Neil Collins has farewelled a friend of nearly 40 years that came to him after he was bashed in Wellington and was with him when he met Johnny Cash and the Dalai Lama.
The Dunedin radio host and city councillor yesterday shaved his trademark moustache to raise awareness for the men's health charity Movember.
Before the clippers met the well-kept hair on his lip, Mr Collins remembered the good times they shared and the moment of violence that brought them together.
He was bare-lipped when, as compere for either a Miss New Zealand pageant or the Showtime Spectacular in the early 1970s, he was bashed by a mugger in Wellington.
Mr Collins was carrying the night's takings when he left the hall and was set-upon by a "damned big fellow" with a devastating punch.
He gripped the money bag for dear life as his signet ring-wearing attacker bashed, and then slammed, his battered face into a rough brick wall.
The burly mugger "knocked the heck" out of him - "I actually, quite literally, saw stars" - before fleeing when other people emerged from the hall.
Mr Collins was too battered to be laid on a bed at Wellington Hospital, so a nurse held his head while a junior doctor stitched him back up.
He knew he would be scarred for life when a cursing nurse in Rotorua had to kneel on his chest to remove the "messy" stitching from his upper lip.
"And then, I suppose I was conscious of the scar, being in the public eye as much as I was at the time," Mr Collins said.
"So, the moustache grew from there ..."
His lip was bare when he interviewed the Rolling Stones, Ringo Starr, and the Everly Brothers, but with moustache when he met many other big names.
Roy Orbison, Jethro Tull, Kenny Rogers, the Dalai Lama, Johnny Cash, Spike Milligan, Bill Cosby - they, and many others, knew Mr Collins as a moustached man from Dunedin.
Mr Collins said he was happy to clip that history goodbye to support Movember, which is this year raising funds for the Cancer Society and the New Zealand Mental Health Foundation.
Sports broadcaster and Movember ambassador John McBeth had challenged him to cut and then regrow it for the cause - but Mr Collins was still mulling his lip's future.
"Well, the older you get, the grayer they get and the harder they are to see on pasty skin," Mr Collins joked.
"I'll be interested to see what my friends have to say about the new, no moustache me. Perhaps some will say it is time for a change."
