2-4-6-8 WHAT DO WE APPRECIATE?Gender role reversal, that's what! On

DEPENDING on who you listen to, Rob Bell has either got to be gay, or he has the best job in the world. Opinions about Bell, a 28-year- old African-American, are not hard to come by. Not because when he was in college he nearly became his football team's mascot - a giant cuddly spider;

nor because Monday to Friday he works as a budget analyst for the American government.

But because, on the weekends, Bell has a rather more unusual job. On every alternate Sunday, from September through January, Bell is one of only 12 male cheerleaders in all of professional American football.

When the team he works for, 2001 Superbowl champions, The Baltimore Ravens, play at home, Bell dons a purple and white tracksuit and takes to the field to dance, tumble, perform acrobatic stunts and generally shout at the top of his voice in front of 70,000 fans.

All of American football's Shrek-sized players, from the 32 nationwide teams, inspire divine worship, and Barbie doll-shaped women waving pom-poms have always danced on the sidelines in adoration: cute cheerleaders recognised for wearing cleavage- enhancing tops and tightfighting shorts or mini mini-skirts.

No one would claim that the gridiron game has ever been a home to innovation or trendsetting ways, Janet Jackson's controversial 'wardrobe malfunction' at last year's Superbowl notwithstanding (for this year's Superbowl, next Sunday in Jacksonville, Florida, organisers have booked the super-safe Paul McCartney as the half- time entertainment to avoid anything close to last year's debacle).

So where exactly do male cheerleaders like Bell fit in, and why does only one professional American football team have them? As Bell himself laments, "We are the only professional male cheerleaders in all of America."

If the idea of male cheerleaders in American football sounds odd, the fact that they originated in Baltimore is even more bizarre.

The city is a depressed-looking place just north of Washington DC, whose weather is on a par with that in Ballachulish.

I have been invited to a Ravens' home game to watch the male cheerleaders perform, and to talk to them about their stereotypechallenging role.

I arrive by train and from the point at which it slowed on the outskirts of the city, street after street, block after block was filled with burnt-out and boarded up houses: the bad neighbourhoods and crumbling streets of a city that has the third highest murder rate in America.

Once you leave the train station and head downtown to where the Baltimore Ravens' gargantuan, grey stadium is, you pass even more neglected properties and graffiti-covered walls. It is only when you reach the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Baltimore's shiny new harbour development of trendy shops and fancy seafood restaurants, that you feel you have made it into the 21st Century.

Earlier in the week, I had met all of the cheerleaders at one of their twice-weekly practice sessions in a downtown gym. Bell told me then, "You try what we do for even ten minutes and you'll have a whole new respect for it."

'Trying it' was never on my mind, but I want to meet these dozen proud men who, according to both them and their female colleagues, still endure sexual slurs and not very subtle innuendo, yet who get to work extremely closely with a group of drop-dead gorgeous, and very supple, if surgically enhanced, young women.

The male cheerleaders' coach, 33-year-old Napoleon Martinez, meets me at the door and escorts me to the sunken basketball court where 44 dancing girls (and 12 guys, lest we forget) are removing tracksuits, adjusting halter tops, stretching, wiggling, giggling and warming up.

Standing 5' 8" and weighing 200lbs, with a 46" chest, Martinez could easily be mistaken for a weightlifter or successful personal trainer. He looks in great shape and, until he retired from being an active cheerleader two years ago, he had been cheerleading since the age of 21.

In America, nearly every college with a football team has mixed cheerleading squads but, until The Ravens arrived on the scene, there had never been any men on an NFL cheerleading squad. Nevertheless, Martinez was initially reluctant to become even a college cheerleader because of what he calls "negative perceptions".

"Everyone assumes that all male cheerleaders are homosexual, " he exclaims, when we are sitting at a fold-up table on the basketball court a few feet away from all the other now dancing cheerleaders.

Was being gay an accusation that bothered him? "After I got involved I didn't care. You are always going to have those idiots who refuse to accept this is every bit as athletic as any other sport. I won't go so far as to say that cheerleading is a sport, but I will be the first to say that every aspect is athletic. You need to have the grace of a ballet dancer and a gymnast, the agility of a wrestler and the brute strength of a football player. You need to put all those together to do what we do."

It has to be said that what they do is not just pom-pom waving and high kicking with the best of them. Male cheerleaders are there to throw girls in the air and, hopefully, catch them when they come down. And while they do perform acrobatic tumbles, back-flips, somersaults in mid-air and encourage the fans to cheer, their main duty is to be the muscle on-hand to perform a multitude of strength- sapping stunts.

These include basket-tosses, where a group of guys link hands and throw a girl lying horizontal on their hands high into the air and catch her as she comes back down; 20ft-high pyramids with girls balancing precariously on the backs of other girls already standing on the shoulders of two different guys; and one-handed lifts, which are exactly that, and require the most individual strength of any of the stunts.

The guys perform with only 14 of the female cheerleaders who have all chosen to work with them in what is known as the stunt team, rather than just be dancers.

The Ravens' 12 male cheerleaders are unquestionably fit guys: their average height is just short of six foot; they have expansive, toned chests measuring as much as 46" ; they can all easily lift their own body weight above their heads; and all weigh at least 200lbs. It is lifting women rather than weights, and doing it in multi-coloured tracksuits while smiling constantly, that makes them different from the other men working out in the gym; although, Martinez insists, there is some definite skill involved in this particular strongman act.

"When I first tried it, I thought, 'Oh, I can do that. I played all the sports, I'm strong, I can do that real easy. I tried it. . . but I couldn't do it, " Martinez tells me. So did you drop the girls, I ask. "Oh yeah, " he says casually.

So apart from lots of practice, what does it take to be a good male cheerleader? Martinez thinks for a moment then, rather than physical abilities, he talks about the mental ones.

"You need to be open-minded to accept the role you are taking on, " he declares. "You need to have the mental fortitude to know you are going into a situation where there are still a lot of negative perceptions about it. People will make assumptions about you without getting to know you. If you can get past that, what male wouldn't want to be around 44 of the most beautiful and in-shape women three times a week for three hours?" He has a point.

During a break from practice, I ask Bell what his motivation is."I just like to cheer, " he says rather softly. "And we have a great team. I love the camaraderie on our squad and right now I've got 12 great guy friends who are like my family, and if I need fashion advice I've got 40 girls to ask.'

The cheerleaders' mother hen is Tina Simijoski, herself a former professional cheerleader.

Simijoski, 38, has been in charge of the programme in Baltimore since its inception. As we watch her dancers practise their routines, Simijoski explains that because Baltimore's president introduced male cheerleaders as soon as the team arrived in the city (they previously played in Cleveland, Ohio, but that's a whole other story), the fans accepted the revolution on the sidelines of their sport.

"It worked for us because we did it as soon as we got here. Would it work for the Dallas Cowboys? Well, I would guess probably not, " she says, acknowledging that for some, cheerleading is just about "tits'n'ass", and perhaps for Dallas most of all. Their dancing girls are known for their gravity-defying breasts, near-invisible costumes, pert bottoms and tumbling blonde locks: the stereotypical cheerleader and every male American football fan's lazy, lustful fantasy.

But Dallas is not alone in presenting a squad of women who could keep the readers of FHM or Playboy happy for several consecutive months.

Barbara Zaun, who runs the Philadelphia Eagles cheerleading squad, sums up the feeling of the other NFL teams with regard to the sexual make-up of their cheerleading squads. "Our fans want to see women, " she says. So women - on the sidelines, on postcards, in swimsuit calendars - are what the other 31 teams give their fans.

Even the Tennessee Titans who flirted with male cheerleaders for a single season decided to revert to an all-female squad last season.

"We always review what we do after each season, and I think the decision was that we would, instead of gymnastics, emphasise dance routines, " was the only statement the Titans' PR man would offer when I enquired as to why they had called time on their dancing boys.

Somewhat ironically, the whole cheerleading phenomenon began early in the 20th Century in American high schools with men - and only men. They were employed as 'yell leaders' and through cardboard megaphones, they would yell at the crowd to cheer, or they would spell out the names of teams by the letter and encourage the crowd to follow. "Give me a P . . .

give me an H . . . , " and so on.

Even America's current leader, President George W Bush, used to be a male cheerleader in high school. When he attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, an all-male, private boarding school, Bush was apparently a better cheerleader than an athlete.

"He was an average athlete, " recalled former pupil, Doctor Richard Clapp, who graduated from Andover a year ahead of Bush. "He was definitely not that good." So he stuck to cheerleading and became the lead cheerleader for the school's football team in the mid- Sixties.

But in mixed-sex schools, women were soon added to the sidelines to further encourage crowd support, but without as much emphasis on looks. It was only when television got involved that programming chiefs and advertisers demanded cheerleaders be brabusting babes.

When I arrive at The Ravens' stadium, Martinez escorts me into the bowels of the arena. We walk for ages through a vast concrete tunnel which loops the ground to reach the cheerleaders' dressing room: past laundry rooms, weight rooms, steam rooms, the players' dressing rooms, camera crews, police officers, stretching players and some of the uniformed male cheerleaders themselves on their way to meet and greet their fans.

Martinez says proudly, "Our male cheerleaders are as important a part of our programme as the women, and are treated as such. They get everything the females get. They get the same publicity. They get the same kind of photo shoots. They are promoted just as equally as the females." Sure enough, if you check out the Ravens' website (www. baltimoreravens. com), biographies and soft-focus model shots of the men are there, right along side those of the women. And the male cheerleaders get paid exactly the same as their female colleagues - a mere $50 per game (although they do get additional perks such as game tickets and up to $75 an hour for personal appearances).

They do seem a very relaxed and friendly group of young men and women. Are there any inter-cheerleading relationships going on, I wonder? "There are some couples in this squad, " says Simijoski. "But I tell them to leave that at the door. I don't want relationships coming on to the field or into practice."

Simijoski says men will quite often withdraw from the squad because of pressure from nervous and possessive girlfriends or wives.

"Some just don't want their men working with so many gorgeous women, " Simijoski says, laying waste to the idea that cheerleading attracts only gay men.

But if they are fit heterosexual jocks, then why aren't they playing a sport? Martinez says the practice sessions, other training sessions and the Sunday performances leave little time for anything else. Bell agrees saying, "It doesn't leave a lot of free time and occasionally you have to leave work early, but at least my job is really co-operative."

In the cheerleaders' dressing room, many of the women are still getting ready. Perhaps it is many a heterosexual man's dream to visit the dressing room of a group of professional cheerleaders, but I feel decidedly uncomfortable.

Here are women who have been picked, in part at least, for the way they look, for their very welltoned bodies and pneumatic breasts; and here am I, staring their very well-toned bodies and pneumatic breasts in the face, so to speak. I don't know where to look, and don't want to appear a voyeur.

Off in a side room from the main locker room is a smaller locker room. It's obvious this is where the guys hang out. It isn't just their oversized gym bags that give it away, but a heavy scent of deodorant and sweat. I scuttle in and am introduced to Will Stokes who has been cheering with the Ravens for the past six years, but who thinks this might be his last year.

"I still have a huge passion for it, " he insists. "I love the team atmosphere and we teach each other a lot during the season, but my joints ache a bit more than they used to and your body will only hold up for so long."

Stokes, 25, was a gymnast in college and now holds down a job as project engineer, but he says he never wanted to give up cheerleading when he left college and he still enjoys the reaction he gets each time he performs.

"We've had a very positive response from the fans, " he tells me. "They like to see the girls fly high and they like to see the difficult stunts and intricate eye-catching combinations."

During the game Simijoski decides which intricate combinations the cheerleaders will perform, and in what order. The routines for the dancers have names such as Sexy, Split and Foxy, but the stunt team are expected to perform much more dynamic sets: The 2-2-1 Hitch, Lego Stretch Pyramid, Diagonal Stunt, Back Tuck Elevators and Pike Arch Baskets to name but a few.

I wander off to seek out the opinion of some fans before the game starts. I talk to a mixture of men and women, young and old, and I can't find a single person who thinks that male cheerleaders are unacceptable, inappropriate or probably gay. A lot of the male fans think they are the luckiest guys in the stadium, after the players, and women wish there were more of them: 'They are cuuuute!' says more than one.

During the two weeks before and after I meet the NFL's only male cheerleaders, none of the countless people I mention them to cast aspersions upon their sexuality. The most common reaction from everyone outside of Baltimore was surprise that there were male cheerleaders in the NFL. No one could remember ever seeing them on television, despite the Ravens having had their stunt team for the past six years.

I ask Martinez about this. "You may see the tops of someone's hands or you may see a girl flying in the air, and obviously she didn't jump there by herself. The camera will pan up and catch the girl, but they never catch the guys that threw her, " he says, accepting that's just the way it is.

The Ravens themselves may have been bold enough to try something new, but that doesn't mean the television networks are prepared to crow about it.

Twice during intervals in the game, the whole cheerleading squad gather at one end of the stadium and perform a couple of three- minute routines.

While the dancers seductively shimmy and sidestep and high kick and go from foxy to sexy to splits, the stunt team form fancy pyramids behind them and toss their flexible partners sky-high, watching them twist or star-jump or back-arch in mid-air. The crowd "ooh" and "ahh, " no one falls, and a stadium-wide round of applause grows as the music and the routine finishes. Impressive stuff.

During the three hours plus that the game lasts, the 12 male cheerleaders perform at least 50 different stunts and by the end of it all, they are as exhausted as the players, who as far as I can see, never pay the slightest bit of attention to the male cheerleaders but can't help sneaking peeks at the women when they shimmy past.

As we walk off the field, I ask Simijoski about the players' reactions to male cheerleaders. "The players are critical because they just want to see women out there, " she reveals. "But they've never tried what we do, so they don't know how hard our guys work and what goes into it."

I notice some now drunken fans staring at the male cheerleaders as they walk down the players' tunnel. "Fags, " I hear one shout meekly.

I ask Bell if fans shouting comments like that upset him.

"No, " says this professional male cheerleader.

"I think, you're in the stand and I'm on the field, so you yell all you want."

The Superbowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots will be shown next Sunday on Sky Sports 1

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