Knockout Text in Illustrator CS2

I’m designing some t-shirts and having a hard time figuring out how to create text that will knockout the object below without rendering the text to outlines. Anyone have ideas that will solve this problem?

Edit: Figured out this it wasn’t that time consuming to copy text to preserve the original and then convert to outlines > create clipping mask. I just hoped there would be a solution that wouldn’t require that many steps. Oh well.