By Lacie Morrison
lmorrison@mineralwellsindex.com
Dancing began as “just something to do” for Mineral Wells resident Mike Brooks but quickly developed into a passion that brought him several awards, including a world championship.
“In 1997, I had started going to the Electric Cowboy [in Fort Worth] for shuffle lessons,” he said. “I wanted to learn because that’s the dance everybody was doing over there. It’s similar to a triple-two but backwards.”
After a month of lessons, however, he wasn’t advancing very far.
“The thing about taking lessons in a bar is they go over the same stuff over and over. You can’t learn a whole lot but it was something to do,” he explained.
It wasn’t until his mom – a competitive ballroom dancer – was to dance at the Electric Cowboy for a cable show that Brooks met the man who would point him in the direction of competitive dancing.
“I surprised her and went over and watched her. When they were done, she said we should go by the studio – Blake Elder’s in River Oaks,” he recalled.
Brooks, a rural carrier for the post office, decided to take lessons and signed up for classes, including one called the Jitterbug Stunts Team.
“It was a bunch of UTA students and me. I was 43, 44 years old in there with the 18-, 19-year-old kids doing the jitterbug,” he said. “We had a ball.”
“I was taking every class I could get and got to know some of these kids. … I did that for seven or eight months before we even discussed doing competition,” Brooks said.
At the encouragement of others in his class, Brooks agreed to compete for the first time. He had to learn four dances to qualify and was only able to practice for six hours with his partner before the event in New Orleans.
His first time on a competitive dance floor, Brooks said he was placed in the open division versus the senior division.
“We got bronze on all four dances. There was only one level lower,” he recalled.
The experience itself, however, opened his eyes to a whole new experience.
“I’m just a kid from Mineral Wells going to the big city,” he said. “It floored me when we walked in. They were playing a waltz. There were probably 500 people on the dance floor and it literally looked like the floor was rising and falling because they were all in sync.”
Over the course of that weekend, he met Teri Bordeau, who eventually became his dance instructor and partner.
“I watched her guys dance. It was night and day,” he recalled. “They were prepared, confident, way above where I was and where I wanted to be.”
Because of Bordeau’s limited space for students, it took Brooks another eight or nine months before he was able to learn from her and that opportunity came from a friendly tip.
“I befriended Teri’s mom, who let me know about an opening,” he explained. Brooks called and got the slot. “I got measured for my vest that night and started taking lessons twice a week. It was basically, at that point, her figuring out where I was and what level.”
Brooks explained there is a progression to learning dance steps and specific dances were required in competition.
“The two-step is the first you work on. You try to get it down and then go into the waltz. Then after that, you have to do a swing – either West Coast or East Coast – then you had to do a rhythm dance,” he said, which could be a polka, triple-two or nightclub two-step.
With aspirations of dancing at the world competition, Brooks had to participate in three events.
“Back then, there was an event in the U.S. every weekend. You just had to decide where you wanted to go,” he said.
At his first dance with Teri as his partner, “my scores all came up to silver at New Orleans in 1999,” Brooks said. “After my first time, it was a mission to show myself I could do it.”
In January of 2000, he placed fifth as a newcomer over 40 at world competition. Five years later, Brooks won the world championship in Nashville.
Bitten by the dancing bug, Brooks continued to attend competitions across the country and in other countries. Teri was his partner for a number of years before he started dancing with Karen Leiker, of Houston.
Although he qualified, he didn’t always attend the world competitions – he missed the year it was in Sweden in 2006 and the Netherlands in 2002.
“It was right after 9-11 in January,” Brooks said of his decision not to travel. “Very few Americans did go.”
Brooks hung up his dancing shoes after his second year with Leiker as his partner.
“I was burned out completely. I was dancing every weekend with Karen and twice a week with Teri, doing lessons in Arlington,” he said. “It became like a job.”
With a reprieve under his belt, Brooks said he “fully intend[s] to go back and probably start dancing again next year.”
“I had turned down lots of opportunities earlier to learn because I wasn’t interested or had the time,” he recalled. “At my first competition, I came out of that feeling that I didn’t do well but I know I can. Then I was hooked, especially after placing fifth at world.”
Through dancing, Brooks said he’s been able to see more of the country than he thought possible. Among the cities he’s seen are Atlanta, Orlando, Denver, Houston, Austin, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Nashville, Oklahoma City and Albuquerque, N.M.
Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, was another location he’s seen when he attended his second world championship.
“We were there the first week of January. It was colder here than it was up there,” he recalled. “We really had a good time up there.”
Another trip that stuck in Brooks’ mind was when they traveled to a competition in New York six months after 9-11, when the city shone beams of lights into the sky as a reminder of the World Trade Center towers that were struck by hijacked planes.
“That was unbelievable. It’s amazing to me how they could concentrate the light like that into beams,” he recalled. “We were staying in East Rutherford, N.J., and you could see the light clearly from there.”
While sightseeing, Brooks went by “Ground Zero.”
“They had pretty much gotten all the stuff out of the hole but you wouldn’t believe the size of the hole,” he commented. “The damage to the buildings around there was amazing.”
During his tenure on the dance floor, Brooks estimated he’s attended approximately 90 competitions as a professional amateur with Bordeau and as a senior couples with Leiker.
In addition to knowing his own skills, Brooks said he enjoys the social aspect of competitive dancing.
“You develop so many friends. You see each other at the competitions. You get to know these people, go out to eat,” he explained. “The thing that really kept me in it was wanting to learn more and more intricate patterns. I want to eventually get to the level where I can teach and be an effective teacher.
“Once you learn how to dance, you pretty well keep it. … To me, dancing is muscle memory. For me, I have to do it over and over again for it to become muscle memory and then you don’t have to think about it.”
Brooks recently took his mother, Aleta Brooks, out for a spin on the dance floor as a part of the United Way of Palo Pinto County’s Dancing with the Stars event. It was obvious to those who attended that Mike Brooks’ feet definitely knew their way around the dance floor.
