Logically, you’d think competitive sports would have been invented first. But cheerleading, in its most primitive form, was here long, long before the football, the game clock, or even Lou Holtz.

I imagine a little boy in animal hide shorts surveying the prehistoric prairie and yelling desperately, with a slight Jurassic lisp, “Run, Uncle Ugh! RUN!!!”

Final score? Saber-Toothed Tigers 1, Caveman 0. (A good cheer can do only so much.)

Or maybe the cavemen played a game of Hides vs. Skins while cavewomen encouraged them with “a tisket, a tasket, put the rock in the basket,” back when “the rock” really was one.

Did you know that near Sydney, Australia, they’ve found fossils of pompoms made out of Wooly Mammoth hair? They haven’t, but maybe one day…Just sayin…

We do know that cheerleading was re-invented, big-time, with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who in 1972 eschewed the Eleanor Roosevelt quality of cheer for something a little racier. Like skin. And white go-go boots. And no “two bits, four bits” cheering.

For all practical purposes, cheer as our grandparents knew it died that fall nearly 40 years ago, thanks to white patent leather, mid-drifts, and the kinds of cowgirls Roy and Ritter and the Durango Kid sang about wistfully on those long, lonely nights on the prairie, down 10 late to the Redskins and facing third-and-long.

But that’s not the only kind of cheerleading done in Dallas today. Last weekend I was exposed to non-exposed cheerleaders, ages junior high to high school, in something called competitive cheering. This sort of thing has been going on since the 1950s or so but, like the World Football League and disc golf and the Raiders’ move out of and then back to Oakland, I missed the whole entire thing.

What I saw at the Dallas Convention Center over three days were more than 3,000 cheerleaders — 225 teams, give or take a ponytail — competing at the National Cheerleaders Association’s 30th annual championships. That’s substantial rah-rah.

My first impressions are that this is much harder than it looks, that toe-touching, basket-tossing and pike-kicking “as one” takes a lot of practice, and that estrogen as a force grows exponentially. If you are ever in the way, move, or there will not be enough of you left to scrape up and put in a shoebox.

The Ruston High team I supported (by watching, not by actually lifting anybody) won a national title and a third place. I suspect more North Louisiana schools will get in on the action; the “problem” is that it really is hard. But as with any challenge, if you give a child enough love, give them some hope and some instruction in something they really care about, kids will surprise you with what they can make happen.

Speaking of, let me offer props to the man who invented the whole competitive cheer concept. He is Lawrence Herkimer, inventor of the “Herkie” jump who, as an SMU cheerleader, organized and led a cheer camp in 1948, drawing 52 girls and one boy. The camp grew by seven times in one year. In 1986, he sold the NCA and his cheer supply company for $20 million. With a patent on the pompom, Herkie is the man, the guy on top of the cheer pyramid.

Sunday, I saw people lined up 45-deep to buy T-shirts. Impressive.

If I were “Herkie,” I would “Rah!” my ownself. I would cheer me.

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(First published in the Sunday editions of The Times of Shreveport and The News-Star in Monroe March 10, 2019.)

From 100 yards away you could see them all, the last of the family and friends, some still visiting and some now walking toward their trucks and SUVs in dark suits and dark dresses and wool coats on this cool and breezy late-winter, partly sunny afternoon.

None of them had expected, last week at this time, to be here. But a mid-morning plane crash on the final day of February took the lives of two men who were close friends and the friends of many, Ricky Lennard and Scott Hollis. They were athletic, good-looking guys who could get along with anybody; I knew Scott a little from Louisiana Tech and Ricky a little better because the youngest of his three boys, Alan, big brother to Molly, was one of my Little Leaguers, back when Ricky and I were around 40 and our boys were 9 and didn’t yet know about girl problems, the cost of replacing your transmission, or health insurance deductibles.

Until Wednesday I had not seen Alan or Molly or their brothers in years. Today the three brothers wore dark suits and shades. They could have been Secret Service agents, and I wish they had been but they weren’t. They were instead three handsome guys who’d drawn short straws and were at a Shreveport cemetery at this tragic time because of the Fates and nothing more.

So, the human condition and mortality being what it is, hundreds of family and friends were, on back-to-back afternoons this week, at a service similar to the one we’ll each be the guest of honor at one day.

Wednesday before getting back into my car at the cemetery, I looked back across the clipped grass, the plastic flowers of pink and red and orange and white standing neatly at attention in bronze vases on every headstone, the American flags waving here and there, the hearse resting and polished after having done its duty, the day ending, the mourners leaving, a contradiction to spring and new beginnings being right around the corner.

Back home I went straight to a box I keep in my garage. In two minutes I’d found what I was looking for, an old baseball scorebook holding the names of guys who’d brought me so much joy, back in another place and time.

It was 20 years and 11 months ago on this very day — April 6, 1998 —when some of these people at the cemetery now were at the Shreveport Little League ballparks for the season opener between the 9-year-old Orioles and Astros.

One of those Orioles was Alan Lennard.

He let me hug him Wednesday, not 10 feet from his daddy’s casket. He’s no longer a left fielder, first baseman and occasional pitcher. He’s 30 and a Navy Seal.

“Back when y’all were little, your dad thought like I did,” I told him. “We wanted you and your friends to have as much fun as possible with ball or together or whatever, to enjoy being boys, because we both knew life can get messy down the road.”

“We didn’t have a care in the world back then,” Alan said, and he smiled like you do when you’re suddenly old enough to look back 20 years, at all you’ve lived and learned.

Alan was quick to smile back when he was a little Oriole, but he was quietly intense too, in uniform. I looked back in my scorebook and saw he’d knocked in the winning run for us in the final game of the regular season, a 10-9 victory over the Hated Braves, who’d rip us up in a couple of weeks in the postseason tournament finals.

Because of Alan and his little Baseball Men friends, that tournament was one of the great weeks of my life. Six games in seven days, including a 13-10 victory on the mound for Alan against the Diamondbacks in a game he had to pitch because we were low on arms with all these games so close together. I told Ricky the day before because life can get lonely when you’re 9 and all alone on the mound and you haven’t pitched much.

Ricky was easy-going and had three other children and plenty of experience in these situations, and he shrugged his shoulders and smiled, just as I knew he would. “Sure,” he said. “Get him out there.”

That was 20 years and nine months ago, June 6, 1998. I guess it’s stupid that I remember stuff, but maybe it’s not.

Before leaving the cemetery I was lucky enough to notice two babies in carriers, grownups smiling at them and the babies smiling back. They’ll find out that living life under the rainbow means troubles don’t always melt like lemon drops, that while it’s our turn to drive home from a cemetery today, one day it won’t be. I hope that life for those babies is filled with friends and smiles.

Meanwhile we live the days, grateful there are so many better than bad ones, and we soldier on, pitch by pitch, trying to be a good teammate, a shoulder for sad times, an encourager, grateful for all the wonder life holds, and grateful for the time we’ve been given to share it.

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