Volume 4, Issue 40: George Hendrick

"He stands at the plate, intimidating, daring the pitcher to throw him a strike."

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Over the last month, I did something I have never done in my life: I grew facial hair. Specifically: I grew a mustache.

This was not a conscious decision—I did not believe, to be as clear as possible here, that growing a mustache was a good idea, that it would enhance my facial features, that it fit with the type of person I am walking around this earth. It is very off-brand, unless my brand is “witness for the prosecution at the O.J. trial.” I think you can argue it added 15 years to my age, the way they always have young actors on “Saturday Night Live” play lame dad characters by slapping a mustache on them. Having a mustache made me feel more middle-aged than any of the countless other middle-aged things I do all day, like listen to Wilco, complain about other drivers or ask my kids how to do things with my phone that I can’t figure out. I did not consider the mustache a value-add.

No, I backed myself into a corner with the mustache. As mentioned, I’ve been coaching a Little League team this year, and while the kids are spirited and joyous and ever-improving, the scoreboard has not reflected this: We started the season 0-6. But we lost some close games, and we were right on the cusp, so I told the team that I was so confident that they were about to break through that I would, for the first time in my life, grow a mustache—and not shave it until we won. I figured it would be a couple of days, a week, tops, before we got in the win column. We then lost our next seven games, over the span of three weeks. And suddenly I had a mustache.

The Leitches are not a hairy people. I have no chest hair, hardly any leg hair, and I grow facial hair so slowly I usually only need to shave twice a week. I’m barely a mammal; I’m essentially a dolphin. I’d never even considered growing facial hair before, and, frankly, I usually didn’t even notice facial hair. It wasn’t until I had hair on my own face that I realized just how many men have facial hair, how they curate their beards and goatees and, yes, mustaches, how their facial hair communicates something about themselves—how much thought goes into how they present themselves to the world. I mean, you gotta think about those things all the time!

Every beard is a decision. Because I’ve never been able to grow a beard—and, it’s fair to say, I’m never going to be able to grow one; I think that ship has sailed—I’d never thought about the conclusions people would draw about me via a mustache. I was in line at the post office last week wearing the mustache, and I found myself wanting to tell people, who looked at me for the first time, “hey, no, I’m not a mustache guy, this is just for my baseball team, why are you looking at me like that?” I’m sure they weren’t looking at me at all. But it felt like they were. Which of course says something about me. If you meet someone with a mustache, or a beard, or a goatee, it says something about them—their view of the world, how they want the world to see them, how much of themselves they even want to be seen.

I have friends, like you surely do as well, whom I never seen without a full beard, which is to say, I’ve never really seen their face. A friend from high school shaved his beard for the first time in more than a decade a few months back, and his children didn’t even recognize him. (They then begged him to grow it back. He did.) I do not think he was hiding himself with his beard. But there wasn’t a person in his life who didn’t look at him differently, dramatically so, when he didn’t have one. It wasn’t only people who were just meeting him drawing conclusions on his personality without his beard; loved ones saw him differently without his beard. That’s a lot of pressure! I’d never thought about that before, how having to make decisions about facial hair legitimately could affect your life. I’ve just shaved every three days for 30 years and paid it much mind otherwise. But how we present ourselves is, undeniably, how we actually are. Or at least how we wish to be. And it does affect people.

Not to get too political on you as we approach Election Day, but look at what Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance looked like on the book jacket for Hillbilly Elegy:

Now look at him, running as a Tough Guy Conservative today:

I mean, the beard’s doing a lot of work there, right? I think you’ve got to be a pretty dumb guy to think the second J.D. Vance is somehow tougher and more virile than the first one. But there’s a lot of dumb guys out there.

Until I grew that silly mustache for our Little League team, I honestly had never given facial hair even a second’s thought. But now, I find myself, every time I see someone with a beard, wondering what they really look like underneath there. And who they’re trying to be. And who the real Them actually is.

Facial hair is, alas, not for me. I hated my mustache. I never realized how itchy facial hair is: I was constantly scratching it, and tugging at it, and fidgeting with it. I disliked it so much that I had multiple dreams where I was shaving it, as if getting rid of the thing was what my subconscious desired more than anything else. You have dreams about flying through the air on the wings of dragons; I dream of shaving a mustache.

At last, on Wednesday night, in our final Little League game of the regular season, we … tied. It was 7-7 heading into the fifth inning, but we’d already played for 1:45, hitting our time limit. (One nice thing about Little League baseball is that kids all have to go to school the next morning, so they never let the games last too long.) A tie isn’t the same thing as “winning a game,” but the team and I agreed it was close enough. The next morning, I shaved the mustache. Any curiosity I might have had about the experiment has been satiated: I’ll never grow a mustache, or any facial hair, again. There is nothing to hide behind: The rest of the world is just going to have look at my stupid face, plain and dumb and me as it ever was. Life is full of enough worries and decisions: I feel fortunate that facial hair, from now on, will be something I just won’t have to think about. One of the many benefits of barely being a mammal, I suppose.

NEW BOOK COVER

Hey, check it out: I’ve got a new book coming out! It’s called The Time Has Come, and you can get it wherever books are sold May 2023. I will, obviously, be bugging you all about it a bunch over the next few months, so I will tread lightly now, except to say that this cover—released this week, done by the utterly brilliant Joanne O’Neill, who also did the jacket for How Lucky—is beautiful, so gorgeous that I worry that the words inside could not possibly do it justice.

I will be begging you all to pre-order this thing over the next few months, but for now: Cover reveal! Cool, right?

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. LeBron James Is Awfully Quiet These Days, New York. In case you were wondering what happened to More Than A Vote.

2. How Who Wins the World Series Will Change Baseball, MLB.com. More reasons to root for the Phillies.

3. Trump Wins By Wearing You Down, Medium. Inspired by a section in Maggie Haberman’s absolutely essential biography of Trump, Confidence Man.

4. World Series Players, Drafted, With Mike Petriello, MLB.com. Any time I get to do something with Mike Petriello, it’s fun.

5. I Have a Piece in the World Series Program, MLB Productions. In case you happen to find yourself at the game.

6. Your World Series Game Two Preview, MLB.com. Updated in time for this morning!

7. Your World Series Game One Preview, MLB.com. I wrote this before last night’s game, obviously.

8. Fun With Election and Sports Prediction Percentages, Medium. My brain does a lot of math this time of year.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed the great “TAR,” as well as “Black Adam” and “Descendant.”

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we previewed the Georgia-Florida game.

Seeing Red, we did a quick show about the Cardinals resigning Adam Wainwright.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“A Unified Theory of Bob Dylan,” David Remnick, The New Yorker. Not to be all boomer about this, but, uh, yeah, I’m gonna read a David Remnick piece about Bob Dylan.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Boys Don’t Cry,” The Cure. I’ll confess, I am not the biggest Cure fan, but I do love this song (and a few others), and, more to the point, at an event for my friend Bertis Downs’ birthday last night, I got to sing this song with a full band … and in full costume.

Yeah, fun night. Good thing we got that mustache shaved in time.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Go Illini, beat the ‘Huskers. Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will