SPORTACHE: Paul Breitner
This section of SPORTIVO will be devoted to sports’ best ‘staches. Feel free to send your submissions for consideration.
If you followed soccer during the 70’s, chances are you beared witness to some of the most insanely offensive displays of facial hair this part of Swedish porn. The clean-cut players of the previous decade started to write the book on nonconformism by showcasing gravity-defying afros, bushy sideburns and messy beards that sent waves of follicular freewill all across the pitch.
Few of those visionaries became as emblematic as Germany’s Paul Breitner. A star with Bayern Munich and later with Real Madrid, Breitner was always an imposing defender and an able midfielder when he switched position at the end of his illustrious career. A fixture with the Mannschaft (that’s the German National Team, and also a cool euphemism for “penis” if you followed last year’s World Cup), the “leftist” back also had the honor of being World Champion with the ‘74 West Germans.
Towards the end of his career Breitner was widely criticized for shaving his beard after a cosmetics company offered him 150,000 Deutschmark to do it. Hell, he gets no hate from us. We would shave our wispy, Chandler Bing-like soup strainers for an extra punch on the “Get a free sub” card from Quizno’s. Seriously, look at Breitner. He looks like a guy who could use the extra cash. It wouldn’t surprise us if he lived underneath a bridge and shared scraps of foods with fourteen dogs and the odd racoon.
Anyway, here’s to you, Paul! Congrats on being the first inducted member of the SPORTACHE Hall of Fame.
April 5, 2007 11:16 AM