June 3, 2010 in City

Beard contest jogs memories of follicle foibles

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Dan Pelle photo

Isaac Jensen, of Spokane, will compete in a beard competition in Bend, Ore.
(Full-size photo)

When I read the press release announcing that a Spokane man will compete for a $1,000 prize Saturday at the 2010 National Beard and Moustache Championships in Bend, Ore., my immediate thought was …

Have terrorists slipped Rogaine-laced LSD into the Bend water system?

Then I gave it some thought and tried to be more open-minded.

First off, we now live in an age where fame can be achieved by ramming the most tube steaks down your gullet at one sitting.

Competitive beard growing by that standard is an Olympic sport.

(It is a more natural form of curling.)

And second off, this is Spokane. We need every whisker of attention we can muster in this civic stubble field.

So I called our hometown hirsute hero, Isaac Jensen. He agreed to give me the long and short of what’s going on.

Some particulars I already knew from the hype sheet. The four categories of competition in Bend include best moustache, best partial beard and best full beard. There is also a freestyle section, where an adventurous soul might curl his ’stache into, say, a Snidely Whiplash homage or shape his goatee into a replica of the Space Needle. (Check out the hair-raising examples at www.beardteamusa.org.)

Jensen, who is entered in the full beard category, met me in a coffee shop Tuesday. He has that “hipster-in-a-band” look: Shaved head. Nasal piercing. Tattoo-slathered arms. Sure enough, he told me he used to play bass in a group called Cozette.

A relative newcomer to Spokane, Jensen earns his pay entering data for a business in Liberty Lake and also aspires to be a writer. (Trust me. No good can come of that.)

“I love it,” he said of the area. “The drivers are terrible, but the traffic is pretty light.”

As for Jensen’s beard, well …

It is full and thick although I was expecting a little more of the Billy Gibbons “Zzowie” factor.

Not that I’m one to talk.

I grew my one and only beard back when I was in my mid-20s. As you can see from today’s retro Doug photo, as fashion statements go this was a monumentally bad one.

My beard made me look like one of the crewmates from that popular TV show on the Discovery Channel.

You know, “Deadliest Thatch.”

Thank goodness my lovely wife, Sherry, didn’t marry for looks. If she had she might’ve pulled a Tipper Gore and told me to make like the polar ice caps and disappear!

Some people are just not genetically equipped for facial hair, I guess.

All I could field was the “baseball moustache.” (Nine on each side.) My beard was a good deal hairier, but it revealed itself as an unruly bramble with patches inexplicably missing.

Plus the whole thing itched like crazy.

You have to “push past that” scratchy period, Jensen advised. “My only complaint is that it’s difficult to eat a bowl of cereal.”

So how does a nice lad wind up in a beard-off?

“You don’t find these competitions,” said Jensen. “They kind of find you.”

What that means is that a friend told him about Jack Passion, another musician, author of “The Facial Hair Handbook” and reigning world beard champ.

Inspired to follicle his own star, Jensen began growing his beard in earnest. He eventually went online and filled out the entry form for the upcoming championships.

Jensen is convinced he looks much better with a beard.

Misty Hamrick, Jensen’s significant other, confirms this notion. “I think I screamed a little,” she said of the last time she saw her man clean-shaven.

And so on Saturday, Jensen will go for the grand. Despite any contestant shortcomings, $1,000 will be given away to a lucky competitor at random.

Even so, Jensen is not expecting much.

“I’m not under any delusion that this could be a first-place beard – this year.”

Translation: it appears that our man is in the early stages of what could be a long and winding road.

“There’s no end in sight,” he added.

Doug Clark is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review. He can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or by e-mail at dougc@spokesman.com.

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