Lip service As Movember comes to a close, a look at some famous Manitoba moustaches By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:12 PM CST Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2024

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/11/2024 (612 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Jon Montgomery’s moustache was just a patch of reddish stubble, it could only dream of becoming an astronaut.

The ruddy muzzy always knew it was destined to go fast, to go far and to live life on the edge. That much was certain when it held on for dear life while its host whipped around the skeleton track in Vancouver to win a record-setting, beer-soaked gold medal at the 2010 Winter Olympics.

But in the 14 years since, as the Russell-born Montgomery’s gone on to enjoy a successful post-athletic afterlife as a television host, his whiskers still yearned to go where no Manitoban “lip sweater” had ever gone before.

And so, Montgomery partnered with Movember for a manscaped mission, aiming to raise awareness for men’s physical and mental-health causes. (The Amazing Race Canada host, who has raised $10,000 for Movember since 2012, has a personal connection to the cause; his father went through prostate cancer.)

On Sept. 22, in a field in Kingston, N.Y., Montgomery’s moustache trimmings were strapped into a space-proofed container, attached to a balloon, and launched to a cruising altitude of 35,472.9 metres above mean sea level for a two-hour-long solo flight at the very edge of the earth’s stratosphere.

“It just really changed my perspective,” the moustache told the Free Press upon its return. “Made me wonder whether other lifeforms exist, and whether they grow facial hair, too.”

Its adventures left the Free Press discussing the most memorable Manitoban moustaches, sifting through old boxes of hockey cards, scanning LP sleeves and asking the general public for suggestions.

The following star soup-strainers made the barbershop cut.

 

Louis Riel

About 150 years before Montgomery’s moustache witnessed the vastness of the universe, a man named Telrean noted the absence of Manitoba’s most important moustache in a diary entry, written on Sept. 23, 1874, in Saint Hyacinthe.

“With emotion, I shook the hand of Riel, the young hero of Manitoba,” he wrote after meeting the Métis icon.

“He was tall, bronze like the Métis, without showing much trace of his Indian blood. He wore sideburns without a moustache.”

As detailed in a 1949 entry in the Manitoba Historical Society’s Transactions series, a publication that preceded Manitoba History, in 1874, the 29-year-old Riel had just visited Washington, where he’d met with sitting American president Ulysses S. Grant. (Grant had by that point tamed his Civil War scruff).

Meanwhile, Riel’s father, Louis Sr., who died in 1864, is seen in most photographs with a sideburn-full-beard combo.

You might have a hard time envisioning Louis Riel without his ‘stache, which has become an indelible element of our province’s founder’s visual identity, a downward crescent blending revolution and grandiose intelligence in one follicular swoop.

Riel’s is without a doubt Manitoba’s most consequential moustache.

 

Burton Cummings

There are more than 1,200 members of the Facebook fan club Burton Cummings’ Moustache, a tribute to the hirsute frontman of the Guess Who, the biggest band to ever emerge from Winnipeg.

“I AM NOT BURT HIMSELF!” the group’s administrator writes. “This is the official UNOFFICIAL fanclub of Burton Cummings’ moustache — the moustache is what contains all Burt’s superpowers.”

There might be some Samsonian truth in that: on each of his first three solo albums, the St. John’s neighbourhood-raised songwriter made the muzz — and those curly locks — a focal point of the album art. But when he released Woman Love, the singer debuted a naked lip.

“Singer Burton Cummings has a new image,” The Canadian Press reported on April 2, 1980, one month before the album’s release.

“Cummings, now a short-haired rocker, says he woke up one morning, took a look at himself and realized he was bored with what he saw. Deciding to make a change, he hacked off his hair close to his scalp and shaved off his moustache.”

For 1981’s Sweet Sweet, Cummings hired photographer John Rowlands to handle the cover art.

With his thumbs meeting in the album’s centre, forming a crude W, Cummings framed the lower third of his face, his lip once again graced by that superpowered moustache.

 

The 1982-83 Winnipeg Jets

Yes, these Jets featured current head coach Scott Arniel and a 19-year-old star centre named Dale Hawerchuk, but there’s a case to be made that the 1982-1983 Winnipeg club is the greatest moustache team of all time.

Coached by reigning Jack Adams winner Tom Watt — a mustachioed dead ringer for Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky — and co-captained by bare-lipped American Dave Christian and the gloriously stached right-winger Lucien DeBlois, the Jets limped to a 74-point finish before losing to the eventual Smythe Division champion Edmonton Oilers in the first round of the playoffs.

The Oilers later lost the Stanley Cup to the New York Islanders, who won their fourth straight championship behind a roster featuring St. Boniface’s Butch Goring, a Lady Byng-winning gentleman with an incongruently grizzly moustache.

Perhaps the Jets blew it by having an all-time lineup of dusters well before it came time to grow playoff beards.

The unofficial leader was defenceman Dave Babych, who wore the thickest moustache this side of Lanny McDonald for most of his 19-year career, the first five spent as a Jet.

(In a January 1984 Bench Bits column, Free Press sports editor Hal Sigurdson noted, “Dave Babych has shaved his moustache, while Dale Hawerchuk is growing one.”)

On the blueline, Maurice Mantha earned the nickname Moe. Saskatchewan speedster Doug Smail donned a horseshoe moustache above his Moose Jaw.

Wearing No. 16 and a respectable ‘stache, former Brandon Wheat King Laurie Boschman scored 74 points in only 61 games, trailing only the baby-faced Hawerchuk (92 points) and the French-born Paul MacLean — a first-ballot moustache Hall of Famer who finished the year with 76 points.

While the all-star MacLean is remembered as a prototypical power forward who scored 40 goals for the Jets on three occasions, most modern hockey fans became acquainted with him during his tenure as a cantankerous, award-winning bench boss.

During the 2013 season, MacLean, then coaching the Senators, went viral when an Ottawa fan sitting behind him in a suit and tie — and walrus moustache — was dubbed “Paul MacClone” by Sportsnet.

The auto parts salesman’s facial hair was covered by local and national press. “Now, some of my customers call me Coach,” Watson told the Ottawa Sun.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our award-winning Moustache Roundup in Saturday’s newspaper, and feel free to send your suggestions of Memorable Manitoba Muzzies (MMMs) to Ben Waldman.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com