Editorial note: the following story is from the New York Daily News and can also be read on its web site here.
By ETHAN SACKS
New York DAILY NEWS
Monday, June 23rd 2008, 2:19 PM
Turns out the answers to Jason Giambi's early season problems may have been right under his nose.
Through a brutal early start that saw his average drop to .191 on May 18, Yankees slugger Jason Giambi kept a stiff upper lip. Then on a lark, Giambi decided to join his teammate Johnny Damon in growing a mustache.
The rest is the stuff of legend.
"It's
for fun," Giambi told the Daily News. "Johnny (Damon) and I were joking
one day because we were both kind of scuffling. We did it as a joke and
over the long haul of the season, you have to find things to break up
the monotony of it."
It did more than break up just the monotony:
The first-baseman has raised his average eighty points since. Over the
past month, Giambi is tied for 5th in the majors in home runs and third
in OPS. And though Damon has since shaved off his Lady Tickler, the
Yankee outfielder also had a hot streak around the time he ditched his
razor.
While Giambi has given some of the credit for breaking out
of his slump to a lucky gold lamé thong with a flame-line waistband,
there is a movement to recognize the mustache as the source of the
slugger's rediscovered power.
Aaron Perlut, executive director of the American Mustache Institute, hopes the success of players like Giambi and Arizona's Eric Byrnes
this season will bring the 'stache back in vogue with professional
baseball players, who've gravitated more towards clean-shaven look
since the '80s.
"We believe a mustache brings tremendous power
to the men or women who chooses to wear one," says Perlut, whose
organization has 320 chapters around the world. "A mustached American
is brave one in today's culture where a mustache looks down upon."
"As it grows in, you get this weird sort of confidence about you," says Jon Chattman,
a pop culture expert and co-author of "The Book of 'Bert,' the
definitive text on celebrity mustaches. "People stare at you when you
walk down the street - you kind of feel like John Travolta in the opening credits of 'Saturday Night Fever.'
Chattman says it's just a matter of time before the mustache overtakes its uglier cousin, the playoff beard.
Giambi originally grew out his moustache in 2006 as a tribute to childhood idol, Don Mattingly and enjoyed similar success, but had ultimately given into the Yankees' clubhouse policy on facial hair.
"If
Mr. Giambi is thinking of shaving, I would remind him that lore holds
that every time a mustache is shaved off, an angel dies and falls to
Earth," says Perlut.