WALNUT CREEK, CALIF. — The dusty red Geo coasts into a parking spot and stops directly in front of a sign that reads "15-minute parking." The driver strokes his beard and waves his hand at the warning, like Merlin, trying to make it disappear from the Walnut Creek mini-mall. "That doesn't apply to Jack Passion," he says.
Jack 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 in wonder 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.
In 2007, those majestic whiskers earned Passion a first place in the "full beard: natural" category of the World Beard and Moustache Championships (WBMC) in Brighton, England, and overnight celebrity in the insular subculture of competitive facial hair.
Since then he has incorporated, launching a line of organic cotton T-shirts silk-screened with the likeness of that full ginger beard. Last week he put the finishing touches on a self-published how-to tome called "The Facial Hair Handbook." In addition, Passion, a bass guitarist, is recording his first solo album, "At the Opera."
But there's one thing that 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, the defending world champion will have to step in front of the judges and do it all over again.
"People are gunning for me," Passion says. "There are people talking . . . on the Internet. America doesn't love champions, America loves underdogs."
Though men have no doubt 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 (Assn. 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, attracting clubs from around the world.
