Flak Magazine: Kick Out the Sports! 12.26.05

The fast-growing haircut chain Sport Clips has a concept so brilliantly obvious, you wonder why it took so long to take root. The concept is, you can attract a loyal audience of men by taking the salon experience and making it less gay.

It may not be that homophobia makes some straight men consider the hair salon experience as uncomfortable as having their wives ask if their pants look too tight in the butt. Maybe instead it's the average salon's housewife-and-old-lady component, the brood of hens with goop and tinfoil in their hair, talking for hours about drapes, or Oprah, or Oprah's drapes, the women unaware that they look and smell like nuclear plant seepage.

What's the alternative, the barber? At least not for white people. Movies such as Barbershop show black men having great fun hanging out at the title establishment regardless of whether they're getting their hair cut. White guys' image of the barber is a nasty cuss with a buzzcut, an eyepatch and a lit cigarette permanently attached to his bottom lip.

These are the reasons, I'm going to guess, why the Sport Clips that just opened in my neighborhood is overrun with barrel-chested white men, the likes of whom I've never seen at the kind of salon that insists on moussing your hair after it's cut.

Sport Clips, a 10-year-old chain with more than 300 locations in 28 states (and growing), is unashamedly seeking the knuckle-dragger, which as women know is the vast majority of men. A Sport Clips location has a big-screen TV in the lobby showing sports, stadium-style seating in the basketball wood-floor waiting area and a TV showing sports in front of each hair-cutting station. Instead of the likes of Us and Celebrity Hairstyles, the waiting-room magazines are Sports Illustrated and Bassmasters.

Sport Clips sells hair-care products, but it more prominently sells pennants and autographed pictures of retired players, good for a target audience much more likely to make an impulse buy out of an autographed Bobby Hull photo than they would a bottle of gel. Speaking of hair care products, Sports Clips only cuts hair — no coloring, styling or anything else that might require the smell of chemicals, including having combs in a little tub of disinfectant (towels wrapping sets of combs and brushes for each haircut are kept in an adjoining locker.)

I recently took Sport Clips for a test run, once with my 8-year-old and 3-year-old sons, and once just myself. Mind you, I haven't had miserable experiences at salons, except for the one time the stylist asked me if I wanted my hair cut with a part, which I did, whereupon she shaved a part on my white head. (I looked almost as bad as Bronson Arroyo wearing cornrows.)

Bringing my sons first answered one question for me — if Sport Clips is so insistent on taking the money of knuckle-dragging guys, why didn't they get all Hooters and have stylists wearing breast-busting tops and cameltoe-tight shorts? Sport Clips advertises you can get a hot towel and massage after your cut — having the lure of a barely clothed bimbo ready to do it would get the crowds coming, so to speak.

The reason they don't, other than not wanting to attract the attention of the local vice cops, is because they figure these barrel-chested men will bring their kids, too. After all, for most younger boys, the only haircut required is something simple, just a little mowing of the lawn. Then again, for the barrel-chested guys, that's all they're looking for, too. (To be fair, I saw some of these guys bring their daughters, as well.)

While my 3-year-old son had his hair cut, I asked the stylist — well, given they don't actually style, I guess she'd be a barber — a couple of questions. First, what sports do they show all day? And second, does she ever get sick of having them on?

On the first question, she said Sport Clips usually runs ESPN News if there's no game on, as there was that Sunday. On the second, she said she can tune the sports out easily — "I think the Pirates are on or something," she said, referring to the Pittsburgh Steelers-Minnesota Vikings game playing behind her head. I felt relief that the person coming at my young children with sharp implements indeed paid more attention to their heads than to the Pirates or Steelers or whoever the hell was on TV.

The job she did on my children seeming satisfactory, I returned for my own haircut. I pretty much got the lawn mowed. Most stylists take a look at my hair first, noticed my raging cowlick, the huge wave on the back of my head, and my natural, 50s-style ducktail, and stifle laughter before telling me their strategy to make shit into shinola.

Not here. But for $20 for a haircut, hot towel, head and neck massage (delivered by one of those Sharper Image-type machines, not actual human hands), plus the surrounding sports, I didn't complain. Well, except for the fact that when I went, the big-screen TV had the unstomachable Woody Paige and Skip Bayless on. Next time, I'll check my local listings to determine if only crap is on and, if so, risk my manhood by going to a real stylist.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.