Surprise! Football Star Brian Urlacher Has Hair Now

Yes, that’s Brian Urlacher. The perennially bald former linebacker appeared on TV today to reveal the surprising results from a hair transplant procedure. (Photo: WGN Morning News)

Retired Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher made a big announcement today (Jan. 5). No, he’s not coming back to the team (although Bears fans can dream) — he’s sporting a full head of hair!

Urlacher spent 13 years on the Bears’ defensive line, always with a hairless head. The 37-year-old has reportedly been shaving his dome for about two decades. In fact, Urlacher hadn’t seen himself with hair since “high school, maybe college,” he tells Chicago’s WGN Morning News.

“I was happy to be bald. I had been bald my whole life,” Urlacher says. But when a friend had the procedure and liked it, Urlacher decided to give it a shot. “If I got it done and didn’t like it, I could still shave my head. But I liked it.”

WATCH: Brian Urlacher Reveals Full Head of Hair:

The eight-time Pro Bowler revealed his new look on WGN for the first time today, but he actually went in for the hair transplant procedure in November 2014.

“There are no cuts on your head, no scars on the back of my head — they take it one hair at a time, and they remove it from the back and put it in the front,” says Urlacher, who is now a spokesperson for the RESTORE hair clinic in Chicago. “It was a one-day procedure, and I was in and out in the same day,” he added.

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Although his family and close friends knew, he hid his head from the public. “I wore a hat everywhere I went for a year,” Urlacher says. He added that his current thick head of hair has looked this way for about four months.

Why the secrecy? Urlacher didn’t specify, but it may be that he was waiting until he could show off the final results. According to the American Academy of Plastic Surgeons, it can be months before someone sees the desired results from a hair transplant. For many people, the transplanted hair falls out in about six weeks, and growth will restart within another five or six weeks. Then, the hair grows in at a rate of approximately half of an inch a month.

Brian Urlacher retired in 2013 after spending his entire football career with the Chicago Bears. (Photo: Getty Images)

For now, Urlacher seems pleased with his new cropped look. “My showers take longer, I have to leave an extra couple of minutes to comb in the morning, and I put gel in it sometimes now,” he says. But the best seal of approval has come from his kids, he says, who told him, “It doesn’t look bad.”

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