The Secrets of the Stache

There he is. One of the most enterprising journalists in the country. He’s founder of a thought provoking sports/literary/pop culture journal that features some of the biggest names in the business, Grantland. In my opinion, this was a great idea. And it has drawn out some probing thoughts from Chuck Klosterman ( who’s great theme is ,What is Reality?). An article by Colson Whitehead on gambling made great use of the fish-out-of water scenario in Atlantic City. … When I type in the address to the Web site, I don’t know what I’m going to get. I think this is one of the site’s virtues. I bet it’s not a high maintenance sight to run either. If you build it they will come, and some of the best writers have (Malcolm Gladwell and Dave Eggers among many others…even a video game reviewer).

Basically, this is a guy who should be very proud of his mustache.

But today on Pardon the Interruption Bill Simmons was acting self conscious about it. Part of the reason was probably the imposing opponent he had in Michael Wilbon. The latter TV personality is ubiquitous these days, often filing PTI broadcasts from the NBA Finals and such events where his commentary is in demand. He has a hit TV show and a very professional presence with hints of moral authority. Wilbon is still a young journalist comparatively, but there’s something of the old Edward R. Murrow and Howard Cosell in him somehow, even if it’s just his voice in conjunction with sober analysis. Anyway, right when Simmons got on the show he was acting squirrely about his new stache and Wilbon was acting poised as usual. Wilbon hits a jab mid show. During a commercial break, Simmons says “oh ______ will be happy.”

Wilbon: Why?

Simmons: He loves facial hair.

And finally the nail in the coffin.

Wilbon: “I’m not sure if I even like that look on you.”

At the end of the show, Simmons turns over. “I’m Bill Simmons and I’ll be shaving my mustache tonight.”

No! Don’t listen to him Bill.

I think I know where all this latent tension stems, and it has something to do with the culture of manhood. Intangibly, one can sense that Wilbon has it and Simmons doesn’t. It’s also worth noting that guys like Bob Ryan, Norm Chad have been repeated guest hosts while the internet’s widest read personality was only rarely on, and that was to be cross examined for his ambitious basketball assertions. I may be wrong on this, I haven’t tuned in for months, but since Grantland’s inception has Simmons only now been grudgingly accepted into the PTI ranks?

To talk about what I know about Grantland’s voice, I’ll try to find things that could be construed as unmanly….Gladwell, Simmons and Eggers, even the placid Whitehead are all long form writers (long writing a practice that  a guy like Wilbon gives up to be on TV), of differing literary merits, who seem to make a pardoxically strict effort to sound nerdy and/or nice. Their thoughts are large, but their voices somehow timid.

For example here’s Eggers on wooing a woman:

“Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm.”

Take care of business already, right?

It’s a far cry since the days of Norman Mailer when Stormin Norman took boxing lessons, wrote about the sport intensively and told John Updike that he needed to get back in the whorehouse and stop worrying about his style.

So perhaps subconsciously, Wilbon sees Bill Simmons as surrounding himself with dudes that are less than men. This of course depends on the kind of writers and activities Wilbon tends toward. I reference Mailer because his assurance seems compatible with Wilbon’s at the mic.

I go back to a book I read about the CIA in Vietnam, Tree of Smoke. The French translator character has a mustache and that’s looked upon as a kind of joke. The thing is, you need to be good at something to have that mustache, preferably something with guns or grit. I suppose the Hemingway stache would qualify as well since he worked as a medic in the first great war, and also undressed many fine females and wrote about it in a forward thrusting and dignified way. Perhaps the question in the back of Wilbon’s mind is, what did you do to earn that mustache? Watch more basketball games than me? Blog longer than I did? I waited a long time to start wearing suits like this. I was one of MJs favorite reporters as a greenhorn and I still wasn’t ready for a mustache!

I guess ego plays into it. Simmons seems on an upturn, and the PTI guy may feel threatened.

But as a media guy I see some difference. As Chuck Klosterman once noted on Bill Simmons’ podcast, Simmons bowed out of the Boston Herald job early, realizing he would have to be a hockey beat writer for a decade or so, or until someone died, before he could cover his beloved basketball or football in Boston. So he took to the blogs. On his own blog, where he appealed to a base of self professed “super fans,” that is not critics–sport’s writers– … he became one of the first journalists to see the potential in blogging. And he used it to cut in front of many journalists, earning a spot on espn.com well before he would’ve been allowed to cover the Pats as a newspaperman.

Perhaps older dog reporters resent the bloggers, a group whom Simmons represents whether he loves it or not. Maybe there will always be that chasm between the two. The beat reporter can have a stache, the super fan who talks about going to games with dad can’t.

I, entering college the day Facebook was available to university students only, respect guys like Simmons though, guys who have a sense of timing. For example this literary sports journal thing. Great writers have always felt compelled to freelance a story about sports, to give them more well-rounded credibility. I don’t believe such stories ever had a central location. Now they do. And if magazines like ESPN and SI are going to continue to produce surfacey hero worshipping articles, expecting us to slobber over guys who cheated off us in our physical geography tests then I believe in a place where writers now have a clear target for a work that asks what a given event in sports means on a wider social level.  I think Simmons is fighting the Howard Cosellian  ”jockocracy” even better than the eloquent Michael Wilbon

So Simmons should be proud. He’s a news guy, not an amazing writer. But he’s found a way into a new dimension by the power of an idea.

Keep the  mustache if you want, Bill.

I must say though, part of me recognizes Simmons’s reticence this afternoon on PTI. I too have a mustache.  I first agreed to take it on when taking a film role as an arm wrestling trainer. The role called for more man weight than my slender frame could provide. When I first finished the big shave and took a look in the mirror I felt like a woman who didn’t know if she liked her new auburn streaks.  I realized then that this is what guys have to play with, the facial hair. Any doubt I had was assuaged by a recognition that it was my native right to experiment with my facial hair.

The reactions have been mixed. But like a writer who writes a book, you have to go home and look at the name on the spine and know it’s yours–the reviews are not yours. When I go home, I’m the man with the mustache. Not the ladies, not the admiring gents. And, with that in mind I still like it. So if you like your handiwork then you can put on a face that knows what it likes.

There are moments when I have been challenged. One of my music heroes Michael Fracasso greeted me last Saturday night with a polite, “Hey Danny! … Wait, did you have that last time I saw you?” He mused on the days when he had the same stache and the same hairdo. This was probably strange for him. I went on to tell him about the movie role. We discussed a 70s SNL appearance by a mustachioed Paul Simon.  Many thoughts were being turned on both sides.  Even the fact that he’d had one too didn’t change the overriding feeling I got that he didn’t like it. Gentleman he is, the final word on the stache was “it’s a period piece for sure.”

Tomatoes, for sure.

After his smooth gig at The Blue Door I went with him and Greg Johnson to Juniors. At one point and sort of outta nowhere, Fracasso looks at me and says, “I can’t even look at you. I feel like I’m in a movie or something.”

Every bar I go to the stache promotes discussion. A lesbian bartender I’ve always thought was too tough for me started razzin me, but then this ole thing was a gateway to some flirty and competative shit talk: the kind I’ve always wanted to have with the 37 year old mother and vivacious barhand. At a Bricktown bar with Zebra upholstery at spots a shorter young professional walked by, stopped and looked at me quite earnestly…

“Nice mustache. Really. It’s good.”

It was a solemn and blunt appraisal. One guy talking to another, not too many words, but just the right ones at the same time. Then he’s off, and I’m off.

You will get haters, and you will find admirers. But what you mustache yourself is this: Are you gonna wear it or what?