 Can I meet 40 here just looking over Sydney Harbour across to Watson's Bay and Listening to Sac scandal insisting sisterhood 50 years of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders Way from the Dallas courthouse through the Supreme Court where it would ignite a battle that's still raging Okay, so the Dallas Cowboys debuted their cheerleaders in 1972 It was the year deep throat hit American theaters launching a vogue for porno chic And it was the year title 9 passed opening the door for women and athletics The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders were a watershed to combining the precision of the East Texas drill team the Kilgore rangerettes with the class of the Radio City Rockettes and adding a dose of old-fashioned Texas razzle dazzle We're looking for an all-american Sexy girl Choreographer Texi Waterman once told a local news station taking a right out of that word sexy And this internal contradiction of being good Also a bit bad Innocence but also a bit dangerous became an essential part of their brand and their explosion To follow the Dallas Cowboy, so I don't think I've seen any Dallas Cowboys insignia regalia Since I've been in Australia. There was a name in the 1980s when Channel 4 In Britain started showing NFL games and Britain developed a large number of NFL fans But that fairly quickly died away when Britain started the Premier League Televising more of their own homegrown sports so Now the World Cup is going on right now. There are billions billions of fans, but When the Super Bowl gets played there may be four million people around the world Well, watch the Super Bowl live Right, so maybe 120 million Americans, but only about 4 million people around the world. So National Football League Like that's largely an American sport. I mean The English sports are far more dominant Generally speaking than the American sports They attract one more world attention So the NFL is just curiosity in England and in Australia and in Europe like when you when you see How many millions and billions of people watch the World Cup, right? Now the American sports of baseball and the National Football League just don't compete with that Sydney and Melbourne having big live viewings the soccer ruse of playing at 6 a.m. Sunday morning In the Darling Harbour, so I'm gonna try to get up early get over to the live viewing With my fellow fans in Sydney cheerleaders over the next half century is to watch the pop sexualization of television on billboards magazine covers Evolutionarily designed to sexualize women now These natural passions Making out DVDs that became a reality TV show Though their spot in culture is singular their struggles and triumphs speak to women's rising place in the world How we look how we behave? Women's rising place in the world That comes at the price Falling price place in the world in other areas such as the traditional woman who gets married has kids is a mother It's a women's liberation and feminism There are raised possibilities freedoms and social status for certain women Which is those who weren't going to be settled down by marriage and children But simultaneously lowering freedom status opportunities for other women and for certain men Who and what determines our value? These days they're seen as a legacy Okay, who or what determines our value our value is determined by what we do for other people So if your beauty provides joy and inspiration to people that's the power if your eloquence provides joy and inspiration to people That's a power if your confidence provides needed services That reliability to people. That's the power right now value depends upon what we can give to other people a Throwback to another era their instantly recognizable uniform was donated to the Smithsonian in 2018 a piece of American lore alongside Dorothy Slippers and Abraham Lincoln's top hat But the squad has also slipped from its pedestal Across the NFL the past decade has brought fair wage lawsuits sexual harassment claims Right, none of these things have reduced the pedestal of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders I mean who had the mind of pedestal anyway Aside from their sexy and fun to look at and bad press One of the things I was amazed at is in televised national football league games They only show that the cheerleaders for a maximum of something like one and a half seconds or two seconds. They have a limit For how long they'll show cheerleaders at a time and it's like really short of something like two seconds Professional cheerleaders for other teams are moving away from sexy sideline dancing adopting more modest uniforms and adding men to their squads Oh, yeah, that's great man. Nothing like adding men to a squad or modest uniforms or modest routines like adding adding a transactional to the squad. I mean That's really going to appeal to national football league fans line of Panthers recently brought on the first openly Trans cheerleader. Oh man, I bet that was a huge huge hit with the fans Nothing, I like more going to a football game and getting the feast by eyes on some delicious transsexual cheerleader Whether fans wanted these changes is another matter In February scandal hit the Dallas Cowboys when ESPN broke the story that the team's number one PR guy Richard Dowell Rimball had been accused of using his phone to fill Four cheerleaders in their dressing room back in 2015. Yeah, that sounds like something out of Porky's magazine Women have been posing for men And men have been taking pictures of women For as long as it's been possible Now this was apparently done without their consent. So yeah, that ends the whole different world Resulting in a 2.4 million dollar settlement The company line had always been that the cheerleaders were protected the extensive rules that had been put in place decades earlier Yeah, okay, you can try to protect people, but Just because you can't protect them perfectly isn't then all pointless Having rules procedures and ethos of culture right to protect women. All right, that's all a good thing But no no form of protection is going to be perfect Dictating everything from how the cheerleaders dressed to the way they conducted themselves off the field were supposedly for their own good Mentor guard their safety as well as their image Yet here was the team's own PR guy being accused of creating a PR disaster Wow, just imagine that an organization is not able to exert 100% control over all those employees at all times shocking Anything that is human is susceptible to corruption a squad that prided themselves on wholesome sexiness. This was seedy indeed The cowboys and so Skip Baylor says the best film about the National Football League and the best novel is North Dallas For he by Peter Gent a former Player for the Dallas Cowboys. I remember reading this novel in the summer of 1980. It kind of shook me up a bit Unflinching Accurate fair look at the Dallas Cowboys Buffalo looks like they're moving to nine and three. Yeah, they're just absolutely destroying New England Patriots Is is built ballot check just a 500 coach without Tom Brady? I mean it sure looks like he's just another guy just another coach a 500 coach without Tom Brady I'll rimble denied any wrongdoing But my phone blew up with cheerleaders I'd gotten to know during the year I spent interviewing them for the Texas Monthly podcast America's girls how had this happened had it happened other times on sports radio and Twitter and in casual Conversation, I heard questions that had dogged me since I'd started this project Did the world still need professional cheerleaders? Did we did we need them? They had entertainment Sports is also largely About community sports is about creating a sense of connection so People who go into a world that that feels disconnected All right, they want to connect And so that's probably the main power of sports Remember when I told Ford about Josh Allen Five or five years ago, yeah, Josh Allen quite the quarterback Looks like he's absolutely putting it to the Patriots Okay, I've been reading a great book it's called a soccer numics the 2022 edition by European men and American women and billionaire owners destined to lose so this book says that The world's most innovative soccer country is Germany and Ex-players have now lost their monopoly on managerial jobs So yes should not be written in stone that only former players can become soccer managers So the German soccer Federation now has a training course to certify professional coaches For people who did not play professionally So it helps to know the smell of the stables in professional soccer, but there's only one aspect of being a coach How you pedagogically analytically communicatively? Okay, how is soccer remains such an incompetent business for so long Well soccer clubs tend to hire incompetent stuff Baseball for a long time was just as incompetent Moneyball great book Michael Lewis asked why among baseball executives and scouts there really is no level of incompetence It won't be tolerated But the main reason was that baseball is structured itself less as a business or as a social club There are many ways to embarrass the club, but being good bad at your job is not one of them Greatest offense a club member can commit is not in aptitude, but just loyalty. So club members are selected for their club ability Clever outsiders are not clubbable. They talk funny. They go around pointing out the things that people inside the club are doing wrong so the staff Soccer clubs traditionally tend not merely to be incompetent They're also novices because the turnover is so rapid whenever a new manager arrives generally brings in his cronies and The media and the fans make it impossible for clubs to make sensible decisions. You're always hassling the club to do something immediately So it talks about a business executive Chris Anderson entered soccer specifically with the aim of making the game smarter His wife gave him a copy of Moneyball in 2009. He read it open mouth He began blogging about soccer data wrote a book The Numbers Game 2015 gave up his tenure job as an economist at Cornell Come managing director of the Coventry City in England's league one of soccer. He lasted only 11 months But I came away with some insights into why clubs don't think very hard It's hard to come across a singly a single innovative club anywhere in soccer The benefits from all the new knowledge in physiology psychology sports data organizational science Time is the greatest luxury in football European soccer clubs can be relegated which means financial disaster American sports usually free from that pressure So you find innovators in some NBA teams such as the Houston Rockets Yeah, this is a good insight if you do everything the same as all the other clubs then you can't be blamed or humiliated if things go wrong Most soccer clubs are packed because people have always done things the old way So everyone keeps doing the same things they've done forever. Even if they're things that never worked out Also, soccer has a masculine culture in a working-class industry that encourages stubbornness So it is now It's about two o'clock Friday afternoon here Try to catch up with the Plains not cooperating But anyway loving this book soccer numics Clubs with the most freedom to innovate or the clubs with no pre-existing culture So historically in Western countries attitudes to bankruptcy have been harsh I remember I had a history teacher at Sierra Community College He got a PhD in history and he did his PhD thesis on the very different way that America handles bankruptcy It gives people a second chance much more lenient than the way Europe handled bankruptcy So 19th century England bankrupts were still being sent to prison Over time Europe has become more like America T4C Bankruptcy increasingly is bad judgment when I was a kid. I read every NFL team basically just said hey, I'm Nate your old kid Can you give me anything? and They cooperate Well, I'm not sure you can do it, but I would tip you just to rip your first hot takes on every Aussie rules clubs Okay Not a huge Aussie rules fan Ah, I used to do that with all the TV stations I wrote to all the sportscasters and all the leading TV stations and radio stations in San Francisco And they all applied replied including the guy who called that famous Cowl Stanford game where a cow returned it for touchdown at the last second And they ran through the Stanford Stanford band so the radio announced I think Joe Starky he wrote me a postcard filled with tips on how to become a sports announcer And so all the TV stations sent me autographed pictures of their sports anchors Also, if you want to travel to England the English Embassy like just gives you tons and tons of stuff So bankruptcy is how soccer clubs tend to stay alive So 1979 US introduced the famous chapter 11 provisions that protect a firm from its creditors While it tries to work out a solution that saves the business so Britain Adopted that later Italy Germany Spain France adopted versions of these more forgiven for giving American bankruptcy laws and this has proved to be a giant boon to soccer clubs So in 1991 Ron Rhodes chairman of Crystal Palace Said on British TV the problem with black players whose heavily black team had just finished third in England Is that they're great at pace? They're great athletes. They love to play with the ball in front of them But when it's behind them as chaos, I don't think too many of them can read the game When you're getting into the midwinter, you need a few of the hard white men to carry the athletic black players through Oh disavow so racist. How could you say that on TV? So this interview was one of the last flourishes of unabashed racism in British soccer To the 1980s racism had been taken for granted pundits explained the curious absence of black players at Liverpool and Everton by saying they haven't got the bottle So I think bottle means strength So no bottle is a particular favorite for black players. It means a lack of concentration. Oh, no bottle. No strength and no stamina Have you heard that expression? No bottle and lack of concentration another racist trope about black soccer players You don't want too many of them in your defense. They cave in under pressure And there's a curious conviction that blacks are susceptible to the cold and won't go out when it rains Crazy, how could people think these ridiculous racist things? So as late as 1993 you can still witness the following scene in London God, I must prepare you. This is a racist scene right Crowd of people in a pub watching England versus Holland on TV Every time Jamaican born John Barnes gets the ball one man in shirts leaves in a tie just out of his city office Makes monkey noises Every time his co-workers laughed If anyone had complained let alone going off to find a police officer and ask him to arrest the man The response would have been where's your sense of humor? Boy? I'm sure glad that we move past that that kind of racist England Back in the 1970s. There are very few black players in English soccer And the two clubs in the 1973-74 season fielded any black players By 1983-84 there are 20 teams that did not field any black players By 1989 every team fielded at least one black player By 1992 when the Premier League was founded only five teams did not field a black player that season So 90% of the clubs were putting black players in the field on the first team So almost all these black players were born in Britain 90% most of them were strikers 58% there are no black goalkeepers are underrepresented in defense So only 1.6% of people in the 1991 British census described themselves as black It in the early 90s 10% of all players in English professional soccer were black by the end of the decade The share was 20% in 2021 the proportion of black players in the English Premier League was over 40% So the general obsession with changing managers same as changing coaches in American sports Is a version of the great man theory of history the idea that prominent individuals such as a Genghis Khan or a Napoleon cause historical change But I'll have you know academic historians binned this theory decades ago All right, when you look at the clubs who have won the European Cup since the competition began in 1956 All right, almost all the winners for the first 15 years Were dominated by the capital cities of fascist regimes All right eight the first 11 european cups were won by rioch madrid the favorite soccer club of general francisco franco or benfica From the capital of portuguese dictator salazar Seven of the losing teams in the first 16 finals came from fascist capitals By the start of the 1970s the dominance of fascist capitals was ending The teams from europe's remaining dictatorial capitals continued to thrive The totalitarian capitals got up to a great start in european cup The first 42 years of the european cup democratic capitals never won it so Provincial soccer teams are usually the most successful because they dominate their towns Okay I used to have a liveable dragon type t-shirt when he scored on brazil after a few cups ago I put on my ready liveable dragon t-shirt drag my Oh My balls on her face. Good times. Thanks, Michael Owen Just a normal day in paradise Okay So provincial western european cities Dominate the european cup and champions league Why? Okay, capitals tend out the greatest concentration of national resources. So why do their teams? Teams behave perform so badly All right, the main reason teams from democratic capital cities aren't So much up for winning right no soccer club matters that much in the capital city Just like los angeles didn't have an nfl team for about 25 years and it wasn't really a big deal So in the late 1990s a group of visiting fans from an english provincial town could wander down london's baker street Yelling their club songs are passed by so in their minds. They were shaming the londoners They were invading the city for a day making all the noise But to the londoners who are being shouted at many of them were foreigners They didn't care about or even understand the point that's being made So london paris musco don't need to win the champions league in soccer It's a different type of city where a soccer club can mean everything you need a provincial industrial town So these are the places that have ousted the fascist capitals as rulers of european soccer So by 1892 More 28 english professional clubs were from the north or the midlands So places that were poor That were Legacies of the industrial revolution and they still shape english fandom So the combined population of gradient greater mercy side greater manchester and lancashire county is less than five and a half million about 10 Of the English park don't you dare say that george w. Bush doesn't care about black people At the end of the 2021 season the top three teams in the premier league table the two manchester teams and live a pool Or based in the same region Right they have a century of brand building manchester united Is the most popular club on earth because manchester had been the first industrial city on earth At first 43 professional soccer clubs were within why do you think americans Why why aren't they amateur why don't they have amateur clubs is that What do you think they're being amateur and collegiate? Oh, well, there are plenty of amateur and collegiate sports They just don't attract as much attention So 43 soccer clubs within 90 miles of manchester Represent the greatest soccer density in the world Almost all of europe's best traditional soccer cities are industrial centers All right, they're industrial centers that sucked in helpless Villages right people came to cities that had industry to get jobs The newcomers cast around for something to belong to and they settled on soccer So sports and religion meet the same need for connection Right, you can move to a new city and find a synagogue or a church or You could support the soccer club right people want to belong So supporting a soccer club or going to church or a synagogue helps you make a place for yourself in a new city Real Madrid is the king of european soccer with 13 european cups It's the exception all the other major powers are provincial industrial towns, basalona, manchester, turin, munich, melan, inter and hamburg Also the smaller industrial cities, liverpool, glasco, noton, Birmingham, marseille, porto, nortman, einoven and rotterdam Of one 16 european clock Cups All these industrial cities have stories much like manchester's Peasants arrive from the countryside. They leave all their roots behind. They need something to belong to the new cities They can choose religion, but they usually choose soccer So soccer clubs arise soon after factories And this link between industry and soccer is universal across europe Industrial cities historically love their clubs most intensely Now the industrial revolution has ended and now i have empty docks and factory buildings But uh you still have fans who love their clubs So contrast these industrial cities with all towns with traditional upper-class streets such as oxford, cambridge, sheltnam, canvary, york and bath Right they don't tend to develop serious soccer traditions Their teams play in england's third tier league Now upmarket towns with age-old hierarchies and few incoming peasants People there don't need soccer clubs to root themselves So in many people's lives sports is the most important communal activity About a third of americans watch the super ball But european soccer is far more popular in the netherlands All right three quarters of the population have watched hollands at biggest games And in european countries world cups probably the greatest shared events of any kind and Is that the exact sequence of events that led uh trump? Having dinner with nick fuentes who invited the moon trump in trump and kanye knew each other and so kanye Was coming to have dinner with trump And then kanye got Got contacted with mylo who said bring along nick fuentes So do people commit suicide after major sporting events? The evidence says that sports tends to save more lives than it takes Because sports gives people community and meaning and purpose to their lives because of connection So typical soccer tournament or sporting event saves hundreds of lives Also sports provide an outlet for Primal tribal racial and national feelings So there are a few outlets Which permit open expression of tribal racial and national feelings sports is one of the few Perhaps the most powerful so you have a common interest and endeavor you fuse it with nationalism You have enhanced social cohesion and Decreased suicide so social cohesion. That's the key phrase here. That's the benefit that all sports fans get to enjoy So there are fewer suicides and the rest of us they get Social cohesion from fandom winning or losing is not the point you get social cohesion even when you lose nations Communities will frequently bond over a defeat in a big sporting event people cry in public They perform post-mortems in the office the next morning they hunt for scapegoats together and brings people together right so Losing matches does not make people in significant numbers so unhappy that they jump on buildings Right fans of long-time losers like the Chicago Cubs Boston Red Sox All right, they didn't kill themselves more than other people So it's not the winning that counts, but it's the taking part is the shared experience of sports ball That brings people together You wear the team regalia. You watch games together in bars. You talk about the team All right, you pull together this saves people from suicide and from loneliness There are fewer suicides in the u.s. on Super Bowl Sundays and on other Sundays, but there is more domestic violence so men tend to get Agitated and beat their wise When there's sports going on But with sport to get a sense of belonging it's a lifesaver Nothing brings a society together like a world cup with your team in at soccer ruse 6 a.m. Sunday here in sydney Right, everyone in the country is watching the same tv show Talking about it the next day of work Part of the point of watching a world cup is that almost everyone else is watching it too isolated people Types most at risk of suicide lonely people are suddenly welcomed into the national conversation They are given social cohesion even really awkward people even losers So big soccer tournaments Save so many lies because we all pull together. It's a universal impulse It often drags women along with it in a way the club soccer does not The only alternatives to this are probably war and catastrophe that create that sort of national unity So when John F. Kennedy was killed not one suicide was reported In the week after John F. Kennedy's murder because the whole nation pulled together in the u.s. After 9 11 right Had an all-time low in Course the 1 800 suicide hotline in britain in 1997 suicides declined after princess diana died So this pulling together through sports particularly suits individuals have poor interpersonal skills And these are Characteristics of severely depressed and suicidal persons. So you do not have to be charming To be a fan among fans All right, you can you can you can be welcomed to the club So Connects people That's what sports does That was cowboy cheerleaders My phone blew up with cheerleaders I'd gotten to know during the year I spent interviewing them for the texas monthly podcast americas girls How had this happened had it happened other times on sports radio and twitter and in casual conversation I heard questions that had dogged me since I'd started this project Did the world still need professional cheerleaders? Did we ever The cowboy's history books won't tell you the true origin story of the cheerleaders The dallas cowboy's cheerleaders began as the creation of one man texas e Shram reads a 1984 tome on the cowboys Nope try again general manager tex shram who helped launch the franchise in 1960 was a visionary a former cbs executive Who saw that the future of professional sports was television? And it's true. He kept the squad alive during the years when born again coach tom landry wanted them gone But the dallas cowboys cheerleaders are actually the creation of a few women whose innovative ideas and contributions have mostly been forgotten D brock was a woman of the world So tex shram once tried to show tom landry Debbie does dallas And uh tom landry took greater fans and walked out very quickly Is that in a world could be quite small for women? She got her phd in literature at the university of north texas after marrying long time dallas times herald columnist bob brock with whom she had three sons She taught high school english though. She later become a founding faculty member at the city's first community college el centro She was uncommonly beautiful Blonde and five feet seven and she modeled on the side She also had a sense of humor I don't really like girls that have that much breast Brock remembered legendary clothier stanley marcus once telling her as she prepped for a neiman marcus fashion show Well, i'm sorry. She replied but there they are Sometime before the cowboys second season in 1961 Shram tapped her for a big idea beautiful models on the sidelines Respectfully, brock told him this dog wouldn't hunt Models didn't move much and they required money something shram didn't like to spend She hatched a different plan recruit local high school girls Pay them with a couple of tickets to the game. Give them some kerchiefs and pom poms. It's free Shram placed her in charge and she spent the next decade trying to make this formula work though ultimately She recruited teenage boys for an experiment in co-ed cheerleading remembered mostly for its dumb name the cowbells and bow That is one of my embarrassing moments Brock now in her early 90s told me at her home in tyler The name was a pr guys stunt and sadly it stuck My teams were strong not bells and bows