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What they introduced was sex and glamour into the gladiator arena of modern sports. We didn’t know that we had introduced something new to football.” Texas Stadium erupted in a joyful noise she can still hear, fifty years later. “And all of a sudden, we heard noise from the fans, and we’re going, like, ‘What’s going on?’ ” Baker told me in her honeyed twang. This moment in 1972 marked the debut of a bold experiment, a very Texas hybrid of pageant beauty, good-girl etiquette, and come-hither slink.Īs the drums of the live band started to pound, the seven cheerleaders burst from that tunnel. It’s tough to remember in our skin-saturated age, but cleavage and bare midriffs weren’t just unusual back then-they were scandalous.
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The Dallas Cowboys had had cheerleaders before, including a group of high schoolers in bobby socks and pleated skirts who yelled “Charge!” They didn’t dance, and they didn’t wear that. Each of them stood in that tunnel, staring at the artificial turf and the stands of a new football stadium named for the state whose glory it hoped to capture. (Actually, eight did, but an aspiring model dropped out before the season began.) They would become known as the Original Seven: Baker, Anna Carpenter, Rosemary Hall, Dolores McAda, Carrie O’Brien, Deanovoy Nichols, and Dixie Smith. More than a hundred showed up for tryouts only seven made the cut. Earlier that spring, she’d heard a radio spot on the local station KVIL announcing that the Dallas Cowboys were looking for a new kind of cheerleader-dancers, that was the idea. She was one of five raised by a single mom in South Dallas, on the wrong side of the tracks in a status-obsessed city, but Baker had a quality you might call sparkle. The twenty-year-old was short and skinny, and she used to shimmy to James Brown in her living room as a kid. This was 1972, and Vonciel Baker was nervous about the crowd. A plunging royal blue crop top knotted at the rib cage, just one suggestive tug from coming untied.
SWISH AND FLICK PROFESSIONAL
On a sweltering Saturday in August, seven cheerleaders stood in the tunnel of the new Texas Stadium, just beyond the city limits of Dallas, wearing a uniform unlike anything that had ever been seen in professional sports: White go-go boots that zipped up the front.