Rick Chandler of Off the Bench posted a note on Friday about Phyllis from “The Office” being a former NFL cheerleader, citing a story from years ago on Deadspin.
The actress who plays Phyllis is named Phyllis Smith, and she’s got a fun piece of trivia: She’s a former cheerleader for The Buzzsaw That Is The Arizona St. Louis Cardinals. She was a dancer in the mid-80s, a cheerleader and burlesque performer, before she blew out her knee and became a receptionist for casting agencies. That ended up with her, by chance, being cast on “The Office” and becoming the most famous former Buzzsaw cheerleader we know.
Neither story featured any photographic evidence, so it was one of those things that boiled down to “huh”, and you prepared to move on from it with something to nudge people and say should The Office come up in conversation. Well, “pics or it didn’t happen” is now happy to take a back seat to “holy sh** that is phyllis from the office as an nfl cheerleader”.
The pic comes from St. Louis radio station Y98, who conducted an interview with the Bad Teacher star and delivered the goods. It’s a sort of heartwarming reminder of what cheerleaders used to be back in the day, when it was about dancing and having fun and not so much about doing that little hand waggle to move your pom pom while you squat in hot pants.
So with Mose Schrute turning out to be a prominent sports blogger and Phyllis having been a pro cheerleader, what’s next? Did Toby Flenderson compete in the ’96 Olympics? Was Bob Vance the original Ronald McDonald? Come on, out with it.
Edit: So the picture Y98 used is from Sports Illustrated from the long long ago. Thanks to Otto Man (with appropriate quotation marks) for pointing it out. Regardless, hey, she was supposedly a cheerleader, and if you didn’t read Deadspin like six years ago, consider it news.
