TO BE STEREOTYPED ON THE BIG SCREEN?

TEXAS CHEERLEADERS

Texas's bouncy spirit squad piled into Austin's Galaxy Highland 10 Theater on Feb. 23 for the local premiere of Man of the House, a new comedy that has Tommy Lee Jones wrangling five of UT's finest -- and flightiest -- cheerleaders. After the movie, SIOC sat down with four real Texas pom-pom pushers to set the record straight: Are all cheerleaders that stupid? Stylish? And do they really strip down to tube tops, panties and hair curlers while dancing to Gonna Make You Sweat? Here's what our girls thought of MOTH's Longhorns gals.

MYTH 1: Tommy Lee Jones explains that he's a Texas Ranger, and a cheerleader asks, "Do you know Derek Jeter?"

CANDACE POWERS: The whole "stupid" thing -- it's annoying, but we're used to it.

AMBER PRATT: I think we all came into the movie expecting that part to be way worse.

LAURA BINGGELI: They had to exaggerate it to make it funny. That's satire. But we understand that if we all got together, someone might see us that way. We're another animal when we get together; we get really silly. Silly, not stupid.

VERDICT: False, but we'll excuse the misunderstanding.

MYTH 2: The girls go Ron Artest on Jones when he bans sports-bra-and-panties combos in the house.

ALEX LEACH: We don't wear sports bras to class, but we wear less clothes than normal people --

AP: -- because we're used to it. That's what we wear to practice.

LB: And we just generally have really nice bodies, so we're not as worried about it. Cheerleaders have really good style. We had a party downtown a while ago, and just about any boy would have dropped dead if he'd seen how good we looked.

SIOC: So that male fantasy about underwear-only pillow fights is just a bitchy comment away from reality?

LB: Yep. But make sure to print that we're naked. We don't want to ruin any dreams.

VERDICT: Keep dreamin', boys.

MYTH 3: A bubbly cheerleader tells Jones to put on a "happy face."

CP: Oh, that was awful.

LB: My God. We saw them filming that, and that's when we started to get worried about the movie.

AL: That, and when it took Tommy like five takes to get his [Hook 'em] Horns right.

CP: But that "happy face" line is what really got us worried. We heard them doing that scene, and it became, like, Ugghhh!

VERDICT: Like, no way. Double ugh.

MYTH 4: The girls oversee Jones's date via hidden camera and advise him on the coolness of candles.

AP: We pretty much stay out of the lives of our coaches.

AL: Except for one coach. He was dating someone for six months --

LB: -- and we were in Pasadena for the Rose Bowl this year and he got dumped. The. Day. Be. Fore. The. Game. It totally brought us down. It was New Year's Eve. Oh, my God.

CP: She text-messaged it to him.

SIOC: So you are involved, then?

AP: The day before, he had asked some of us what portion of your salary is supposed to go into a ring.

LB: I guess our coaches' lives are kind of our lives, too.

VERDICT: Real. Very real. -- A.D.

TO SUFFER THE AGONY OF MAKING WEIGHT?

Cory Cooperman
LEHIGH '06, WRESTLING

Cory Cooperman is four pounds over, with 24 hours to sweat it off. The Lehigh wrestler is pulling a hooded sweatshirt over two other sweatshirts and securing the hood over a knit beanie. He's jogging in small circles, biking, shadowboxing, stumbling around with imaginary opponents. His pores are glistening. The more you sweat, the less you weigh, and Cooperman has to get down to 141 pounds. "By the time you get to weigh-in, you're drained, you're light-headed, your body is like Jell-O," he says. "And then you have to compete an hour later." Cooperman's face is red, and he looks like a Siberian refugee buried in all his layers. "My girlfriend gets tears in her eyes when she skips a meal," he continues. "She says, 'But I'm hungry; I haven't had lunch,' and I sit there and say, 'Yeah, imagine what we feel like.' We want to put holes in the wall."

The thermostat in this Lehigh gym is set to an NCAA maximum of 80°. The actual temperature ranges from 86° to 90°, depending on how many bodies are jumping rope, sparring or drilling each other into the gym floor, which is covered by a wrestling mat sticky from excess sweat. It's the evening before the Mountain Hawks' Jan. 14 match against Cornell, and the team is prepping for its fourth weigh-in in eight days. Team members are pressing into each other relentlessly, grimacing with every takedown. They've been starving all day. All week. All season. Their bodies are sinewy but worn. A weight management handout written by the coach instructs, "Don't eat because it tastes good. Don't be a victim of your desires." And should they desire a chicken wing, a slice of pepperoni or even a large glass of water, well, they'd be out of luck, because this is wrestling -- the only sport in which good coaches spend half their time with their team supervising nutrition. If they don't, the consequences can be deadly: In 1997 wrestlers from Campbell, Wisconsin-LaCrosse and Michigan died within a six-week period trying to make weight, the first deaths in wrestling since 1928. As a result the NCAA banned the use of saunas, rubber suits and artificial dehydrators such as diuretics and laxatives and moved weigh-ins to one hour before dual meets from 24 hours before.

"You have a match before you have a match: You have a match with the scale," says Troy Letters, the nation's top-ranked wrestler at 165 pounds. "You have to win the weight battle before you even get out on the mat."

After practice Letters and Cooperman drive to a convenience store and carefully select "dinner" -- each gets a sesame bagel with a dollop of cream cheese. At home they sit down at the kitchen table and pull out a canister full of a seltzer concoction that the two meticulously measure into eight-ounce tumblers.

"Coop's been in three weight classes since he transferred [from Minnesota]," Letters says. "He's pretty good with nutrition even though he can't make weight." In 2003, after winning the Eastern Intercollegiate title in the 133-pound class, Cooperman gained 22 pounds in the 12 days before his next competition, the NCAAs. On the day of the meet he was still three over. "I wasn't sitting there eating friggin' pizzas. I was just drinking water," he says. "It was the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me. I had to watch from the stands, and I sat there thinking, I'm better than that kid." His voice elevates. "Not making weight is like your tailback being busted for drugs the day before a big game."

The bagels go half-eaten, but the tumblers are drained. Cooperman pours another glass of bubbly and offers it to Letters, who backs away from the liquid as if it's gasoline. Cooperman looks at the glass and spits in it, then pours it down the drain. "Someday I would like to watch the football game with a bunch of beers and some honey barbecue wings from KFC," Cooperman says. "Instead we'll be watching the game with some water. Last year for the Super Bowl I made a veggie platter, and we were all sitting there thinking, Sweet -- carrots."

Finding activities to mask the stomach pain and distract from the dizziness and mental fatigue is half the battle in making weight. "We go to bed as early as we can before competitions so we can kill those hours by sleeping through them," Letters says. An avid fly-fisherman, Letters spends hours making lures; Cooperman spends hours watching Letters make lures. "We fantasize about things, and that's how we get through it," Letters says. "Like, when we're in the off-season, we enjoy a beer like no one else would enjoy a beer."

"In high school I used to take diuretics and laxatives, and my body took a licking," Cooperman says. "I didn't know what I was doing. Some people still take the easy way out. I'm not religious, but I pray and I know that because of what we do, God's going to be good to us when it comes to nationals. I know that because we're doing it the right way; we're not taking any shortcuts."

It is 10 p.m. The two excuse themselves to get ready for bed. When they wake up and step on a scale, they discover, to their great joy, that they now have mere ounces to overcome. Both jog and drill in the early morning, then head to the gym. They peel off their layers to near nudity and easily make weight. The reward? Another bagel, a piece of fruit and a glass of water, and seven minutes on the mat with an equally ravenous opponent. "I've seen people after they make weight. They gorge, and it hits them while they're wrestling and they throw up," Letters says. "Their bodies can't handle it." As Letters prepares for his match, he's asked how anyone could go into battle starved and mentally drained. He shrugs and says, "A hungry dog fights harder." -- Jaime Lowe

Issue date: March 3, 2005