The only thing more epic than this Indy 9-year-old's championship mullet is his swagger

Voting for the USA Mullet Championships kids division began Oct. 5 and is open until Oct. 11, 11:59 p.m. You can vote once every 24 hours per email address. Vote online here.

With a few missing front teeth and a dirty blond mullet — almost shoulder-length in the back, with shaved stripes on the side — Greyson Reynolds has a confidence that other 9-year-olds, and even most adults, might only dream of.

“My favorite thing about it is that my hair blows in the wind,” Greyson told IndyStar. “It feels like .... it feels like a summer day.”

The Indianapolis fourth-grader may sound like a poet living for life's simple joys, but he has bold ambitions, including winning USA Mullet Championships after landing a top 25 spot in the kids category recently. 

He tells his parents he wants to get inked with tattoos and drive a green Lamborghini. When he grows up, Greyson wants to own a mansion with a pet parrot. For work, he wants to be a demolitionist. A wealthy one, of course. 

"Whatever edge a 9-year-old could live on, that's how he lives," his mother, Sarah Reynolds said. "At all times."

How close to the edge, you ask? The other day, Greyson ate a ghost pepper (400 times hotter than a jalapeno), prompting a phone call home from the school nurse.

He's "the only person in the whole school" with a mullet, he proudly says. This bold spirit he carries is one he has been cultivating since March 2020.

He'd asked his mother for the hairstyle relentlessly over the past couple years (even strong-willed mullet-rockers have to ask for mom's permission sometimes). 

His inspiration is a long-haired Kevin Bacon after seeing the 1990 horror comedy "Tremors."

“He was so cool,” Greyson said. “He kept escaping the (creatures) and ... I’m like, well I want to be like him when I grow up someday.”

Finally, mom gave in, thanks to their trusted hairstylist and some photographic evidence that it couldn't go all that wrong.

"Oh my God, he is like a trip ...He's got a whole persona that he's fighting for," Broad Ripple hairstylist Paula Luik said. "(I told his mom), 'It's just hair and if this is how he wants to express himself, it's like, we can always change it,"

Reynolds was worried about him being teased, since "you know, kids can be cruel." But the 9-year-old looked directly at her with his mind made up.

"‘I really don't care what other kids think," she remembers him saying. "'I like my hair like this. I like the way I look.’" 

His mother was moved.

"I loved his confidence.” 

They're now hoping his "business in the front" determination and "party in the back" passion will help him win the title for best kids mullet in America. 

The USA Mullet Championships brings in competitors from around the country. Now, his fate is in the hands of nationwide voters — and his mom's social media push —with online voting for the final winner beginning Oct. 5. The first-place award is a $2,500 cash prize, which Greyson wants to use to play at an arcade, buy an iPad for his brother and donate to the homeless.

"I'm like a little nervous but either way, if I lose, it's just a game," Greyson said. "I'll just keep my mullet for next year, and then I'll enter the next year." 

Even beyond the competition, the long-hair rocker style suits Greyson's personality well, his loved ones have realized.

"I seriously can't imagine him without it," Reynolds says.

He calls the buzzed lines on the side of his head "speed vents." Speed because of the "speed trails" he sees behind running characters in cartoons and vents because vents echo, reminding him of how his ears hear sounds. 

His dad, Travis Reynolds, named Greyson's hair "The Daily Driver" for the contest, explaining it's like a car you drive every day, a casual, everyday look. 

Though his father and his brother, Maddox, got mullets with him in 2020, they called it quits on the hairstyles shortly afterward. Greyson remains committed to the lifestyle.

"I never changed my ... my mind on it," Greyson says, "Because, like, it will keep my neck warm in the winter."

He doesn't use any special products in his hair, nor does he carry a brush to school, Greyson says, but about every six weeks, he arrives at Luik's salon ready to tame "the cape." The venture has brought both Greyson and his family joy during the pandemic.

"I'm so excited to see him so excited about something," Reynolds said. "These little things matter ... If it's a mullet and that makes him happy, that's OK." 

Days after his "top 25" achievement last week, he arrived in Broad Ripple for a trim, sitting on a salon chair throne, lifted up by a booster seat. He quietly watched Luik attack his prized crown with combs and scissors and hair clippers.

Greyson wanted to keep as much length as possible before the final voting. “Keep the cape going,” is how he describes it, Luik said.

After the appointment, his mother remembered how she used to make the decisions as a mom, asking the hairstylist for a "little boy fade" or a "little boy cut," a generic haircut with no name.

Now, he's living a cut above, with a man's mullet.

Contact Rashika Jaipuriar at rjaipuriar@gannett.com and follow her on Twitter @rashikajpr.