It was a celebration of one of America’s beloved national sports in the same year as the country’s bicentennial; when the Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas Cowboys squared off in Miami for X in 1976, all the stops were pulled out and the nation waited, enthralled, for a surefire spectacle. Mitchell hugs cheerleader Toni Washington; speaking about the members of the squad, Mitchell says in the film: ‘They were what I was here for. I never thought about marriage.
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I had a lot of children, and I felt so deeply about them that they became totally and completely why God had put me here. And i believed in it so strongly that it was easy for me to give every ounce of energy I had to it’She went to New York for the federal court case – 1979’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders v. Pussycat Cinema – which ultimately ended in the team’s favor; the court ruled that the ‘white boots, white shorts, blue blouse, and white star-studded vest’ qualified as trademark, so the porn movie infringed upon the rights of the team cheerleaders. A settlement was reached with distributor Michael Zaffarano, and the easily recognizable outfits were deleted from the film.The whole ordeal saw her threatened personally, however, Mitchell says in the film.During court proceedings, she says, Zaffarano ‘jumped in the elevator, and I was there alone – and for some reason, the bodyguard wasn’t there.
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And he pulled out a knife from his boot and stuck it not in my neck, but right like he was going to – and I hit his arm and he didn’t drop the knife totally; he just let his hand go down. He started laughing and the door opened.’If Mitchell wasn’t fazed by the mob, however, she certainly wasn’t going to be intimidated by other threats to her girls.‘I went to Suzanne and told her I needed to get a divorce,’ Dana Presley Killmer says in the film. ‘I was terrified to tell her, but she was fabulous. She not only was supportive; she said that the Cowboys would help me – and she helped me find a roommate with one of the girls within the squad.’‘I had to do some bad stuff to her husband at the time,’ Mitchell says nonchalantly in the film. Share‘She had that Texas sense of frontier justice: “We don’t call 911,” he tells DailyMail.com.
‘For example, if your friend kept coming to practice with bruises on her face, and you knew that she was being abused by her husband you might want to hire some people to take that guy out to the desert and tell him not to do that anymore. Now, you might want to do that, but very few people would actually get it done.‘Suzanne got it done. She was their Mama Bear. And she was ruthless when it came to protecting her girls,’ Shapiro says.‘There’s really nothing you can tell me about Suzanne Mitchell, in terms of being this tough woman that’s going to fix a problem, that’s going to surprise me,’ analyst Hansen says in the film. ‘The women on her squad, that she looked at like they were her daughters if I was a guy dating one of Suzanne’s cheerleaders, I’d be real careful about making a mistake with that young woman.’The job did completely consume Mitchell’s time, she says, leaving no room for a personal life – and she did look at the squad as her daughters.‘They were what I was here for,’ she says in the film. ‘I never thought about marriage.
I had a lot of children, and I felt so deeply about them that they became totally and completely why God had put me here. And i believed in it so strongly that it was easy for me to give every ounce of energy I had to it.’The ‘mama bear,’ as one ex-cheerleader calls Mitchell in the film, also coached them through extremely sensitive and traumatic experiences – as revealed in one of the more jarring segments of the documentary.‘I was able to have empathy for what was going on inside of their heart and head,’ Mitchell says. ‘I was raped twice; I was 19 and 26 at the time. I didn’t have anyone, which made me know all the more how much people needed someone they could trust. Usually, they could never tell their families –but for some reason, they could always tell me.
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And I think mainly what they needed was to cry, to talk about it, to relive it, and to understand they were still here. They were still whole, and they were in a safe place that would always protect them. Shapiro says: 'As we began tracking down the original cheerleaders from the 1970s, a curious barrier kept popping up. They were all very friendly, eager to talk about the good old days, but nobody would agree to be in the movie unless we had Suzanne’s explicit blessing. Some of these women cheered for one season – forty years ago! And yet they still needed her permission. She really was the Godmother'‘”It will never stop you,” is what I always tried to tell the girls.
It doesn’t have anything to do with your growth, your ability to become who you’re supposed to become. We’re gonna learn something from it.’She felt a similar empathy for members of the US military, where the cheerleaders had legions of fans on bases and at outposts around the globe – and it’s when talking about trips to entertain the troops that Mitchell tears up in the film. She accompanied the cheerleaders on 18 USO trips.‘When I selected the girls to go on tour, I did not select the prettiest,’ she says. ‘I didn’t select the best dancer.
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March 2023
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