Passion seems to be able to bypass other conventions as well.
When he enters a coffeehouse in the mini-mall, part of a tour of local haunts, baristas gape and drinks are on the house. When he walks down the streets of his hometown, passersby greet him with smiles and slaps on the back. It’s all because the 25-year-old musician sports a cascading corn silk of red hair that tumbles to his belt and makes him look like Elijah Wood grafted to a ZZ Top beard. But one thing stands in the way of Jack Passion’s campaign to fully leverage his follicular fame. One simple thing that can swat away all the bragging rights, cut into book sales, endanger endorsement deals and maybe, just maybe, end all that free java. On Saturday, at the biennial battle of the bearded and mustachioed in Anchorage, Alaska, the defending world champion will have to step in front of the judges and do it again. “People are gunning for me,” Passion says. “There are people talking … on the Internet. America doesn’t love champions America loves underdogs.” Although men no doubt have been engaged in low-level facial-hair competition since the first Neanderthal learned to scrape hair from his cheeks with a flinty arrowhead, the WBMC can be traced to the Verband Deutscher Bartclubs (Association of German Beard Clubs), which held the first contest in 1990 in the Black Forest village of Hofen-Enz. From 1995 on, the contest has taken place every two years. In 1999, when Phil Olsen, Passion’s teammate and now captain of Beard Team USA, stumbled across the Eurocentric event, he was one of only two Americans at the competition. He decided, pretty much there and then, to build U.S. awareness and participation. “It wasn’t going to truly be a world competition unless America had adequate representation,” said Olsen, a part-time judge from Lake Tahoe. Eventually the Germans reached out to him about holding the face-off in the United States, which resulted in 2003’s event in Carson City, Nev., where 60 Americans competed and claimed four victories (including Gary Hagen of Gilroy, Calif., who won for his Imperial – a.k.a. handlebar – mustache).
With the competition back on American soil, a relatively young team and who knows what kind of facial fur from the Alaskan wilderness, Olsen thinks this year is the tipping point. “If we could win 12 gold that would be spectacular,” he said.