Icon of Dallas cheerleaders is dead at 73
Suzanne Mitchell, the force behind the scantily clad chorus line that became world famous as the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, has died at the age of 73.
The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, her brother and only immediate survivor, WW Mitchell, said, adding she was at her home in Fredericksburg, Texas.
Mitchell was an administrative assistant to Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ original president and general manager, when the team office was swamped with calls after one of its cheerleaders was captured winking suggestively — and uncharacteristically — into a television camera during the 1976 Super Bowl.
Maybe, Schramm figured, there was more to cheerleading than met the eye. He decided to capitalise on the emerging synergy between television and professional sports by enlisting performers on the sidelines to complement players on the field.
He designated Mitchell, a former public relations executive from New York, to transform the team’s fusty cheerleader squad. She proceeded to more than double its size, from 14; gave them skimpy new costumes; recruited a choreographer, Texie Waterman; and staged a photo session for a pin-up poster.
She had created what would become a pop culture phenomenon. A new era in sports entertainment, branding and marketing had begun.
Declared the “most famous group of cheerleaders in the world” by Edward J Rielly in his Football: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (2009), the Cowboys’ revamped cheerleading squad kicked off the 1978 season of Monday Night Football with a television special titled The 36 Most Beautiful Girls in Texas.
They went on to appear on the television series The Love Boat and in a commercial for Fabergé shampoo. They inspired two TV movies and a 1978 pornographic riff, Debbie Does Dallas, which prompted a lawsuit from team officials.
Distinguished by their white hot pants, short vests, exposed midriffs and white vinyl go-go boots, the Cowboys Cheerleaders (as well as the raft of copycats they inspired) delivered to football fans what one commentator described as “a little sex with their violence”.
To guard against a backlash in the Bible Belt, applicants had to be 18 to 26 years old and respectable: a full-time student, or a wife and mother, or someone holding a full-time job. They did boot-camp training and Dale Carnegie personal development courses, paid US$15 (475 baht) per game, and were barred from being seen in costume with alcohol, gum or cigarettes.
The cheerleaders would also double as goodwill ambassadors. Mitchell would accompany them on morale-boosting visits to hospitals and nursing homes, and to entertain troops abroad.
They were not without their critics. John Madden, when he was the coach of the Oakland Raiders, complained that the emphasis in sports coverage had shifted to “choreographers instead of coaches”. But Mitchell had ready responses. “I would call after I’d get a letter and ask what the letter writer had been doing on Christmas Eve,” she was quoted as saying in The Dallas Cowboys: The Outrageous History of the Biggest, Loudest, Most Hated, Best Loved Football Team in America (2012), by Joe Nick Patoski. “Then I would tell them there were 12 girls who were in the DMZ in Korea performing in minus-20-degree weather serving their country.”
Suzanne Mitchell was born on July 7, 1943, in Fort Worth, to Willis Wilson Mitchell, a commercial pilot, and the former Nell Mitcham, a nurse.
She graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in journalism. She married after college and moved to New York, where she worked for magazine publisher Ziff Davis and an ad agency and did PR for the US Olympic ski team.
When Schramm called her in the mid1970s (she had been referred to him), she was a New York Jets fan and had never heard of him.
“He asked me what I wanted to be in five years,” she recalled in the Texas Monthly interview. “I said, ‘Well, your chair looks pretty comfortable’. He slammed his fist on the desk and he said, ‘You are hired’.”
Mitchell remained with the Cowboys as director of the cheerleaders until the team was bought by Jerry Jones in 1989.