Death to the Mullet! - JamaicaObserver.com

Friday, November 20, 2009 7:03 PM

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Death to the Mullet!

Style Observer

Sharon Leach

Sunday, November 08, 2009

The last few days have been a time of great personal upheaval beginning, naturally, with the release of the Andre Agassi book, Open, which reveals, among other things, that the tennis great used crystal meth and, dear Lord, that the sexy lion mane he sported back in the 1990s was actually a wig.

(Really, I don't know how I'm finding the strength to write this now, so devastated and traumatised have I been by the news. About the wig, I mean.)

Agassi was perhaps the guy most responsible for getting me to watch tennis. He was so brooding and sexy in his tennis whites, with all that wild hair held in place with that headband and, of course, there was that powerful swing. That wild-child hair, though. Gave him an undercurrent of danger - though not quite Johnny McEnroe-dangerous (after all, he was married to Brooke Shields, who didn't give the impression that she would ever be caught dead with a bully, or an abuser for that matter; she 'divorced' her own alcoholic, exploitative mother, for God's sake).

For the record, I never cared that much for the mullet hairdo. I despised Billy Ray Cyrus not simply for his vomit-inducing hit song, Achy Breaky Heart, but also for that stupid mullet he sported. You know, long in back, short up front. Even Jamaican people had our version of the mullet, remember? Dear God, The Napoleon, which we'd 'soulpick' out and stretch beyond credibility for length in the back. Seriously? Such a mockery of good fashion taste. But there was one man, I thought, who wore the mullet without offence, and that hair on Agassi gave him a certain je ne sais quoi.

The crystal meth admission is jaw-dropping. Crystal meth is hardcore. It's highly addictive; many people never come back from it. The US is currently trying to contain the meth epidemic that has destroyed countless lives in suburbia, especially. But when the athlete disclosed that he began wearing the wig when his own hair started to prematurely fall out and his vanity wouldn't allow him to consider a toupee, I had the vapours. I'm not sure why. It's not that I'm shocked by wigs and I get men wearing toupees. Maybe it's the fact that he was a man wearing a wig, not so much because he wanted to, but because of the public hell he lived in called "celebrity" that forced him to.

Agassi is surprisingly candid in excerpts released to British newspapers recently about losing the 1990 French Open, his first Grand Slam final, because of his preoccupation with his hairpiece that had begun to disintegrate the night before when he took a shower. ("Probably I used the wrong hair rinse," he surmises.) For the match it was held together by hairpins that he and his brother, in a wave of panic, secured with pins and clips the night before, and he recalls praying "not for victory, but that my hairpiece would not fall off".

Agassi goes on to say: "With each leap, I imagine it falling into the sand. I imagine millions of spectators move closer to their TV sets, their eyes widening and, in dozens of dialects and languages, ask how Andre Agassi's hair has fallen from his head."

He could have played without the wig, he admits. But he was paralysed by fear of what journalists would write, how they would view him if it came out that he'd been wearing a wig all along.

I'm not ashamed to tell you: that broke my heart.

What hell must he have lived in, a man who was making all that money, had all that fame, everything. What a prison. Who would believe someone of his prodigious talent could ever have a demon of this nature, trivial though it may seem?

Yet we've all been there, I suppose - imprisoned by our own mullets, what we believe to be the source of other people's ridicule - and it has nothing to do with our talent, popularity, standing in society, or anything like that. Why do other people's thoughts matter? It's depressing, the insecurity our popular culture breeds, isn't it? Even in the very ones who are held up as the heirs apparent of it. But in the end, isn't the only important thing to live one's life not for the approval of others, but with honour and integrity, regardless of whether one wins or fails? Maybe this is something one learns when one gets older.

The media does not come out of this story in the best light, either. The sort of predatory news reporting we've apparently come to expect is indicted here. I'm amazed, for example, sitting in on the Observer's innovative Monday Exchange meetings, by the number of good things that are happening in our country, the positive programmes being implemented, which, to the paper's credit, are being put on the front pages. In other quarters, though, you'd get another impression. Subjects of news stories are so often written and spoken about without compassion and treated as just that: subjects devoid of feelings, family, etc. The truth is, bad news is good business; and sexing up the social rot in society has become the new black. Or, maybe the new green. After all, media is a business like any other and needs to make money too. If the choice was between reporting on Agassi's performance during that final, and his hair unravelling, I'm guessing the hair would be the story to beat.

That chapter of Agassi's story, mercifully, ended okay. It took Brooke Shields, who's known, ironically, for her luxuriant hair, to suggest that he shave his head. Confirming what we women have always suspected about men with shaved heads: they're simply covering up advancing baldness.

But, in the end, who cares?

I remember seeing Agassi when he finally took the plunge. It took me all of one minute to think, Well, gee, why did he cut off all that lovely hair? Then I looked at him, saw that vulnerability in his eyes, and thought, "Anyway, he's still so cute."

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