The young schoolboy blurted out his first impression when I entered his classroom.
“I like your hair!” he exclaimed.
Jerry Davich
I had no idea why he said this until a few seconds later.
“My dad is bald,” he said with a sigh.
A few of his classmates giggled. I scribbled down his unsolicited observation for this column, which has been bouncing around my hairy head for nearly a month.
Men’s baldness is a topic I’ve never put much thought into. I recently learned why: I’ve been blessed to have a head of hair that grows like a ch-ch-ch-Chia pet submerged in holy water. I need a haircut every three to four weeks. Otherwise I begin looking like “that guy” who has wild and crazy hair but doesn’t know it.
You know the guys I’m talking about.
But bald? It never occurred to me what bald men go through, physically or psychologically. As soon as this topic landed on my radar, I began asking around to men with bald or shaved heads. Are they bald by choice or by genetics? How do they feel about it? And how has it affected their self-image?
“Bald is beautiful, baby!” a work colleague told me.
He was just talking to his barber about the topic of hair restoration promises, he said.
“I don’t believe they’re effective, despite the marketing, so why throw my money away for a ‘this might work’?” he said. “I’m not vain enough to really care about something as silly as being bald.”
Not all bald men described it to me as something silly, though a few deflected my questions with jokes, such as: “What do you call a bald man on a windy day? Fortunate.”
Larry David, the writer, actor and comedian, doesn’t feel as fortunate. When he accepted his Emmy Award in 1992 for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series for the classic “Seinfeld” episode “The Contest,” he quipped, “This is all very well and good, but I’m still bald.”
Obviously it doesn’t bother him enough to get his hair restored like other high-profile celebrities such as TV sports announcer Joe Buck, who’s undergone eight (and counting?) hair plug procedures. His addiction to these procedures cost him his voice for part of the 2011 season, caused by a side effect of a hair transplant.
A few years ago, just before I met former Chicago Bears superstar Brian Urlacher at a casino, a few coworkers reminded me to check out his newly restored hair. I did everything I could to not stare at it while interviewing him. But I heard other people whispering about it.
In the Chicago region, near where I live, dozens of billboards are still posted near major highways showing images of Urlacher’s new head of hair, compliments of RestoreHair.com. One states, “Welcome to O’Hair Hairport.” Others state, “HAIR-LACHER,” and “Hall of Fame Hair” and “Urlacher - 1, Balding - 0.”
A work colleague of mine who sports a shaved head offers a more philosophical approach.
“If my memory of studying evolution is accurate, human beings became less hairy as they advanced through the ages. So bald men are more evolved than men with great hair, it would seem,” he said, noting that he’s pretending to look like an NBA star rather than merely an old guy.
Charles Barkley, the former NBA superstar who’s as bald as a basketball, recently said nobody wants to be bald.
"Everybody I know who’s bald, we started going bald," he said. "We didn’t want to go bald. We just started balding.”
Male pattern baldness matters more than I thought. The phrase “hair restoration” is often uttered in the same hushed tone as “erectile dysfunction.” To avoid it, most bald men I know intentionally keep their head shaved as a preemptive strike against the appearance of natural balding.
“I never cared enough to do any treatments, and I never wanted to go through the reapplying of the products,” one friend told me.
“I shave by choice every day,” another friend said. “I saw my dad's horseshoe on his head and promised myself I would never have that.”
“My hairline started receding in my early 20’s and I started looking too much like I was sporting a balding mullet, aka the ‘skullet,’” one man told me.
Another guy said, “I started with Rogaine in my 20’s, but soon realized that a razor was cheaper.”
I had no idea so many of my friends are bald. I guess I just didn’t notice.
“I’m banking on artificial intelligence to someday restore my hair and rescue my love life,” a social media friend told me.
My neighbor’s wife said baldness chose her husband, not the other way around. “I’d rather have him bald. He looks so good,” she said.
Another friend said he and four friends shaved their heads for the last day of high school.
“One friend used Nair and got a horrible rash. Another friend used a razor and had cuts everywhere. Another had a really lumpy head,” he recalled. “Mine, on the other hand, just looked good so I kept it. I used a razor that day and still do this today. I knew I had thin hair and my day would come. Imagine all the money saved on shampoo over the years.”
Barkley disagrees. “Everybody wants hair,” he said.
