One of the longest-running NFL discussions is about Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis and his haircut. Davis’ haircut has frequently been a subject of discussion, as with the 2016 Reddit thread of “How does Mark Davis STILL have this haircut!?!” and Rob Riggle’s 2018 “Now that is a Super Bowl!” joke at the NFL Honors event. Davis (seen above at a February 2020 boxing match alongside Raiders’ coach Jon Gruden) recently gave a rare extended interview to Andrea Kremer for a segment on HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (premiering Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on HBO, also available on HBO Max), and Kremer told him that when she told others she was going to interview him, the first thing they told her to ask was “What’s with the hair!” That led to this exchange:
“It’s the way I cut it!”
“What do you like about it?”
“I just blow-dry it, and it just winds up pretty much hanging like this. I don’t really have to comb it.”
“Do you have a special barber that you go to?”
“Well, there’s one in Palm Desert I go to now [as per a 2014 ESPN piece, he had been doing that for years even while the Raiders were still in Oakland, and had “three barbers since college”]. But it’s not her fault! It’s me! I force her to do it!”
“Do you have this keen ability to just laugh at yourself, and just not take yourself that seriously?”
“Yeah, absolutely! People ask me where I grew up, and I say, ‘I haven’t.'”
From there, there’s a discussion about Davis growing up around his famed father, Al, and how Al once fired him from being a ball boy. That’s shown in this clip:
https://twitter.com/RealSportsHBO/status/1439997792580218891?s=20
There are some further comments in there on Davis’ relationship with his father and with the Raiders while his father was alive, including “I knew just what his dream was, and that was to build the greatest organization in sports, and I just thought that it would be selfish of me to expect him to teach me along the way.” And the whole segment (which runs about 14 minutes, and is produced by Maggie Burbank) is interesting, and worth a watch. But the dialogue on his hair is perhaps particularly entertaining.
The September episode of Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel premieres Tuesday night at 10 p.m. ET/PT on HBO, and is also available on HBO Max. Other segments this month include one on ultramarathoner and firefighter Jerry Garcia, and an update of their 2019 feature on Adam Schefter.
[Photo from Joe Camporeale/USA Today Sports]
