Peter Rook: on follically-challenged footballers
It was while watching a TV re-run of The Big Match from the seventies that I began to ponder, whatever happened to follically-challenged footballers?
It was while watching a TV re-run of The Big Match from the seventies that I began to ponder, whatever happened to follically-challenged footballers?This thought also struck a chord with me as my hairline is currently receding at a rapid rate of knots.
Fortunately, I have a recession where the hair disappears on either side of the temples or, as it is known, "a Phil Collins", rather than the "dreaded Derek Nimmo" – that's the mock monk look, where the hair disappears on top and spreads.
Hair loss strikes all men to some degree in their middle years and it would appear I'm no exception. Mind you, I get very little sympathy when I try to discuss this with one of my friends who has suffered the worst kind of loss of all – "the confused Mohican" or "the vanishing middle of the fairway". This is where hair loss occurs right down the middle but remains forlornly at the side, therefore resembling an inverse Mohican.
He has even developed a nice line in self-deprecatory wit. He goes about telling people that he lives life in the fast lane and that his hair just couldn't keep up.
I should be grateful my recession has not come much earlier, since my dad was a chrome-domer from his early twenties. Maybe it's true what they say about your hair being inherited from your mother's side. So at least there are some compensations for having a mother who was the bearded lady in a travelling freak show.
For years my brother and I were convinced that dad was not a mild-mannered postman, but was actually a midfield terrier for Tottenham Hotspur, who went by the dual identity of Ralph Coates.
Can it be a coincidence that they were never seen in the same room together?
For those not familiar Ralph, he possessed a remarkable comb-over that could be seen flapping in the wind as he played.
It was the forerunner of "an Arthur Scargill". Some people mistakenly ascribe the comb-over to Mr Scargill, hence the expression "he's got an Arthur Scargill".
But Ralph and my dad were there long before the Miners' Union activist.
As well as Ralph, bald footballers included Jack and Bobby Charlton, Nobby Stiles and Alan Gilzean, to name but a few.
Then came Johnny Metgod and David Armstrong. Then there was Thomas Gravesen and Lee Carsley. But today I can't think of a single Premiership slap-head (and by that I mean genuinely bald and not shaven-headed).
Are they all weave-wearing woofters or does this generation have a much lower testosterone count? Judging by the girlie way they throw themselves to the ground at the merest physical contact it would explain a lot.
These and other questions will no doubt be answered by some obscure university academic research in the future – but remember, you read it here first.
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Saturday 20 March 2010
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