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My hair fell like a divot to the floor. Sometimes in the sort of clumps that follow an approach shot hit rather too heavily; sometimes in those little tufts a player might toss to test the wind. It rested on the floor much as a sod of earth would lie on a fairway – that is to say reproachfully, until it was replaced in its divot hole and patted down or, in the case of my hair, swept up.
Samson knew a bit about hair. I do, too. I speak as a man who prizes his. A man can be hirsute or hairless, bouffant or bald. It is said to be a symbol of a man’s virility and since I have a full head of it I want to believe that. Obviously if I was more follicly challenged I would describe it as hokum.
I have significantly less hair now than I had five days ago. It wouldn’t be right to say that when I went for my haircut I resembled Rory McIlroy in early 2009 and after it I looked like Jim Furyk, but you get my drift. I suspect many men, whether golfers or not, are experiencing the pleasure of their first trim for weeks.
Last Wednesday morning, after entering the scene of the crime through a side door, I donned a plastic cape, put a mask on my face and sat in the barber’s chair for the first time since February. My last appointment had been in the fourth full week of the second month of the year. It was pre-pandemic, pre-lockdown, pre-The Players, pre-the Ides of March and pre-hundreds of practice balls being hit and thousands of words being written.
BEFORE AND AFTER
It had been 18 weeks, or 127 days – about the length of time it took Bobby Jones to win the Opens and Amateur Championships of Great Britain and the US, the mellifluously named Impregnable Quadrilateral. Wars have been started and finished in less time. Marriages too. I should know, I have had two. Marriages, that is, not wars, though sometimes there was precious little difference.
Do I feel better? I do. Others can decide whether or not I look better. The cut and shape of a man’s haircut lies in the eye of the beholder, rather like his golf swing. It had cost about the same as five Titleist Pro V1s. A bargain. A lost ball is a lost ball, probably gone forever. My hair will grow again. It has started already. And it won’t be another 127 days before its next trimming.
E-MAIL JOHN
John Hopkins