Not just a superstition: Fans use playoff beards for charity

Mike McGrath was the reason the Penguins won the Stanley Cup.

He thinks.

He’s developed a series of traditions over the past few years — wearing the same shirt for every game, always drinking out of the same cup, holding his Pens towel a certain way and watching games at his house with his friends.

But this year’s postseason was the first time McGrath decided to grow the playoff beard, a mane loyalists grow alongside actual members of the team, which he shaved only after his team won the Cup.

And for McGrath, it was the first time he had grown any sort of facial hair, and for the first three weeks of the playoffs, he couldn’t stop scratching his stubble.

The itch eventually went away, but the luck stayed. The Penguins beat the Detroit Red Wings 2-1, thanks, in part, to McGrath’s his hairy mug. Or so he likes to think.

The beard’s good fortune reached beyond success on the ice. McGrath teamed up with Dan Richmond and Darren Hucko, his hirsute co-workers at Hefren-Tillotson, a Pittsburgh-based investment advisory firm.

As a three-man beard-growing machine, they entered the “Beard-A-Thon,” a charity event sponsored by the Pittsburgh Penguins for the Mario Lemieux Foundation, an organization founded by Penguins legend Mario Lemieux and dedicated to cancer research.

The team finished second on the Penguin’s online Beard-A-Thon leaderboard yesterday, raising $7,933.25. The community of Penguins fans who participated in the Beard-A-Thon raised more than $109,975, more than every other team in the NHL who participated in their own Beard-A-Thon programs.

The men on the Hefren-Tillotson team sent out weekly e-mails to co-workers asking for pledges in support of their beards, amid taunting from older firm members that they were too young to grow facial hair.

But the beards grew — full. And they generated a good luck cycle that went from beard to ice and back to beard.

“We think the days we got the most donations were the days we won the games,” Hucko said.

Large donations ensured victory on the ice, which gave the beards more time to get longer, and according to hockey tradition, the more beard, the more luck.

It was destiny. It was unstoppable. It was an auto-piloted course to Stanley Cup glory started by three beards, the members thought.

The tradition of growing playoff beards dates back years before it became a profitable charity fundraiser. Male fans who want their team to win will not shave from the start of the playoffs until the team either loses or wins the Stanley Cup, just as many of the hockey players they’re watching do.

No one knows exactly how or when the tradition started, but John Cimperman, a partner in the Cinergy company running the Beard-A-Thon, said, “It started somewhere in the mid ’80s with the New York Islanders.”

The planning began last October, and NHL teams began to show interest. Of the 16 NHL teams who participated in the playoffs, nine allowed Cinergy to run Beard-A-Thon campaigns for their fan base.

“The fans of the Penguins have been absolutely phenomenal,” Cimperman said. “It’s a testament to their passion as hockey fans.”

Regardless of why the tradition started, male Penguins fans agree that there are few better ways to support their team during playoff time, even while the women in their lives might be repulsed by it.

“My mom didn’t like the beard, but I had to keep telling her it was playoff time,” graduating Pitt senior Jim Weigand said.

Weigand said he grew a beard purely because he thought it would bring luck to the team. He grew one for last year’s playoffs, when the Penguins were only a few goals away from winning the Stanley Cup, so he decided to grow one again.

There was an itchy phase for him too, but he endured it. Now that the playoffs have ended, Weigand still hasn’t shaved off his beard, a possible violation of the tradition.

There is controversy in the hockey world about the time particulars of beard growth — exactly when to start it and when to shave it.

“Once the playoffs are over, so is the beard,” McGrath said. “The tradition has always been that you shave when you win the cup. The players have and so have we.”

Darren Hucko also shaved his beard Saturday, the day after the Penguins won the Stanley Cup. He said he felt he had used up every ounce of luck in his beard, and also recognized that “it’s hard to rock the scruffy beard with a suit.”

Besides sticking to the traditions of hockey and the workplace, the men on the Hefren-Tillotson team responded to pressure from their wives.

When Richmond got home from playing golf last Saturday, his wife told him she wouldn’t kiss him until he had shaved the beard. He had no choice but to shave it off.

McGrath’s wife bought champagne for the Stanley Cup party on Friday. When he asked her what they would have done had the Penguins lost, she said that regardless of the outcome, it was a celebration of his beard coming off.

Playoff beard-growers in Pittsburgh are part of a much larger community of the follicaly advanced spanning two nations of hockey fans.

On playoffbeard.com, anyone can look at the guide to grading playoff beards, which shows a five-stage progression from the mildly hairy “Kristofferson” to the mop-headed figure of “Chewbacca.”

There seems to be a growing support group of playoff-beard growers who need advice. One fan from Alberta, Canada, has a blog that warns growers that their girlfriends will be unimpressed and complain that it “prickles.”

The guys from Hefren-Tillotson didn’t care that others might not understand, because the beards brought them their own good fortune.

Mario Lemieux heard about their efforts and invited them to his suite in Mellon Arena to watch a game.

He thanked them for raising the money for his charity. They soon began to talk about the close game they were watching, but only after they discussed beards.

Lemieux was growing one, too.