The grizzled beard, which he's been growing nearly a year, is the perfect look for Detroit Lions linebacker DeAndre Levy.
Levy isn't your typical pro athlete -- or normal person, for that matter -- who likes to vacation in a luxurious hotel with a beach and fancy restaurants nearby.
He's way too adventurous.
Levy spent his summer trip hiking through a remote area in Peru, fulfilling a plan he's had since he was a young kid of going to the Amazon.
And what did he eat there? It wasn't any fresh mahi mahi delicately prepared by a master chef, that's for sure.
No, Levy caught and ate ... rats.
His teammates, not surprisingly, aren't interested in joining him.
"Most of them think it's crazy," Levy told Detroit News columnist John Niyo "They found out I went skydiving and they thought that was crazy. They thought the Amazon was nuts, eating frogs and rats and piranha and stuff like that."
Levy, 26, took the trip by himself as a way to escape, well, a different type of rat race back here. He was led through the rainforest by a couple of local guides on a week-long excursion. They lived off the land, building their own huts to sleep in and hunting for their next meal.
Asked about eating those rats, Levy said, "Yeah, there's a little jungle rodent we had to catch with a spear."
"It's a little intimidating at first," Levy, a third-round draft pick out of Wisconsin in 2009, said of the trip in general. "Swarms of bugs buzzing. You constantly hear stuff moving. The night is alive.
"I mean, the spiders are so big there, they can make the bushes move," Levy told Niyo. "But it was fun. It was definitely worth it. It was the experience that I wanted."
This was just the latest of DeAndre's great off-season adventures. A year ago, he swam with great white sharks and bushwhacked his way through the Republic of Botswana in Southern Africa.
The next venture he's planning is to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the highest free-standing mountain in the world at more than 19,000 feet above sea level.
"It's about stepping out of your comfort zone," explained Levy, who is entering his fifth year as a starter for the Lions. "And not really worry about, 'Oh, is this OK? Is that OK? Should I check in with this person or that person?'
"There's something rewarding about that."
Even, apparently, if it requires eating a few rats along the way.
