It’s been a personal source of perplexity. It hits me hardest when I watch NFL football. It distracts me from the game. Makes me think about grooming and culture and shampoo and colorful beads when I should be thinking about touchdowns, onside kicks, run-pass options and cheerleaders. I don’t know enough about dreadlocks!

Well, I don’t know anything about dreadlocks. It’s a cultural blindspot. Part of a growing list of things that old white guys will never be ghetto enough to understand. And while I know that culturally I’ll never get it, intellectually, I search for answers. Is it real hair? Why does it look so matted? How come every NFL defensive back is required to wear them? Who knew that so many football players have never had a haircut?

A white guy talking about urban hairstyles is surely something we all should dread. Whatevs.

Dreadlocks date back at least 2,000 years and are closely associated with many of the world’s great societies. By one definition they are ropelike strands of hair formed by matting or braiding. African-Americans wear their hair in this manner as a form of ethnic pride or for meaningful cultural and spiritual reasons, while white people typically wear dreadlocks to use up the beads they had left over from the sixties or to identify with the marijuana culture.

Anyway, there are all kinds of styles and techniques and cultural nuances associated with dreadlocks, including something called “free-form” or “neglect” dreads where the hair matts together slowly of its own accord. I also found out by way of the worldwide interweb, that washing dreadlocks is a big deal because you can’t achieve a righteous degree of dreadiness with dirty oily hair. So the hundred pounds of hair crammed into that NFL helmet … clean as a whistle (I never saw that comin’).

The number of dreaded football players has steadily increased since Al Harris and Ricky Williams started wearing theirs in the 1990s. In fact, Ricky Williams was tackled by his dreads on two separate plays in the same game in 2003 which led to the NFL establishing the “Ricky Rule.” It states that a dude’s hair shall be considered part of the uniform and therefore it is perfectly legal to yank him to the turf by his dreadlocks.

According to NFL data from 2015, fourteen percent of the 2,905 athletes on NFL rosters had hair long enough to activate the “Ricky Rule.” That means by now close to 500 NFL players are longhairs. And if you believe the NFL, fifty-four percent of these players play defense, while forty-four percent play offense. Seventy-four percent of the total long-haired players had dreadlocks and twenty-four percent had free-flowing hair – mostly white guys like Clay Matthews.

The theory goes that players who get tackled are less inclined to wear dreads, and while I think it’s clear that defensive backs are more likely to dread-up than anyone else, my own personal observations tell me that wide receivers and running backs are a close second. Lineman of any type seem to have been slow to adopt the dreadlock scene, and of course, we’re still waiting for our first dreaded kicker.

One guy that studies such things thinks this whole dreaded reality has the potential to get pretty hairy. He says that getting tackled by the hair results in “more than 500 pounds of force to the neck during the takedown” and that hair tackles could result in “high shear and compressive stresses in the neck, as well as neck torsion, that could cause severe and life-changing injuries.”

This so-called expert says, “I’m really concerned there’s going to be a serious injury. It doesn’t mean it won’t happen just because it hasn’t happened yet. I’m really concerned somebody’s going to end up with a broken neck …”

Essentially, he says it’s only a matter of time before someone dies of dreadlocks.

As for me, I’m just an average white dude, sitting here trying to get my hair to matt and wonderin’ who all those players are whose names are blocked out by the hair that’s growing down to their ass.

Photo credit: jurvetson on Visual hunt /CC BY