THE best part about Saturday's final regular season game for the UH men's volleyball team (besides the bodacious garlic fries at the Special Events Arena snack bar) was the home crowd. It welcomed the players with warmth and enthusiasm. After the four-game win against USC, it piled on the leis -- making the necks and shoulders disappear from graduating seniors. In between, when things looked bleak, it would spontaneously chant, "Let's go, Bows!" or erupt into catchy, rhythmic clapping. Leading the cheer
for equality in sportsThe fans knew exactly what to do, even without the relentless rah-rah-rahing and enthusiastic directives of the UH cheerleaders.
Don't worry. This isn't going to be a scathing indictment of the superfluous role of university pep squads in collegiate sports. If grown men and women want to bounce around and yell like they're on mega-doses of vitamins and anti-depressants in order to win scholarships, more power to them. Whatever it takes, baby.
I do, however, have a problem with girls on high school and junior varsity pep squads, and women on professional sports cheerleading teams, whose primary role seems to be gyrating around in seductive clothes for the benefit of male players and fans.
This long-tolerated antiquity came to the forefront last week, when Julian Guthrie of the San Francisco Examiner wrote about Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, Calif.
The majority of the school's 14 cheerleaders -- all young ladies wearing short maroon-and-blue pleated skirts and wielding pompons -- are hu-hu, because the administration has ordered them to cheer for the girls basketball team as well as the boys basketball squad.
What's the big deal? The directive seems fair and makes sense if the true purpose of a pep squad is to be, if you'll pardon the expression, an athletic supporter.
But note some of the catty comments made by the disgruntled cheerleaders, their parents and their former coach on this added responsibility:
"I don't mind cheering for girls, except for the fact that the only people who turn out for those games are the girls' moms." -- Thea Singleton, cheerleader.
Oh Suzannah, how amazingly perceptive of you. Maybe the girls basketball team intuitively sensed that most of the pepsters didn't want to be there. Or perhaps the gal players were startled by having so much attention and support heaped on them from the sidelines -- other than by their mothers, of course.
THEY'LL get used to it. And so will the Tamalpais High cheerleaders, who like other pep squads in this nation had better get used to somersaulting and screaming for female athletes, too.
Better yet, why don't we pass a national law that all cheerleading teams -- from junior high to professional level -- be co-ed, so that pep squads aren't perpetuated as moving Playboy magazines, existing primarily for the sheer enjoyment and titillation of male jocks and voyeurs?
Or is that still the main reason for cheerleaders to exist?