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The Brooklyn Paper / Graham Letorney

Hair apparent: A doctor measures Doug Williams's nipple hair while a film crew documents the historic event. The hair measured 5.078 inches, breaking the Guinness Book record.

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It’s official! No one in the world has a longer nipple hair than Doug Williams.

Last Saturday, Williams had his celebrated chest hair measured at a barbeque in his Wil­liamsburg backyard, complete with a grill, a keg, and even a DJ. A group of photographers and a videographer were also on hand, clustered around Williams to get the best shot of the astonishing strand.

The barbeque was the culmination of Williams’s quest to get the hair into the Guinness Book of World Records. He says he didn’t set out to break the coveted record, it just happened.

One morning, Williams was “taking stock” of his nipple hair and noticed one was “really long.” Curious to see what the record was, he looked it up and found out it was only four and a half inches, considerably shorter than the hair sprouting from his own vestigal mammary gland.

Those close to Williams thought it was, well, a little odd.

“Initially, I was a little bit surprised,” said girlfriend Malika Crutchfield. “But after checking out the hair, I realized he had a shot at the record. I’m thrilled.”

The record-breaker himself remained low-key. “It’s a genetic thing,” he said with a shrug, as reporters hounded him with more questions than the beat writers who follow around Barry Bonds.

Measuring duties fell to Dr. Sagat Verma, who bent over Williams and carefully extended the strand, holding it against a tape measure. Appraising nipple growths isn’t Verma’s specialty; by day, he’s an internal medicine specialist at Wyckoff Medical Center in Bushwick.

It might seem excessive to bring in a medical doctor for a single hair, but the Guinness Book requires that the measurer is a licensed doctor with “standing in the community.” And that’s just one of many complex regulations imposed on the record-breaking event. Williams filled out pages of paperwork, the hair had to be measured three times and photographed, and it had to be wet during the process.

To meet this last requirement, Crutchfield squirted bottled water on Williams’s bare chest from a couple feet away.

“That’s good,” he said, but she gave it a couple extra squirts, just to be sure.

Then Dr. Verma measured the hair while the DJ stopped the music for dramatic effect, announcing “the world’s largest nipple hair!”

“How many inches?” somebody asked before a hush came over the crowd.

The official length came out to 129 millimeters — the Guinness Book uses the Euro-centric metric system — or a little longer than five inches, demolishing the previous record of 115 millimeters.

That once-illustrious mark was held by Simon Mould, the pride of the United Kingdom.

Trouncing Mould at his own game was fun, but Williams told The Brooklyn Paper last week that jealousy was not why he got into the nipple-hair game.

“I am not attempting this record for the money,” he said before his quest. “It is enough for me to know that I can inspire an entire generation of young people, mostly boys, to grow long body hairs and achieve their own dreams.”

Afterwards, Williams posed proudly.

“This is more or less the most attention my nipple has ever received,” he noted.

Once the paperwork goes through, Williams will be immortalized. But he hasn’t lost his sense of self, advising would-be nipple-hair champions to “just follow your dreams, whether it’s to grow long nipple hair or something equally as important.”

But Williams is not one to rest on his laurels. He’s got bigger follicles to fry.

“Hopefully I’ll discover a very long hair somewhere else on my body,” he said.

A true champion, it seems, is never satisfied.

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper