NICOLE MILLER/Daily Bruin UCLA soccer players display
their new and ever-changing haircuts.
By Vytas Mazeika
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
The British tabloids go crazy when Manchester United midfielder
David Beckam does anything with his hair ““ when it was long,
after he shaved it and even when he sliced one of his eyebrows.
Though this fixation with one’s hair is not unique to
soccer players and fans alike, it is characteristic.
Take the UCLA men’s soccer team, for example.
Forward Tim Pierce and midfielder Adolfo Gregorio have both
bleached their hair. Goalkeeper Zach Wells has dyed it black. Matt
Taylor has chopped his long hair down. All of them look but
remotely similar to their media guide mug shots.
“I don’t know how to put this nicely, but it might
be the vanity of especially the professional soccer world,”
head coach Todd Saldaña said with a smile. “I
don’t know what to put that to, except that maybe a lot of
them are sort of creative types, but also a little vain. They want
to draw some attention to themselves.
“Certainly it would make John Wooden cringe.”
Out in the soccer world there are plenty of other examples of
people with peculiar hair.
According to Saldaña, it’s hard to turn to a game on
TV without seeing a player with dreadlocks, another with a shaved
head, one with dyed hair and another with highlights.
“I don’t think it’s soccer related, but
I’ve noticed a lot of people in MLS also have dyed hair
““ like Landon Donovan and Paul Caligiuri,” Wells
said.
“Paul Caligiuri is Pert Plus dude,” Pierce added in
reference to Caligiuri’s mop of hair.
But why this obsession with one’s strands of hair?
“We’re just goofy,” Pierce said.
“I’ve been dying my hair black, blonde, everything
since I was in high school.”
Southern California natives like Pierce and Wells have dyed
their hair for a while now, so for them it’s more a matter of
changing it up every once in a while, just on a whim.
A Bay Area transplant like Gregorio gets a bit of persecution
for his NorCal “fade” and newfound ‘do ““ he
even had a blond goatee to match earlier in the season.
“Adolf just wants to be from Southern California so much,
that he’s got to color his hair and copy everyone,”
Pierce said.
Saldaña allows his players to display their colorful nature
as long as that bit of freedom does not affect the player’s
dedication in the “right areas” of the game.
After all, they’re all just one big, happy, dysfunctional
family.
“We, as a staff, sort of stay out of it,”
Saldaña said. “We’re not necessarily suprised by
it now. We have yet to go into the mohawks and things like that. I
think I would have to draw the line there.”
Believe it or not, there is a psychological reason for this
phenomenom.
Superstitious players tend to turn to this as a ritual in terms
of good luck, while those mired in a slump feel the need to make
some sort of change in order to spark something new.
“Just like me, I was on a bad streak, dyed my hair and
that Friday scored a goal,” Gregorio said.
Upon hearing this, Pierce began joking about how he’ll
score a couple of goals, then cut his hair, score another one, dye
his hair again and score another goal.
If there were any truth to that, you would never see Pierce with
the same shade of hair for more than a week.