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Crowe Axes Cheerleaders, Final Shreds of American Goodwill

By Matt Hinton

To paraphrase James Hampton:

Oh I ain't saying you did or you didn't. All I'm saying is that you could have robbed banks, sold dope or stole your grandmother's pension checks or started a terrible rock band or chucked a phone at a hotel employee and none of us would have minded. But kicking cheerleaders out of a football game, man, that's un-American.

Not that, uh, Russell Crowe actually is American, or that the "football" is question here is the variety typically covered by Sunday Morning Quarterback. But, dammit, if one owner can ban cheerleaders, then the global anti-pom campaign may not be lagging far. Remember: they hate our right to jiggle. SMQ was silent when they attacked "sexy" cheerleading in Texas, but this, friends, is a cancer that must be stamped out:

The Oscar-winning actor, who is part-owner in the South Sydney Rabbitohs club, said the club had become concerned that the cheerleaders -- whose uniform includes fishnet stockings and tasseled miniskirts in the white, green and red team colors -- were inappropriate entertainment.

"It makes women uncomfortable and it makes blokes who take their son to the football also uncomfortable," Crowe was quoted as saying in News Ltd. newspapers Friday.

"We examined game day and wanted to contemporize and make the focus [on] football," he said.

A team of percussionists will replace the cheerleaders, the club announced this week. The club's Web site invited drummers to audition.


Corker of a twist, mate, she'll be apples! At last our day to barrack again!
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There are certain things in every man's life he must stand up for, that move him to risk his livelihood for principle, and protecting the freedom of cheerleaders to leap and gyrate as they see fit at a football game - any football game, anywhere, in which cheerleaders have ever participated - ranks high on SMQ's list of said values. Without cheerleaders, the world is that much closer to a dark future of frustrated, spirit-less chaos and despair; such a world, in fact, hardly constitutes existence as we know it. Join him in his call to athletic organizers across the globe, beginning with the scruffy star who would fascistically march one of Western culture's most cherished and buxom traditions out of the stadium and into the underground: Save the cheerleader, Crowe, save the world.