Yankees' hair policy history: The long and short of it

For The Boss, it wasn’t really about beards.

It was about long hair.

Lost in all the hoopla about the Yankees last week updating their facial hair policy to allow “well-groomed” beards was that George Steinbrenner was much more offended by long hair than facial hair when he instituted the policy in the mid-1970s, according to people who were around at the time.

Oh, The Boss didn’t love facial hair on his players. But mustaches were allowed, as they have always been under Hal Steinbrenner after his father’s death in 2010. Sparky Lyle, Catfish Hunter, Thurman Munson, Goose Gossage, Don Mattingly, Nestor Cortes and many of the current Yankees have sported memorable mustaches over the decades.

The Yankees’ hair policies under George Steinbrenner were initially informal after he bought the team in 1973.

In 1976, the policy was put on paper in spring training under mustachioed manager Billy Martin.

According to a 1976 Newsday story, a sign was posted on the clubhouse bulletin board. It read “No Beards — No Beads — No Mutton Chops — No Long Hair — No High Stirrups.”

It was signed by Steinbrenner and Martin.

The hair part — not the beards, beads or stirrups — was a problem when outfielder Oscar Gamble, who had been acquired from Cleveland in the offseason, reported to spring training in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Gamble, who passed away in 2018, was well-known for his huge Afro, which extended well out of his cap and batting helmet.

“It probably extended seven or eight inches from his scalp,” Marty Appel, the Yankees’ public relations director from 1973-77, told Newsday this week in a telephone interview. “How he even got a baseball cap over there remains amazing. But spring training of ’76, we were staying at a place called the Fort Lauderdale Inn on Federal Highway. It's a Sunday, and the players are all required to report the following day, Monday. So the phone in my hotel room rings, and it's Gabe Paul, who was the president of the team, the de facto general manager.

“He called to say he just saw from his hotel window Oscar Gamble pulled up and got out of his car with really long hair. Gabe Paul said to me, ‘You better go tell him he has to cut it or we won't give him a uniform tomorrow.’ ”

“I think I said, ‘I'm your PR guy. Should have been a coach or something.’ But it fell to me because he said, ‘If we suspend him and we don't let him dress tomorrow, then we’ve got an enormous PR problem. That's why it's going to you.’

“I had only met Oscar once. Now I had to go to his room and knock on his door, introduce myself and say, ‘We’ve got to get your hair cut, or they're not going to let you dress tomorrow.’ ”

Luckily for Appel, Gamble was willing. Appel managed to get a barber to agree to come to the hotel on a Sunday for $40 and Gamble’s locks were shorn down to Steinbrenner-approved length — and height and width.

“The policies didn’t really come into play until Oscar’s situation,” Chris Chambliss, the Yankees’ first baseman from 1974-79, told Newsday this week in a telephone interview. “But it was kind of like well-known. It may not have been as well-publicized before. I used to have some long sideburns that were like mutton chops, almost. That was as close to a beard as you can get. Never had anything said there. I’ve never had any talk about my grooming. I didn’t have a lot of hair. I don’t have any now.”

Steinbrenner, in 1978, told The New York Times: “I have nothing against long hair per se. But I’m trying to instill a certain sense of order and discipline in the ballclub, because I think discipline is important in an athlete. The players can joke about it, as long as they do it. If they don’t do it, we’ll try to find a way to accommodate them somewhere else. I want to develop pride in the players as Yankees. If we can get them to feel that way and think that way, fine. If they can’t, we’ll get rid of them.”

Also during 1976 spring training, according to a Newsday story, Lyle shelled out $50 for a haircut (and a perm — it was the Seventies) because he wanted to conform.

But Steinbrenner thought the reliever’s hair was still too long.

“I want to see skin over the collar on the back of their necks,” Steinbrenner said, according to the story.

So Lyle, Hunter, Munson and pitcher Dick Tidrow “left yesterday’s workout looking for an open barber shop,” according to the story.

“I think it stinks,” Lyle said, “but I’m going to do it. It’s kinda hard to play without a uniform.”

Said Chambliss: “It was something that Mr. Steinbrenner wanted. He wanted the guys clean-cut and stuff. I didn’t think it would ever change.”

It didn’t change even when Yankees captain Munson, who had a mustache and often was stubbly in the beard area under his catcher’s mask, tested the limits of Steinbrenner’s policy.

“Thurman is a key in this because he actually grew a beard at one point,” Appel said. “That sort of set Yankees world on fire.”

Munson loved tweaking Steinbrenner to the writers. After a particularly good game in 1977, Munson was asked about the heavy whiskers that were starting to infiltrate his chin, according to a Newsday story.

“I like beards,” Munson said. “I didn’t ask [Steinbrenner] about it. Billy Martin doesn’t mind. If he doesn’t mind, it probably means George is the other way.”

Later, Munson added: “Somewhere, is that against the Constitution — to say I can’t grow a beard?”

The greatest test of Steinbrenner’s distaste for long hair on his players came in 1991, when then-captain Mattingly was benched for a game because he refused to get a haircut. The Yankees were a bad team in that era, and Steinbrenner had been suspended from the day-to-day business of the Yankees the year before by commissioner Fay Vincent.

But the Steinbrenner influence lived on. Publicly, it was manager Stump Merrill who threatened to suspend Mattingly and three other players for violating the long-hair ban.

Mattingly, then the moribund franchise’s biggest star, didn’t back down. He was benched for one game before getting a slight haircut — one inch off the back, according to a Newsday story that credited bullpen catcher Carl Taylor as the scissors-wielder.

“I took an inch off the back, layered it a little bit,” Taylor said in the story. “I didn’t do anything with the sides. I made it neater. I just did what I thought was going to be able to pass inspection, so to speak.”

Mattingly, at the time, said: “I think it’s all pretty silly. I talked to my dad last night and he asked me what was going on and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I was pretty much embarrassed by the whole thing.”

In 2016, when Mattingly was in his first year as manager of the Miami Marlins, he announced a policy that prohibited any facial hair.

A year later, Mattingly canceled the policy, asking only that his players appear “groomed and professional.”

Asked recently about the Yankees’ updated policy, Mattingly — now the Blue Jays' bench coach — said, “Times change.”

By Anthony Rieber

anthony.rieber@newsday.comAnthonyRieber

Anthony Rieber covers baseball, as well as the NFL, NBA and NHL. He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since July 5, 2004.