Beard fanatic on quest for hirsute glory

VIRGINIA BEACH

Chris Knowles was in the Navy for six years, prohibited from - as he puts it - "rocking a beard."

He tried a few times to get a no-shave medical reprieve, purposely giving himself razor burn by scraping a dull blade against the grain of his stubble. The doctor saw through that.

So when Knowles woke up on Sept. 6 last year, his first day out of the Navy, he didn't shave. And he hasn't since.

"Not trimming it, nothing," Knowles said. "I just let it go."

Tonight, Knowles puts his beard to the test at the New York City Beard and Moustache Championships in Brooklyn. It is, the beard af icionado says, the nation's premier facial hair exposition.

Though Knowles didn't show a whisker while in the Navy - shunning the permiss ible ultra-

trimmed mustaches - once he committed, he plunged into the whole culture of beards. He formed the Hampton Roads Beard and Mustache Club, a 25-member group of which he is president.

Two other club members plan to drive with Knowles to the New York competition.

And Knowles went bushy, somewhat of a non style called "full-beard natural."

"It's like the laziest thing you can do to have an achievement," Knowles says of the bushy beard look. "I don't have to do anything."

When Knowles showed up to talk, he rocked his full beard with a black T-shirt and white lettering and the unneeded label, "BEARDED." Outside, sunlight hit his face and revealed a palette of autumnal hair colors, strawberry blond flowing from his bottom lip, darker scarlets and chestnuts swirling together on the sides.

"That's what I'm hoping to get extra points on," Knowles said of the colors.

Full-beard natural, Knowles said, is the "Big Dog" competitive category, but the contest also judges men in categories such as goatee, patchy beard (the more scattershot the whiskers, the better), freestyle (the swirly kind) and a special

category for this year, recession beard, which signals to everyone that you've lost your job.

Knowles, now a 25-year-old college student, said his dad always had a mustache and variations of a goatee.

The buzz in the beard world, Knowles said, is that beards used to be popular, were spurned by baby boomers, and are back in vogue with the 20-something crowd. He figures it's a backlash against the coif ed and buffed "metrosexual" movement of the past few years.

When you look at Knowles, it's clear he's not going for a contemporary look, and his appearance seems like something out of the movies. Maybe old grainy films.

"Last time people had this kind of beard was like the hillbillies," Knowles said. "The moonshine days in the late '20s."

Lon Wagner, (757) 222-5119, lon.wagner@pilotonline.com