My First Mullet

Since I was about 12, a period of almost 40 years, I’ve had really short hair, not quite a crew cut, but rather just long enough to comb. I get it trimmed every few weeks and it makes life easy – wash it in the shower in the morning, run a comb through it, good to go. No muss, no fuss, no product.

But the pandemic has given me the unexpected opportunity to grow some hair, and while it wasn’t something I really cared about, at 50 I realize I have dwindling opportunities to grow it out. A couple of years back I sat through a three-hour meeting that was being webcast. The camera was directly behind me so for the entirety of the proceedings I was forced to look at my growing bald spot. If I wait much longer to grow this stuff out I’ll no longer have options. 

I have not had a haircut since a week or so before the March Bassmaster Classic and what I’ve learned is that my hair does not really work when grown out. I’ll never have Feider-like flowing locks, just a mass of tangles. Nevertheless, I can’t give up on the experiment yet. I’ve vowed not to get it cut until it’s time to go back to the office. 

The result is that I wear a hat just about any time I leave the house. Otherwise, I risk at best a “Something About Mary” look and at worst the appearance of a tumbleweed. No matter what I do, though, it’s clear that I have my first mullet. 

That’s actually a good thing, because the other person who has grown a similar mullet (at least what I can see around and through his hat) is two-tour pro John Cox. His mullet led to a remarkably good season: He earned two top-ten Elite Series finishes and ended up 17th in the AOY race and is headed to his third Classic. At the same time, he took his FLW Outdoors winnings to a point just shy of $1.5 million. On the Tackle Warehouse Pro Circuit he started off with a win at Sam Rayburn, then reeled off five more money finishes, including 7th at the Chickamauga Super Tournament and 3rd in the “Title” at Sturgeon Bay. That’s not necessarily an aberration for Cox, who finished in the top seven in the FLW AOY race four times in the five years preceding 2020. Nevertheless, I’m going to hope that my follicles lead me to new levels of fishing effectiveness.