Today's New York Times ran a piece on beards in the NFL, focused mostly on those sported by Jake Plummer and Ben Roethlisburger (whose name I can almost spell correctly thanks to my near-year in Pittsburgh), whose teams will meet on Sunday in the AFC championship. The writer, John Branch, combines NFL facial hair history with local ethnography, like when he interviews Denver stylist Johnna Pasquin, who says "No one has come in and asked for the Plummer."
Branch takes this as evidence that Plummer and Roethlisburger are truly going against the grain, but what he fails to realize is that no one who wants to grow a big beard is going to go to an expensive salon, since the very idea of a "Plummer" means an unkempt, wild, just let-it-go growth. Something that one can do on one's own. Something that will need to be bush-hogged, not shaved.
The beard indeed is making a comeback. It's most likely the new hipster thing. Goatees are so 1998. But full-on, untrimmed bushy-ass beards are hip. And at the risk of losing my feminist credentials, I will go on record saying I think they're pretty hot.
I mean, Plummer, who looked so conventional pre-beard, has one; George Clooney (in Syriana) has one; and the last time I ran into Michael Berube, he had one. (And that was in the middle of summer.) Thank goodness winter and winter break came, and I could talk my more practical-minded honey into bringing one in. Hooray.
Maybe it comes from being an impressionable kid in the 70s or growing up near the mountains or watching Grizzly Adams reruns in the early 80s. I don't know, but if 2006 turns out to be the year of the Big Full Beard, I won't be sad at all.
