Gimme a head with hair, long beautiful hair,

Shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen.

Give me down to there, hair!

Shoulder length or longer (hair).

TAMPA, Fla. - Such a cliche is the gentle human in a violent business that Troy Polamalu would be of less interest, or any at all, if he did not have hair that screams at the world. Look at me, it says, while Polamalu himself says don't.

Hair has become, in the tightly wrapped and greatly armored NFL, what tattoos are in the NBA, that badge of individuality, defiance of the uniform.

This Super Bowl has more than usual of that, and Polamalu has the most, though Larry Fitzgerald of the Cardinals need not slink away in follicled humiliation.

Like Polamalu, Fitzgerald is also soft-spoken and reserved, and the prospect of the two of them meeting at the intersection of a forward pass offers an entangling image, like the linguine getting mixed in with the vermicelli. How to ever sort that out.

Wouldn't that be something, game stopped on account of split ends, which would be Fitzgerald while Polamalu is a safety?

The NFL has considered the subject of obvious hair, debating whether to pass a rule that would require all hair to be tucked inside the helmet, which in Polamalu's case would require a couple of baggage handlers.

This might have been rooted in envy, since most NFL owners have less hair than Polamalu leaves on his pillow each night.

More haired heads prevailed, and thus do we now see shagginess on all teams, if Polamalu is the most celebrated example.

In its holster, as it was Wednesday at a press session, Polamalu's coif is tidy and discreet, no more peculiar than any other 'do, tied back and pulled tight.

Around the room, in fact, mostly with the Steelers offensive line, hair was much more obvious and the kicker, graying Justin Hartwig, appeared to have modeled his on the old spazzpot, professor Irwin Corey, who always seemed not only to have slept on his hair but to have combed it with spatula.

Preconceptions are obvious, that because Polamalu seems to be showing off, he is every bit the peacock that TV cameras follow from play to play, a Neon Deion Sanders type, ready to hog the spotlight.

The first words you hear him say are . . . well, I couldn't hear what they were. He speaks as if he is in church, and he is very often. He is a devout man, a Greek Orthodox Christian. He makes the sign of the cross after every play.

But he does not shout. I am no more than 2 feet away, and he makes Champ Bailey sound like a carnival barker.

I look at my notes. Hmmm. Ummm. I have written it down verbatim.

A helpful NFL aide fiddles with the microphone. No help. He kicks at the speaker. Most things can be fixed by either kicking, hitting or spitting into it. This is also true of most NFL defenses, which I suddenly discover Polamalu is talking about.

". . . would say we like to smother," he is saying. "We are not one of those give-and-take defenses."

Just minutes earlier Polamalu's coach, Mike Tomlin, was describing his safety as "playing outside the box," and so I asked what he thought Tomlin meant.

"Being allowed to be free," he said, softly, again the amplification on the fritz. That's fritz, not frizz.

Polamalu wears his hair as he does because he is of Samoan ancestry, the notion being that Samoan men are obligated to do so, though Samoans themselves dispute it. And why does Polamalu just not tuck it away in his helmet anyhow, if he does not like the attention it brings him?

"It is uncomfortable," he says. "So I just let it flow."

Believe him or not. Without the hair, he is just another good player. The hair is the distinguishing thing because there have been safeties who have hit just as hard. John Lynch for one, another of those reasonable men off the field but a fury on it.

Hitting hard is what safeties do.

"I play football with a passion," he says. "If it was ballet, I would do the same thing. Football is a contact sport. The brutality is not what drives it, it is the passion that drives what your motivation is."

Polamalu was asked the difference between a big hitter and a hitter.

"You ask a big hitter to run into a brick wall, and he will run through it," Polamalu said. "You ask a hitter, and he will run up and nudge it."

Polamalu is of the run-through-it kind, a big hitter if not a particularly big man.

"It takes some sacrifice to be a big hitter," he said. "You have to realize that you might not get the best of it."

It is always easy to tell. The winner is the guy who gets up hair first.

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