill squad demonstrations, and of course raucous crowds led and directed in their noise by cheerleaders (which were often heavily male. Mixed cheer squads were common, but the default to female cheer squads were still mostly in the future).
Until the 1950s though, college football *was* football, and the professional game of the NFL was a decided second fiddle for consumption of the sport. As such, it heavily took its lead from the college game as it tried to establish itself on a national stage. At the earliest, this can be seen in emulation of collegiate teams with some NFL squads adapting their own 'fight song' a la college and in turn the arrival of marching bands who tried to provide a similar atmosphere, and halftime entertainment. This in turn led to the addition of cheering squads, the first of which was brought on by the Baltimore Colts in 1954 (although from what I can find, at least ad hoc usage was being done prior, as a Rams fan was complaining in 1950 about the *"obnoxious creatures who cavort about the stadium like so many flea-ridden apes and by dint of the most asinine ruses and schemes, exhort their sheep- like adherents to a game-ruining frenzy"*. They, and the other teams that followed suit early on, generally didn't have their own squad, but instead would bring in high school cheer squads or drill teams who volunteered for the role.
It was the arrival of the AFL in 1960, and the challenge it presented to the NFL, that kicked cheering into overdrive. The AFL wanted to get parity with the NFL which required building up its fan base quickly. The NFL wanted to beat them back, which meant expanding to more teams... who also needed fans. This saw expansion of the cheer squads to more teams, including the Dallas Cowboys "Belles and Beaux", although formation using local high schoolers remained common. By the 1970s though, cheersquads started to professionalize, with the Cowboys doing so in 1972. 21 NFL teams had them, and more and more they were moving away from the "conservatively dressed teen-age girls", as was described the Miami Dolls, to the primary duty of "looking sexy", as was described the 49ers "Nuggets". Combining traditional cheering with drill squad, and also dance squad, from then out out cheering in the NFL started to form into what we think of it today (although there is interesting controversies about the sexifying, such as the Broncos disbanding their squad in 1980 after some posed in Playboy, and bringing back the high schoolers).
To be sure, this isn't to say that baseball was *100 percent* immune to cheerleading - crowds *do* cheer after all - but professional baseball dates to before cheersquads became a 'thing' and the conventions of the game, and of watching it and when and how to cheer, were well established by the early 20th century. And of course baseball was *well* entrenched as the premier major sport of the country! There wasn't any particular *need* to ape the conventions of somewhere else to try and grow is popularity! That doesn't mean no one tried... as apparently there were some brief attempts in the 1920s, they were not popular and quickly disappeared. It is perhaps best explained by how 'traditional' cheer squad style cheering doesn't really fit the tempo of a baseball game, and as such those squads were less about pumping up the crowd for the home team than in guiding them in hurling insults at the visiting squad.
But the competition factor also just can't be ignored. Just as the NFL aped the conventions of college football to try and emulate that experience, and just as baseball *didn't* similarly feel the need to imitate a competitor that, in those days at least, they didn't feel threatened by, the spread of cheering beyond football likewise aligns heavily with being the upstart. Pro-basketball is the other big locus for cheer squads in the US, and they were imitating the NFL just as the NFL had imitated college. The Bullettes, of Washington, were one of the first, launching in 1977, and closely followed by the Lakers and Hawks. Soccer, trying to make its mark in the US, also saw cheer squads in the NASL by 1979 (although I don't think that ever really took hold in Europe, where they have their own, different, cheering traditions). And of course, while they might not have cheerleaders in the sense that you mean (sexied up women with pom-poms), I would note baseball in the US *does* have groups whose job it is to pump up the crowd between innings. Mascots doing funny dances on top of the dugout, a crew who shoots a t-shirt cannon in the middle of the 5th or maybe gives away some tickets for trivia answers (in DC called the 'NatPack'), the Brewer's 'Sausage Race'... Baseball *has* developed its own style of crowd-pumping, just an independent tradition, and while it is somewhat outside the history of the *cheerleader*, it would be interesting to see how closely those developments similarly mimic the above pattern of needing more 'butts in seats', and baseball putting on more spectacle correlating to its declining marketshare versus other sports in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st (much of the development being from the '90s onwards, a lot falls on the wrong side of the 20 year rule, alas).
So why do some sports have cheerleaders and others don't? The most enduring line to trace is that of collegiate events and its impact on the broader sporting culture in the United States. We see cheering develop concurrent with college football, and from there enter the world of professional sports via the NFL (and AFL) as they sought to provide both a similar experience to the college game, as well as compete with college, and with each other. Other sports (primarily basketball) similarly emulated as they tried to attain national prominence and build up fan support, but we must also remember those were games where action was fairly fluid, and continual, and keeping crowds pumped up and on the edge of their seats - and then entertained at halftime - meshed well with what a cheer squad had to offer, and in turn helped with the development from traditional, collegiate style cheering to the modern 'sexified' version which pulled heavily not merely from cheering, but dance and drill.
Other sports simply didn't latch onto it for a variety of reasons. Outside the US, there simply wouldn't be the tradition of it, cheering as we think of it being *very much* American, and only really introduced to Europe in the latter half of the 20th century, and established sports such as soccer or rugby having their own well developed cheering traditions. While cheering is more common in American sports, baseball might at first seem prominent in its lack, but it is hard to see why they *would* have added it. By the time cheering was really developed in the early 20th century, let alone when it really made the jump outside of collegiate sports in the post-WWII era, baseball a well established professional sport with its own traditions for how a crowd would act, not to mention a longer, slower pace of play that didn't lend itself well to the continual pumping up of a cheer squad. And while we can see more recent developments in crowd engagement at the ballpark, and likely trace similar patterns of competitive need, there is no real reason that cheerleading ought to have established itself as a standard part of the baseball experience in the 20th century.
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Primarily drawing on Mary Ellen Hanson here. Her *Go! Fight! Win! Cheerleading in American Culture* is one of the key books on the development of cheering, although I would note as I don't have a copy handy, I'm relying on her Dissertation that the book was developed from. Also drawing some from McClellan's *Sunday Game: At the Dawn of Professional Football*, Surdam's *Run to Glory and Profits: The Economic Rise of the NFL During the 1950s*, and Harold Seymour's *Baseball: The Golden Age*.