I never wore parachute pants, Jams or did the Macarena. I never started the Wave at a ballgame or jumped up to do Y.M.C.A. hand motions when everyone around me joined in. I’m proud of that fact. But I always regretted not doing more to stem the tide of these fads. Maybe if I had thrown my body in front of an entire section set to do the Wave, I could have stopped it back in the mid 1980s. Maybe if I had bought up all the copies of the Macarena and then destroyed them, that ridiculous song/dance never would have taken root.
That’s why I’ve decided to step up and take on one of the most disturbing fads to touch our society since McCarthy’s Red Scare or “The Rachel” hairdo . . . the flat bill hat. I can’t stand it. I need to do something about it. Who’s with me?! As a lifelong hat aficionado, the trend toward flat bill hats is especially hurtful. I’m the guy who never throws away a hat no matter how soiled, old or out of date it becomes. I’ve got purple TCU hats that now are light blue, thanks to the Texas sun and my sweaty head. I’ve got a Dodgers hat that’s shrunk so much that it wouldn’t fit my 7-year-old’s noggin. I’ve got my high school baseball cap, more Nike caps than Phil Knight and a pair of Masters hats just to prove that I’ve been to two Masters.
Now I’ll admit that if I sported a ’do like Rick Perry, I might have skipped the hats and considered a run for president, too. But alas, my hairline is running away from my face faster than Usain Bolt, so hats are a crucial part of the wardrobe.
Through 7 years, I’ve carefully educated my son on the art of properly wearing and caring for your favorite hats. I’ve taught him that a hat is not just for show, but also protects you from the elements. That’s what the bill of a hat is for after all. It’s for protection from life-threatening UV rays and rain. It’s for blocking the sun when a fly ball is soaring into the gap. It’s for tipping when someone compliments your birdie putt.
But a horrible thing happened on my most recent trip to a shopping mall with the boy. We dropped into my favorite hat store—Lids—to look for a new baseball cap. I was thinking maybe a Detroit Tigers model with the famous English D (always loved that look for Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I.). As I was zeroing in on the perfect cap, my son uttered a sentence that still makes me wake in the middle of the night . . . “Dad, I like these flat bills.”
This may be a case of old-man syndrome, but I just don’t get the look. Has there ever been a fashion statement this side of wearing your pants halfway down your backside that makes the wearer look more like someone who couldn’t score 500 on the SAT if you spotted them the first 450? Why is it hip to look so lame?
Just to get up to speed on the phenomenon, I decided to dig into a little research. That’s why I’ve infiltrated the Facebook site, Flat Bill Nation. Little do the 1,343 other “friends” know that I’m a secret agent bent on slowly unraveling their favorite hat style—one post at a time.
So again I ask you, who’s with me? What other dads will join me on the picket line outside every hat store in the tri-state area? Who will join me in a letter-writing campaign to flat bill wearing Joba Chamberlain of the Yankees? What dads will start bending the bills of every flat bill they spot at their local shopping malls, supermarkets and ball fields? It’s got to start somewhere. A line in the sand has been drawn. Who’s with me?
