The mullet is a way of life for Woodburn's Musio Chavez

Musio Chavez didn’t grow a top-notch mullet for the promise of Pit Viper sunglasses, a Manscaped grooming kit or the – rumored – chance to throw the first pitch at a Major League Baseball game.

It’s not even about that time he got to go backstage to meet Los Tucanes de Tijuana, or the women who ask to touch his hair while their boyfriends give him the side-eye, or the knowing fist bumps when he encounters his “brothers of the mane.”

His quest is more meaningful than any perk that sporting a shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper mullet has brought him.

It’s really about the time he was 24 and fell off a roof at his construction job.

He remembers being in the hospital, his back broken, his family crying.

But he had an inkling that it would all work out fine.

“I was like, I could have died,” Chavez recalls thinking. “That would have been my life and I did nothing cool. So I should start doing cool things. So then when I do die, it wasn’t a boring life.”

So when he got an email that his LSAT score would expire if he didn’t apply to law schools that year, he applied then and there from his hospital bed on an iPad, calling up his old college professors.

Months later he showed up for law school in Oklahoma City with his suitcase and a cane.

He didn’t have a mullet then. But, as the saying in the mullet community goes, it’s not just a hairstyle. It’s a lifestyle.

“If you’re at a restaurant and they ask you, 'Do you want hot sauce on that?' You say yes,'” Chavez said. “If there’s something heavy that needs lifting, you volunteer to do it. If there’s a broken car on the side of the road, you pull over and help the guy. If a homeless guy wants some change, you give him everything in your wallet. That’s the mullet lifestyle.”

After two years of careful grooming – despite one disappointing haircut – Chavez is now among 25 people in the running to win "The 2022 Mane Event" in the USA Mullet Championships.

Voting in the final competition starts Oct. 7 at https://mulletchamp.com, and will last for five days.

From Woodburn to law school

At first encounter, Chavez, 33, is reserved. Then you come to recognize that a wry remark is always just beneath the surface.

His delivery may be quiet, and his words may sound serious, but his smile hints that you’re in on the joke, too.

For instance, his response when asked whether the mullet is an asset to his job working security:

“Much like a lion, I feel the mane, the mullet makes me look more intimidating and bigger to other predators,” Chavez said. “So myself and the people that I’m watching over don’t get bothered.”

Chavez grew up the oldest of five kids. His parents moved to Oregon from California when he was four.

His family came to Oregon because his uncle told his father there were a lot of jobs in the area “for strong men” in logging.

His father, who had immigrated from Mexico, tried logging, then got another job working on a Christmas tree farm in St. Paul. Soon after, the family moved to Woodburn.

“I remember being a little kid, my dad would be like, ‘I’m listening to these people because they’re paying my bills right now, but this isn’t going to be our life,’” Chavez said. “’We’re going to have our own name, on our own building, on our own business someday.’”

And sure enough, his father in 2003 started a taxi business that still operates in Woodburn and the surrounding areas, Chavez said.

After wrestling at Woodburn High School, Chavez matriculated at Oregon State University, going on to earn a business administration degree with a focus on entrepreneurship.

During college, he took up mixed martial arts, or MMA, back when gyms were full of tough guys and brawlers. He learned first to box, and then corner an opponent with the wrestling skills he’d honed as a kid.

But that back-breaking, life-changing fall meant he had to give up MMA, so he took up running, and ran a marathon toward the end of his first year in law school at Oklahoma City University.

OCU was expensive, so he decided to take some transfer credits and attend law school at Concordia University School of Law in Boise graduating in 2019. He moved back to Oregon and worked in immigration law.

This February, he took the bar exam, and he’s hoping to start working as a lawyer soon. He might pursue employment law or criminal defense.

The pandemic gave Chavez an opening to start growing his hair, since longer hair has typically been frowned upon in professional settings.

He started looking into mullet competitions because he has a friend who does mustache competitions.

Chavez noticed that there wasn’t much available in the way of mullet competitions in the Northwest and that competitions are more popular in the Midwest and South.

And that’s another part of his motivation: to bring glory to his hometown of Woodburn, where he still lives and describes as a community of “quality people who have never been on stage before, who deserve it.”

“If somebody else was in my shoes, I would be very happy to see the name of my hometown on the national stage,” Chavez said.

The mullet renaissance

Chavez feels a mullet should be “business in the front, party in the back.”

“I wanted a haircut that said DA in the front, defendant in the back,” Chavez said.

He shakes his head at the unorthodox “party party” mullets that are getting more popular in places like Portland.

But has Chavez earnestly adopted the hairstyle that accompanies the go-big-or-go-home attitude? Or is there something more complex at work here?

“At first I thought it would be a funny way to give myself an easy haircut,” Chavez acknowledges. “… I guess I thought I had wavy hair because I’d never really had it that long. But then when I started seeing it curl up, I was like, ‘Oh, this looks pretty nice. I like my curls. I want to keep it.’”

In May, the growing trend prompted The New York Times Style Magazine to ponder: “What The Mullet Means Now.”

Similar hairstyles have been worn for thousands of years in cultures from Ancient Egypt to the Nez Perce tribe, observed writer Megan Bradley. But in the 1970s, the mullet came to symbolize the nascent punk movement and its culture of rebellion, along with “torn clothes, safety pins, chains and piercings.”

Bradley wrote that today its popularity could reflect a broader willingness to experiment and push boundaries.

Chavez’s girlfriend, Lucy Gantman, also has a theory.

“With the pandemic and just how difficult things were in the world at that time and how scary and how intense, it almost seemed like there’s been this uprise in the mullet to bring lightheartedness and humor,” she said.

So sure, mock it all you want.

But that guy with the mullet just might lend you a hand when your car breaks down.

Voting starts Oct. 7. You can check out the mullets and vote for your favorite through 11:59 p.m. on Oct. 11 at https://mulletchamp.com.

Claire Withycombe covers state government for the Statesman Journal. You can reach her at 503-910-3821 or cwithycombe@statesmanjournal.com

This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Oregon's Musio Chavez to compete in USA Mullet Championships