Success and The Sis-Boom-Bah

Sometimes you can't lose for winning. Just ask a girl who's been thrown off the cheerleading squad of a National Football League team. Finding such a girl isn't too difficult. The controversy that resulted from our first pro cheerleaders pictorial (Pro Football's Main Attractions, December 1978) led to the firing of nearly 50 girls from six teams and a sudden outbreak of morality among N.F.L. management. (Commissioner Pete Rozelle met with the owners and then gave a nice speech to the press about their intentions to go back to selling wholesome American football without so many artificial sweeteners.) The reaction of the press to the firings was a mixture of outrage and amusement, but the over-all effect was to focus even more attention upon the cheerleaders. We followed the progress of many of the girls who'd lost their places in line on Sunday afternoon in last March's pictorial What Do You Say to a Naked Cheerleader? Goodbye! and found that being fired had often proved to be a blessing in disguise. The publicity led to better job offers, proving that the cheerleader concept could spill over into other areas of public relations.

Take, for example, the Texas Cowgirls, Inc. This group of 25 former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders had just formed their own corporation when we published pictures of six of them in December 1978. At the time, their founder, Tina Jimenez (who got the idea for the Cowgirls after she was cut--she says unfairly--from the Dallas rally squad in 1977), said the girls were trying to make ends meet doing department-store openings, T-shirt parties, charity softball games and the like. Now, little over a year later, most of the Cowgirls are earning more than $1000 per week. Obviously, Jimenez has been booking in a bigger league. "Being in Playboy last year really turned it around for us," she says. "Right away, we began getting bigger jobs for more money. The greatest demand was for the girls in the poster, especially Debbie Kepley and Linda Kellum." "The poster" is a story in itself, and one that illustrates the renegade cheerleaders' tremendous potential. When we asked the Dallas Cowboys in the summer of 1978 if we could photograph some of their cheerleaders for our forthcoming pictorial, they refused to cooperate with us. So photographer Arny Freytag did a spoof of the original bestselling Dallas Cheerleaders poster, using the bare-breasted Texas Cowgirls in place of Cowboys Cheerleaders. We published a picture of the poster and Freytag, in an agreement with Texas Cowgirls, Inc., began to market it for twice the price of the Cowboys poster. Freytag put out $25,000 of his own money to print it, but initial sales were spectacular, so he didn't worry about making his money back. Not, that is, until the Cowboys filed suit to prevent the poster from being sold, claiming that Freytag's satirical production was an infringement of trademark and copyright. Freytag claims he's exercising freedom of speech. "We know our poster was outselling the Cowboys' poster," says Jimenez, "and we figured it'd sell a million easy. Since the Cowgirls were to get 50 cents from the sale of each one, I think the Cowboys cost us upwards of a half million dollars." But she says there was a bright side to the story. "What we lost in money, we've made up in publicity." The publicity led to (among other things) six Cowgirls' appearing on the Merv Griffin show, six more opening comedian Gabriel Kaplan's show in Las Vegas, a six-week tour of Japan by a six-girl troupe, compliments of the Mitsubishi Corporation and the casting of ten Cowgirls in the movie North Dallas Forty, starring Nick Nolte and Mac Davis.

Now the Cowgirls are coming out with their own poster, and Jimenez expects to sell several hundred thousand over the next year. This year, the Cowgirls will also tour Europe and Australia, put on a show in Atlantic City and help promote nearly a score of automobile shows across the country.

Getting away from the 50-yard line has also proved profitable for Jackie Rohrs, who was fired from Chicago's Honey Bear squad last year after she posed for us. Jackie has her own cosmetic line, Jacquelyn K Creations, and she says it's been selling better than ever since she appeared in Playboy. And just for fun, she took up magician Bob Fellows' offer to be his (text concluded on page 188) assistant. Another fired cheerleader, Ita Siders, has also joined Fellows as an assistant. Because such nice things have happened to those who posed for Playboy, Denver Broncos cheerleaders Lynda Hatfield and Kim Smith risked almost certain cuts from the Pony Express by posing for this pictorial. Lynda has been the choreographer for that group for the past two years; she's now setting her sights on acting school. "After all," she asks, "how long can you be a cheerleader?" Reasons Kim: "Appearing in Playboy is worth more than being a cheerleader."

Still, everybody loves a cheerleader. Penney Miller found that out when she was axed by the Atlanta Falcons because someone wrote the management informing them that she had appeared nude in another men's magazine. Despite the fact that Penney signed her contract with the Falcons several months after she appeared in the magazine, the team fired her anyway. But she was immediately chosen for the Atlanta Hawks' cheering section, the FastBreaks. Not only didn't the Hawks see anything wrong with having Penney cheer for them but the whole city of Atlanta seemed to think she was special. She entered a contest to find Atlanta's Top 10s (a promotion for the movie "10") and was selected "the number-one 10." Falcons, eat your hearts out. As a matter of fact, look out, you N.F.L. owners; you'd better keep a closer eye on your $15-per-game cheerleaders. Some of them are sneaking away and getting rich and famous.