Spirit Club

By
Rick Brown

Clevelanders …  and by that I mean anyone who grew up within a 100 mile radius of this rust belt city on the lake … are known for two distinct traits: a sarcastic, biting sense of humor and an unyielding … almost self destructive … loyalty. Of course I’m generalizing here. But generally speaking most Northeast Ohio folks possess the kind of sense of humor necessary to survive the “Mistake on the Lake” … “Burning River” tormenting that still endures.
    
While I can’t speak for loyalties amongst Clevelanders’ friends and family, I can point out confidently their almost lemming like devotion to mediocre (at best) sports teams. The Browns, despite all their failings, still to this day have one of the strongest fan bases in the National Football League. As for myself … I try … and mostly fail … to distance my emotional involvement. But I am still watching my Tribe play baseball … just “putting the TV on” during Browns’ and even Cavaliers’ games. And the Cavs did not even exist while I was growing up 20 miles southwest of Cleveland … in then small town Olmsted Falls, Ohio.
    
All this loyalty spilled over to my school … to my enthusiasm for the Bulldogs … teams that, during my time, were a spitting image of the local pros’ frustration and heartbreak. I was briefly a Bulldog myself … track and football. I soon realized I was better suited for the band … even more so …the bleachers. I attended most games dutifully, even if the Bulldogs rarely won. These guys after all, were my classmates ... many of them personal friends. Hope endured.
    
I especially enjoyed basketball games. This was the game I dreamed of playing. The intimacy of being inside … close to family, friends and neighbors … seemingly sweating in your skivvies (1960’s uniforms certainly DID look like Fruit of the Loom compared to today’s oversized outfits) … there was an underlying vulnerability in the excitement.
    
To do my part … to help out the cheerleaders … to bring more fans together … I started a cheering section my junior year of high school. The school, nor any authority … had sanctioned this mind you. I asked no one’s approval. This was … and remains … my style and approach to things. This WAS the 1960s people! And to color outside the lines even further I dubbed my creation “The Spirit Club”. You know … team spirit … school spirit!!
    
I taught a group of about 20 or 25 … mostly boys … what I thought of as avant garde cheers. When the opposing team was being introduced we did the “Silent Cheer”. We’d all stand up and make extreme cheering gestures with our arms, hands and mouths while being totally SILENT. A couple games into the season I made signs that said absolutely nothing … with exclamation points for emphasis.
    
We had some less “out there” stuff in our repertoire. Like “We don’t mess around HEY!” We cheered with the cheerleaders. The Spirit Club had its gentle side … albeit not much of one. The piece de resistance however, was the rubber chicken with the noose around its neck. Whenever there was a questionable call made by an official, we would stand in unison, one of us would hold the noosed chicken high in the air, and we’d shout “We gotta ROPE! We gotta TREE! All we need is a REFEREE!!!”
    
And since this was an era of “school dress codes” The Spirit Club could not remain on the sidelines in this issue. So we all wore our school issued gym shirts and German army helmets. I got the idea for the helmets from the closing credits of the popular “Laugh In” TV series. At the very end of the show comic Arte Johnson, dressed as a World War II German army soldier (with helmet) would turn to the camera, while smoking a cigarette, and proclaim with a terrible accent “verrrrrrrry interrresting!” We all thought the German army helmets were a stroke of genius.
    
To celebrate the Cleveland sarcasm … after a devastating loss … one where the Bulldogs might never have been in it … I would stand and shout “Is THAT all there is to a basketball GAME?!!” Then the rest of the section would stand and we’d sing a little Peggy Lee!
   

“Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friend,
Then let’s go bowling (we changed this from the un-masculine lyric “dancing”)
We’ll break out the booze
And have a ball … if that’s all …
there is.”

Of course we did this not out of disrespect for the team that just got annihilated. We did it to be sardonic.
    
A little aside: I’ve got to come clean here. Everything except the army helmets, the blank signs and the Peggy Lee tune I stole from Berea High School. My family attended church in the neighboring town. So I had friends there. I went to a game with a few of them, saw their cheering section, and stole everything. Back then, without Twitter, Facebook, or even COMPUTERS, communities … for better and sometimes worse … were not interconnected like today’s “Hey I’m in Seattle so why don’t you break into my house while I’m gone?” immediacy.
    
I could label it “privacy”.
    
And I stole Berea’s shtick out of respect really. REALLY!
    
The Spirit Club got away with all this for 2 … maybe 3 games. The Assistant Principal stood at the end of the gym each time, sizing us up for a while. The community didn’t know what to make of us. We were I guess a little out of the ordinary (control?).
    
Around the 4th or 5th home game I noticed instead of the Assistant Principal … who was in effect the school’s “hatchet man” … so to speak … the Principal himself was glaring at us from across the gym. I knew him as a quiet, reserved, almost inconsequential gentleman. His assistant did all the dirty work. The Principal mostly kept to himself. His son was a year ahead of me. He was much the same as his father.
    
At halftime I wandered into the cafeteria for a soda pop. As I approached the line, the Principal strode up to me. His face was fiery red. He seemed extremely agitated.  He pulled me aside abruptly and began tersely informing me that I was misrepresenting the town of Olmsted Falls, shaming the school, etc.
    
This being my first ever conversation with the man I hardly knew how to react. Yet … in the rebellious tradition that was the 1960s, I tried to instruct him of my perspective.
    
“I’m not trying to represent anyone. I am an individual. We are just a cheering section trying to support our team.”

I got about 40% of those words out.

Then … in front of maybe 200 people … in the high school cafeteria … the school Principal SLAPPED ME …
 
… across the face.

HARD.

The cafeteria fell silent and people stared … ill at ease.

I was accustomed to getting hit with a board on the ass. Corporal punishment was no stranger to me … nor the Olmsted Falls School System … in 1969. Paddling … getting “cracked” … whatever you wanted to call it. It was there.

This was very … very different.

Ironically, both he and I stood there gazing at each other with much the same look of amazement, rage, vulnerability, and uncertainty as to what to do … like 2 fighters realizing the contest was a draw.

And as the Principal walked away classmates approached me as if I was now some sort of folk hero. Cheerleaders offered to testify in court on my behalf.

Word spread quickly to the gymnasium. Probably the only ones not knowing were the players. And in the middle of the third quarter the Spirit Club … in its entirety … slowly walked out of the building as the teams looked on in confusion. At the very end of our Spirit Club’s somber parade was Keith, the only African American kid amongst us, dragging the rubber chicken with the noose around its neck behind him.

Years later I learned … and I might have been the only kid in Olmsted Falls ignorant of this … that our Principal had been a prisoner of war. During WWII he was held captive in a German camp. And I still feel horrible about this. Being a dumb kid doesn’t cut it for this extent of insensitivity.
   
I was 17. I didn’t know. We were all dumb kids I guess. I’m guessing even Keith, a black kid, had little idea what symbolic image his was pulling that chicken across the basketball floor. Or maybe he did. All I know is that I did NOT feel like any hero that night. Because I wasn’t one.
    
Symbols can hurt. Flags, scriptures, legal documents, helmets, even rubber chickens with nooses around their necks … can all be used for good or for bad. No one knows intuitively what experiences others have had with symbols or what they represent to them. I learned that the hard way I guess.

The Principal and I never … not once … spoke to each other again. The Spirit Club was allowed to go on. We switched to beanies for our heads. Our cheers had to be approved by the Assistant Principal ahead of time. And while we were still “unsanctioned” I felt as if the authorities wanted us back in their gym … OUR gym… cheering on our classmates and friends.

Maybe we all learned a life lesson.

So for the next two years the “unsanctioned” Spirit Club cheered and hoped and cheered and hoped,

And just for the hell of it I invented a new cheer. It went like this:

 “DOUBLE A!  R D V A R K!  AARDVARK!! AARDVARK!! RAH! RAH! RAH!

The cheer meant nothing … it was nonsense. I suppose I just wanted to plant a seed in the Assistant Principal’s head … make him think I was being subversive when in fact I was merely being goofy. Give a 17 year old kid a Spirit Club … an unsanctioned one … and he’s liable to do almost anything.