Hip hip hooray

I spent pretty much all day Saturday at a cheerleading competition in Columbus, Ga., thereby earning my spot in Heaven.

Have you ever been to one of these things? It is madness. Hundreds of teenage girls screaming and dancing and cheering and doing backflips, while the people in the stands go crazy.

Well, the moms go crazy. The dads just sit there with a blank look and think, “What in the wide wide world of sports is a’going on here?” That, and “Why is my daughter’s cheerleading skirt so short?”

It’s mostly good clean fun, though occasionally a team will come out that looks like it’s been practicing its routine around a stripper’s pole. All that’s missing is a guy named Axl in the DJ booth saying, “Let’s show these ladies some appreciation,” as he spins another Motley Crue tune.

Lest you think I’m a pervert, I was there because my daughter is on one of those competition squads. This is a new concept to me. When I was in high school, our cheerleaders didn’t compete in anything, except maybe to see who could ignore me the most. But this stuff is a big deal.

A couple of my co-workers expressed surprise when I told them I would be at the competition. It seems my alma mater, the University of Georgia, was playing some sort of football game against a school from a neighboring state that afternoon, and they thought I would be watching. Luckily, I don’t really follow college football that closely, so I’m not even sure how the aforementioned event turned out.

(Sonofa@#$#$^%@#%^@blanking#%^@#!@#@!#bullsh^*&$%^&#$^!!!).

But I really didn’t even consider not going to the competition. I have probably been to 99 percent of the soccer, baseball, basketball and football games my kids have played in, plus every honors night banquet or All A's breakfast. I don’t think it makes me a better dad than those who don’t go. I go because I want to. It probably means more to me than it does to them.

I try to be a well-behaved parent, because I don’t want to end up on one of those YouTube videos, being pulled off a referee with my short torn and my lip bleeding and a redneck mama from the other team throwing a lit cigarette at me. But it’s not easy.

I was at one of my son’s basketball games last year and one of the dads from our team got mad at the refs, and went a little crazy and started yelling, and then the other team’s parents were yelling at him, and I thought, here we go. He’s going to get in a fight, I’m going to have to come to his aid, and my mug shot will be on the Nancy Grace show with the words “Middle school parents go berserk” scrolling underneath. But luckily he calmed down and I could sit there and continue to pretend I didn’t notice any of it.

I guess the closest I came to an incident was when my daughter was about 7, and her soccer team was playing one of those traveling teams, where the parents are all insane and they make the kids practice five times a week in the hopes that they’ll get a college scholarship, ignoring the fact that they’re SEVEN YEARS OLD.

Anyway, this team was up on ours about 20-0 and just pouring it on with two girls who must have been the twin daughters of Pele’, so I sauntered over and with a friendly smile said to their coach, “So, are you going for a world record?” One of the coaches got really angry and called me a loser and told me that his girls were winners, and he was not going to stifle them just because a loser like me was whining about it.

Whoa. Them’s fighting words. But I didn’t fight him. I just walked away, and later on he came over and apologized, and said he just got so intense during the games that his emotions got the best of him. I imagine he’s somewhere in a straitjacket by now.

There’s no such danger of anything like that happening at a cheerleading competition, partly because I really don’t know what’s going on. I watch my daughter’s team, and I think she does great, and I’m so proud of her, and as long as nobody falls from one of those human pyramids they do and gets hurt, I consider the event a success.

I guess that’s just my loser’s mentality at work.