And a Big Sis Boom Baaah to Those Smart-Mouth CEOs

Now that Bernard Ebbers has been convicted of fraud in the WorldCom accounting scandal, I think it’s necessary to set the record straight on a comment made several times during his trial.

It’s about cheerleading.

Ebbers testified that he attended a 2001 WorldCom meeting in Virginia to “do my cheerleading” and “give my troops a little pep talk.”

His lawyer, Reid Weingarten, described Ebbers’ role as “playing essentially the WorldCom cheerleader” and not much else.

Last year, Phua Young, a former Merrill Lynch analyst who offered apparently misleading research about the strength of Tyco and Honeywell International, was fined for his role. The complaint against him? He was a “cheerleader,” said Barry R. Goldsmith of the National Assn. of Securities Dealers.

I’m sorry, but these fellows wouldn’t know what to do with a pompom if it hit them in the back of the head. And not one in the lot could carry off a split jump if his life depended on it.

So where do they get off disparaging cheerleaders? As a former high school cheerleader, I can say -- just as fast as I can still sing the words to our school song -- that all this is insulting to cheerleaders.

In the 1970s, when cheerleading was more important to me than grades, college, family and food, I lived the rigorous, disciplined life of a cheerleader. It was a tough, tough world.

Not only did we practice until our throats were raw -- “Beat ‘em, beat ‘em, defeat ‘em; beat ‘em, beat ‘em, defeat ‘em, beat ‘em Central High. GO!” -- but we all faced a draconian system of tryouts and cuts that made “The Apprentice” look like nursery school.

After we made the cut, we worked out until our muscles screamed with pain and the locker room reeked of BenGay. Next, we learned dozens of cheers, developed over the years and handed down by the oh-so-cool older girls. And then we had to know a lot about basketball and football, so that when we chanted, “Push ‘em back, push ‘em back, WAAAY back,” we weren’t cheering for basketball.

Finally, there were the uniforms. I still remember the little pleated skirt and snug blue top that showed evidence of every hot fudge sundae you ate back in July. Draconian, I tell you.

So big-shot businessmen can disparage their accounting roles in powerful companies and pretend that they just weren’t told the silly little details, and can see if they can get away with it anymore. But leave us cheerleaders alone. We ultimately passed math, no problem.