Tag: Hometown

Hometown

Pointers from a Pro

A treatise on the art of writing

By Bill Fields

During college in the late 1970s, not long after I’d begun spending afternoons typing at The Daily Tar Heel offices instead of studying at the library, a fellow student journalist recommended a book: On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction, by William Zinsser.

After saving a few dollars by forgoing a meat-and-three supper at the Porthole, I purchased a copy of the slender volume, 150 pages including the index, at the UNC campus bookstore. That paperback — its yellow cover smoke-stained from a fire that sent me fleeing from an Aberdeen cottage in 1984, and its thin spine splitting — has survived the decades and multiple moves along the Eastern Seaboard.

I still pull On Writing Well off my bookshelf every so often and am reminded what a good primer it is each time I reread Zinsser’s advice, including passages I highlighted as a young man:

“Clear thinking becomes clear writing.”

“Notice the decisions that other writers make in their choice of words and be finicky about the ones that you select from the vast supply. The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original.”

“If your nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.”

“The good writer of prose must be part poet, always listening to what he writes.”

Using examples of writing, good and bad, Zinsser stresses simplicity. “Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.” On Writing Well was first published in 1976, and these days, every time I hear a football analyst say a receiver is “out in space” or a political reporter refer to something happening “in real time,” it’s clear the book is needed now more than ever.

Bill Zinsser wrote his book — of which there have been many editions selling more than 1.5 million copies — to complement The Elements of Style. His how-to took what he later called the “pointers and admonitions” of Strunk and White and showed how to apply them to various forms of nonfiction. On Writing Well grew out of a nonfiction writing course Zinsser taught at Yale University after a long career as a newspaper and magazine writer.

“At the end of class, Bill would return our papers from the previous week, each illuminated with his editing suggestions and provocative marginalia,” Mark Singer, a former student, recalled in The New Yorker. “I still wince at his dead-on appraisal of my travel piece: ‘You’ll notice that I stopped marking this halfway through. What you’ve written is interesting only to you.’”

As an aspiring sportswriter I pored over Zinsser’s chapter about the genre, delighted that he cited Red Smith, whose brilliance I was just discovering, as a writer who “avoided the exhausted synonyms” and strived for “freshness elsewhere in the construction of a sentence.” Zinsser quoted Smith writing that a quarterback was “scraped off the turf like apple butter” and “a luncheonette on 53rd Street that has long since vanished in a cloud of bicarbonate.”

Zinsser had plenty of game too, and like his fellow New Yorker, the more widely known writer Roger Angell, wrote well for a long time. When he was in his late 80s, his vision dimmed by glaucoma, Zinsser won a National Magazine Award for a series of online essays for The American Scholar.

“Today no magazine cover would be wide enough for Rockwell,” Zinsser wrote in one column, “Thanksgiving Day Repainted.”

“He would need a Chinese scroll to accommodate the disparate crowd assembled to eat turkey or some dietetically certified substitute: single moms, single dads, partners, companions, half-brothers, half-sisters, stepchildren, ex-spouses, live-ins, live-outs, in-laws, outlaws, and dogs of rarefied lineage. Only an artist from a post-Rockwell school of painting could hope to catch the overlapping fluidities of the modern American tribe.” PS

Bill Fields’ memoir A Quick Nine Before Dark is available at The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines and other places books are sold.

Hometown

Local Heroes

Cheering for the Blue Knights

By Bill Fields

The strong right arm of Sonny Jurgensen turned me into a Washington Redskins fan before I was old enough for Midget League, but my first favorite football team played much closer to home.

Prior to seeing Sonny sling Sunday afternoon spirals on our black and white Zenith, I had become attached to the Blue Knights of East Southern Pines High School, which my sisters had graduated from in 1963 and ’64 respectively when I was still busy dumping sand out of a Tonka truck.

I couldn’t yet read the inscriptions that classmates had written to Dianne and Sadie in their copies of The Lance, the school yearbook, but I pored over the pictures. As a sports-minded kid, I was particularly drawn to the pages showing the athletes.

Numbered and padded, the teenage football players seemed larger than life to a child unable to heave a ball 10 yards. Photographs showed them in dramatic poses: lineman ready to pounce from a three-point stance; quarterback, ball in hand and passing arm cocked; lunging linebacker frozen in midair by a flashbulb; the team picture showing the players with backs straight and eyes focused, ready for business.

A few years after my sisters had gone away to college, the Blue Knights became more than images in an annual. Beginning in 1966, for three seasons, I tagged along with my father to watch them play on Friday nights in the fall at Memorial Field, the town ballpark at the corner of Morganton Road and Bennett Street.

The Blue Knights — coached by John Williams, a fixture in Moore County sports for decades — were members of the Central Tar Heel 2A Conference with other area schools of similar size: Union Pines, North Moore, East Montgomery, West Montgomery, Chatham Central, Pittsboro, Siler City, Rohanen (east Rockingham) and archrival Aberdeen.

Randy Arnold, a son of one of my father’s friends, played center, so we tried to keep an eye on No. 52 in blue and white when the home team had the ball. But given that my mind wandered to the prospect of a concession-stand Coke or catching one of the mini footballs thrown into the crowd at halftime, I wasn’t paying close attention to every down.

Other Blue Knights also became familiar figures: Harry Jones, No. 22, one of the few African Americans on the predominantly white squad, starred as a halfback in 1966 and ’67; quarterback Billy Strickland, No. 10, was a three-sport letterman; Bill Little, No. 33, stayed very busy as fullback, linebacker and placekicker; end Tim Roschy, No. 80, later was my coach on the Midget League Cowboys (we had a mimeographed playbook) before I realized I wasn’t cut out for the gridiron. The game program rosters of the late 1960s were filled with familiar Southern Pines surnames: Buchholz, Cuff, Sessoms, Warlick, Tate, Martin. The better athletes played offense and defense.

With West Southern Pines — where Blacks attended high school during segregation — not having the money to field a 1968 team, the Blue Knights benefited from the presence of talented sophomore end Charles Waddell that fall in their final season before the opening of consolidated Pinecrest High in 1969. Waddell would go on to star at Pinecrest and UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was the university’s last three-sport letterman.

The Blue Knights lost two of their opening four games in ’68, then hit their stride. After a 14-14 tie with West Montgomery, they finished with five straight wins. The last one, against Aberdeen on Nov. 8, 1968, was the biggest.

It was a good thing we weren’t late getting to the big game. On the Blue Knights’ first play from scrimmage, Skip Caldwell ran 50 yards through the Red Devil defense for a touchdown. They scored on their next possession too, a 25-yard run by Strickland. Final score of the final game: 14-6.

When the lights came on the following fall, boys from both towns would be wearing the green and gold colors of a new home team. PS

Bill Fields’ memoir, A Quick Nine Before Dark: A Life in Golf, is available at The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines and other places books are sold.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Back to School Daze

Ticonderoga and a crew cut, too

By Bill Fields

Summer moved slowly, like a bunted ball unsure if it was fair or foul, but once the dog days had come and gone, the pace quickened. Little League was over. The beach was a pile of Polaroids, a stray Skee-Ball ticket and a chipped conch shell that looked a lot bigger on the Strand.

By the time I rode shotgun with my two-pack-a-day father to a tobacco auction in Fairmont or Whiteville, the strong smell and strange sounds within the vast warehouse signaled that September — and a new school year — loomed. This reality tended to hit me on the drive home as I attempted an annoying imitation of the auctioneer’s rhythmic chant, which usually got Dad to buy me some crackers so I would shut up.

Even a boy who loved those lazy summer days knew there was such a thing as too much watermelon and horseshoes. After a couple of idle months, I looked forward to seeing a new Currier & Ives scene on our wall calendar (an annual freebie from Hobbs Insurance) and returning to the classroom.

Preparation for the first day of school felt like its own season, about which I had mixed feelings. Since I kept my hair closely cropped by getting a crew cut every few weeks, timing a visit to Billie Hill’s Broad Street barbershop certainly was no hardship. I loved the ritual: waiting for my turn, magazine in hand, listening to the adults’ conversation; settling into the chair, smock clipped on and paper band secured around the neck; calming whir of the clippers; a powdered brush when her work was done. After paying Mrs. Hill $1.75 for my haircut, I left ready to take on the world.

Being obsessed with school supplies, stocking up on them was far from a chore even though my mother kept a close eye on the bottom line. We read the “Back to School” ads in The Pilot closely. Valu-Mart might have Flair pens on sale for 39 cents apiece, but they could be three for 99 cents at Mann Drug. I had to be at my persuasive best to get Mom to spring for Ticonderoga pencils instead of a less expensive variety but had better luck with that than I did lobbying each August for a pair of Converse All Star sneakers instead of the brand’s slightly cheaper Coach model.

Mostly, back to school in the late 1960s and early ’70s meant going back to Collins, which had been situated on Main Street in Aberdeen, “the shopping center of the Sandhills,” since the 1930s. It was part of a regional chain of about 30 department stores founded by William Augustus Collins, who opened his first location, in Conway, South Carolina, in 1927. The Collins Co. boasted it was “A Good Place to Shop for Nice Things” while emphasizing its mid-priced mindset that suited folks on a budget. One of its early advertisements said, “Stars in the skies are like bargains at Collins, too thick to be counted.” Another said Collins was “where quality is never expensive.”

Deals on dungarees notwithstanding, my enthusiasm for clothes shopping didn’t come close to matching my gusto for pens, pencils and paper. Although I could play outside for hours in the heat sustained by a few gulps from the garden hose, I tired easily on those annual excursions to Collins, with little patience for changing room visits to see if I fit in regular or “husky” pants. Regardless of the size Mom paid for, it wouldn’t be too long until I’d worn a hole in a knee. She would have to apply an iron-on patch, making me resemble a repaired old tire on one of our well-used cars.

The Collins chain lasted another decade or so, until I had the survived the fashions of the 1970s and was about to graduate from college. Its dozen surviving stores were bought in 1981 by the Peebles Department Stores. William Collins died the following year. “He was a man that never quit dreaming,” Raymond Collins, one of his children, told the Charlotte Observer. “But he believed in backing up your dreams with elbow grease.”

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

A Fish Tale

And a queasy oceangoing interview

By Bill Fields

It’s prime bluefish season in my adopted home state of Connecticut, where anglers pursue the aggressive and toothy species in Long Island Sound. Our now-defunct local minor league team, the Bridgeport Bluefish, had a fitting name. Its logo — cartoon fish with baseball bat — wasn’t in the legendary graphic-design class of another long-gone franchise, the Hartford Whalers, but was very good.

I still remember the fight put forth by a blue I reeled in some years ago when a friend’s father took us out on his boat. It weighed about 10 pounds, the biggest fish I’d ever caught. Because of their strong flavor and oily nature, blues aren’t the best eating. But my host kindly cleaned my catch, and I was determined to have it for dinner.

Although my girlfriend was a good sport and cooked it, the kitchen reeked for hours after a meal that neither of us wanted to replay. We agreed if there were any more bluefish in my future that a catch-and-release policy would be in effect.

My most memorable — and unexpected — fishing experience had taken place a decade earlier on the other side of the country in the company of one of the 20th century’s finest golfers.

In advance of the 1998 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, I was writing an in-depth feature for Golf World recalling the leading characters in a previous Open at Olympic: 1966, when Billy Casper defeated Arnold Palmer in a playoff after trailing him by seven strokes with nine holes left in the fourth round. It was Palmer’s most heartbreaking attempt in his unrequited quest to add a second U.S. Open title to his dramatic 1960 victory.

Understandably, Palmer wasn’t eager to rehash the details of 1966, but he agreed to a short interview, which took place in the parking lot of a Senior PGA Tour event as he regripped his clubs with fresh leather wrapping. Casper, on the other hand, whose 51 PGA Tour wins are the seventh-most all time, welcomed a visit.

I had arranged to meet Casper at his San Diego home, but when I phoned to touch base on the day I was traveling west, he called an audible. “Let’s go fishing,” he said, before telling me where to meet him on the waterfront that evening. I assumed we would be going out in the Pacific Ocean on his boat. Upon arriving, however, I discovered Casper and I were among half a dozen passengers on a charter vessel motoring about 50 miles overnight and fishing for yellowtail the next day.

I settled into my bunk excited at the prospect of a captive interview subject. I woke up with a queasiness I’d never experienced as the boat rocked back and forth, minor movements that were causing major motion sickness. Shortly after sunrise, it was all I could do to make it to the galley, where I found Casper.

“They make a great breakfast burrito,” he said.

As Casper chowed down, I nursed a ginger ale. Another fisherman, seeing that I was hurting, said he had an extra anti-nausea wristband for which I would have emptied my wallet. I put on his gift and soon rallied enough to start interviewing Casper, who was friendly but clearly more interested in fishing than talking: There wasn’t going to be much on my microcassette tape to transcribe.

There was little action once we were outside with rod and reel. I was excited to catch a 30-inch barracuda, but the deckhand, viewing it as a nuisance, took it off the hook and threw the thrashing fish back in the ocean before I had a chance to get someone to snap a photo of me with my catch.

Eventually, as the afternoon went on, Casper and someone else landed a few nice yellowtail. The trip wasn’t a shutout. My appetite having returned in the fresh air and sunshine, I enjoyed the deckhand’s offering of the freshest sashimi I’ve ever had.

When we got back to land 20 hours after heading out, Casper and I said our goodbyes. Walking a couple of blocks to my rental car after my first ocean excursion, my legs felt as wobbly as Palmer’s game had been that fateful final nine in 1966.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Over There

A wee bit of wonderful

By Bill Fields

Like many Americans, I first experienced the British Open — what most in the United States called that golf major championship during the 1970s — through television. ABC Sports broadcasts weren’t long by today’s dawn-to-dusk standards but were revealing: the rumpled landscape, khaki-colored turf if it had been dry, and shorter-than-usual flagsticks. Slacks billowed in the wind. Balls finished in precarious lies in steep-faced bunkers. I learned a new word: firth.

When I watched those Opens, the links seemed a faraway golf universe that were out of reach, places I would only ever see on TV.

Happily, I was wrong. If my addition of all the jet lag, stunning skies, spitting rain, lager shandies, breakfast beans, roundabouts, mysterious shower controls and BBC Radio news is correct, this month’s Open Championship at Royal Birkdale will be my 22nd time at golf’s oldest tournament.

Getting to see a lot of the U.S. and a little of the world is not something I was counting on as a child. An annual vacation to North Myrtle Beach this time of year was about the extent of my family’s travels. I didn’t fly until I was of voting age and certainly couldn’t have anticipated making a couple of dozen trips to the British Isles covering golf in one fashion or another across four decades, whether for an Open, Ryder Cup or Solheim Cup.

I’ve been to The Open in various roles: photographer, reporter and, more recently, television researcher for NBC Sports. For me, there haven’t been as many trips to The Open as to the three American-based men’s majors, but the trips abroad stand out, beginning with the first one in 1988, at Royal Lytham & St. Annes.

The wind was howling in what felt like gale force when I walked outside my bed and breakfast in Blackpool the first morning in England. I heard an elderly man on the sidewalk describe the wind to his companion as a “wee breeze.” I’m no stranger to pushing drives far to the right without meteorological influence, but while I was playing a local course later that day, the wind carried one of my tee shots farther offline than any before or since. That ball might still be on its errant journey.

By the weekend, rain was the story. It came down so hard on Saturday that multiple greens were flooded, the third round was abandoned, and a rare Monday finish was in the cards. That extra day turned out to be memorable, with Seve Ballesteros shooting 65 to win his fifth — and final — major over Nick Price and Nick Faldo.

An Open in St. Andrews stands out. I’ve been fortunate to work four at the Home of Golf. Faldo outdueled Greg Norman over the weekend in 1990. John Daly defeated Costantino Rocca in a playoff in 1995. Louis Oosthuizen got a favorable late-early draw and avoided a beastly Friday afternoon wind on his way to a seven-shot win in 2010. Cameron Smith prevailed in the 150th Open in 2022, when Rory McIlroy couldn’t buy a putt on Sunday.

On my 2010 visit to the “Auld Grey Toun,” I spent some pleasant idle hours, camera in hand, on the West Sands, the wide, 2-mile stretch of beach featured in the opening scene of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. As at many Scottish locales, the sky there can change moods in minutes, going from angry to serene.

Whatever has transpired during the day while on assignment at an Open, après-work can soothe the soul when you’re with colleagues whose company you enjoy having a couple of pints or a good curry — or better still, a couple of pints with a good curry. Just remember, discretion is the better part of valor over there when a server in an Indian restaurant asks you how spicy you want your meal. Years ago, I witnessed a vindaloo in Troon cause more pain than a pot bunker ever could.

I’ve held on to plenty of tournament press badges issued to me over the years — the collection maps where I’ve been and what I’ve done — but my favorites are ones from my first decade going to The Open. They’re simple paperboard credentials with a short loop of string — a style long since replaced by larger ones with a head shot, bar code and lanyard — and they have stories to tell.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Movin' on Up

Taking on the big city

By Bill Fields

By Bill Fields I met a friend for breakfast one Sunday morning this spring at a Connecticut diner. With its bustling vibe, vinyl-covered booths, menu the size of a novella and servers with a sixth sense for a coffee cup in need of topping off, the restaurant could have been anywhere in the Northeast.

In between bites and conversation, my mind wandered to a time when eating at such a place was new, not routine, when I was young and eager and, like so many people before and after me, ready to take on New York.

Forty years ago, ostensibly for a magazine job but more accurately to experience a city I had known from books and magazines, movies and television, I moved north. Before relocating from the first floor of a house on East Maine Avenue in Southern Pines to an apartment in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, my exposure to the Big Apple was limited to two brief visits a handful of years earlier, during and soon after college. I truly didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but America’s largest city attracted me like a paper clip to a magnet.

The inexorable pull was expensive. The $175 monthly rent for a one-bedroom in North Carolina became $775 in New York, and there wasn’t a fireplace or a yard at my new residence. What I believed was a huge bump in salary nearly disappeared in housing alone.

After signing the lease on my exorbitant digs, I motored up Interstate 95 as filled with anxiety as the U-Haul truck (pulling my Ford Escort) was with my belongings. Upon recovering from the stress of the back-rattling drive and settling in, the fretting was replaced by the excitement of where I now was and what I was doing, although my newly purchased twin-sized futon in no way mimicked the pillow-top mattresses in the very few fancy hotels I’d experienced.

New York’s subway fare had gone up to a dollar per ride earlier in 1986. On the morning of my first 25-minute (assuming no delays) commute from Carroll Street station to 34th Street-Herald Square on the F train, I shelled out a $10 bill to fill my pocket with enough penny-sized, bi-metal tokens — “Good For One Fare” on one side, “New York Transit Authority” on the other — to get through the work week. The train made 10 stops before my destination, the stations familiar still: Bergen, Jay, York, East Broadway, Delancey, Second Avenue, Broadway-Lafayette, West Fourth, 14th and 23rd.

After coming above ground at my stop, I walked several blocks east along 34th Street, going right past the Empire State Building, to the Golf Illustrated offices at 3 Park Avenue. There was a pinch-me period when I realized that, yes, I indeed was working in the metropolis that I had seen so many Novembers on TV as a backdrop to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

My mother, then slightly younger than I am now, was able to take Amtrak’s Silver Star north for a visit on my first Thanksgiving in New York, where, bundled up on a sunny but cold morning, she saw the floats and bands in person. Mom would be back in a couple of years, taking in the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall and paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a long, long way from her roots in sleepy Jackson Springs.

I made that daily subway trip from Brooklyn to Manhattan for two years and rode a commuter train from Connecticut to the city for three more. Then Golf Illustrated, along with the other magazines owned by its parent company, went belly up, and I left New York with more doubts than the ones that had accompanied me there. But life would play out just one state away. Golf World magazine, born in Moore County, had relocated under new ownership to Connecticut very shortly after I moved there from Brooklyn. The publication — from which I had departed to go to Golf Illustrated — and I reunited in short order. We stayed together for more than two decades, until Golf World ran its course, too, a victim of changing habits in a changing world. You tap your phone to ride the subway these days; tokens have gone the way of the typewriter.

If I’m in the mood to glimpse personal history, I’m a 90-minute train ride and eight-block walk from 3 Park Avenue. I take that trip a couple of times a year, find a diner, and have one of those turkey club sandwiches that rises high off the plate, looking like a skyscraper tall with dreams.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Home, Sweet (Not) Home

But it’ll do after a long day

By Bill Fields

Near the end of a recent stretch of hectic business travel that included four canceled flights in a week, I arrived in Houston late on a Wednesday evening. After having to employ debating-level skills to convince a skeptical rental car agent that “Bill” was in fact a common nickname for “William,” I secured a vehicle and drove to my hotel, arriving past midnight.

Entering my room, I deadbolted the door and took a deep breath.

In the calm of my temporary quarters on the 12th floor 1,600 miles from home, the frustrations of the not-so-friendly skies eased. The spacious room was quiet and cool, with crisp, fresh sheets on a king bed. The flat screen television was large, the desk ample. Unpacking enough to settle in for the night, it struck me that as wearying as life can become when the travel gods are angry, a room on the road is one of my happy places.

Certainly, I don’t qualify as an ultimate road warrior, the kind of person who leaves on Monday and returns on Friday, week after week for most of the calendar. There were years, though, when I was away covering golf upwards of 25 weeks. My travel has been about half that annually in the last decade but with periods of concentrated trips. During those busy times, a comfortable room is a sanctuary for sleep, work or watching a favorite movie that just happens to be on TV.

I’ve had a fascination with motels and hotels since early childhood when my visiting grown-up cousins lodged at the Charlton Motel on U.S. 1, long since replaced by a convenience store. Whether jumping on the bed or into the pool, which was tucked amid tall pines behind the building, the novelty of the experience made it seem as if I were much farther away from home than a couple of miles.

My family didn’t travel often, but most summers we ventured to the beach. If not accommodated in a cottage, we stayed in one of the oceanfront motels. The Buccaneer on Ocean Drive comes to mind: room key attached to a plastic fob; water glasses wrapped in paper; a window-unit air conditioner to soothe skin after hours on the strand; sand on the carpet; an ice machine nearby.

We ventured to Atlanta once to visit Six Flags Over Georgia and stayed in a suburban Holiday Inn near an Interstate exit. I pored over the room service menu before pestering my parents to let me order a hamburger and a Coke. Getting a delivered meal was almost as cool as riding the log flume at the amusement park.

The thousands of nights on the road since those first trips have been spent in all kinds of places, from a plush Ritz Carlton on the Gulf of Mexico — turndown service! — to a grim budget chain on a trucking route in Kansas, where I was stuck in a “smoking” room so stale it was the only time I expensed Lysol spray. There were mouse sightings too, but I fared better that week than a cadre of tour caddies who booked a motel so sketchy they purchased sleeping bags to put atop the bedding.

On a few of my first trips to the Masters, during the 1980s, I was lodged in a motel distinguished by its unusual color scheme. The “Purple Palace,” as we called it, was $29.99 a night 51 weeks a year, a rate that soared to five times that much the second week of April.

Although a chocolate on your pillow is a nice touch, when you travel a lot the basics are what matters: walls thick enough to neutralize noisy neighbors; a bed that neither swallows you up nor makes it seem as if you’re lying on plywood; a shower with plenty of pressure and hot water whose sliding door doesn’t have a mind of its own.

I can take or leave fluffy towels, but I appreciate a sink at the right height. The only time I hurt myself in a hotel room was in Binghamton, New York. Leaning way over to shave one morning, I tweaked my back and ended up on the floor in pain, causing me to look scruffy and smell of Bengay the rest of my stay.

Mostly, you want your room to be your room. Checking into a Denver hotel one night a couple of years ago, I encountered a clerk with problems greater than nickname awareness. Upon reaching my assigned room, when the key card turned the light green and I pushed the door open, it slammed loudly into the security lock. Hearing someone rustling inside, I didn’t stick around for a conversation.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Knuckling Under

The fabulous flutterball

By Bill Fields

My baseball career ended at 13 after I suddenly became afraid of the ball during my first season in Pony League, the destination in those days after aging out of Little League. At the lower level, I’d been a dependable third baseman with no fear at the hot corner even when the strongest boys with the quickest bats came to the plate 60 feet away. There were plenty of “5-3” notations in the Braves’ clay-dusted scorebook.

In a year I went from All-Star to also-ran and, in short order, out of the sport. No more seasoning my glove with castor oil before the first practice. No more Bazooka bubbles between batters. My knuckleball retired with me.

That’s because in addition to my years as an infielder at the sweet little ballfield across Morganton Road from the National Guard Armory in Southern Pines, a dearth of pitchers my last season meant I was recruited to take the mound when I wasn’t playing third.

Possessing a fast ball which wasn’t very speedy and not being able to throw a curve ball — couldn’t hit one either — I had been messing around with a knuckleball in the neighborhood well before using a rosin bag and stepping on the pitching rubber for the first time.

With the knuckles of my index and middle fingers of my right hand touching the ball instead of a normal grip — some early knuckleballers had thrown the pitch that way, but later skilled practitioners used their fingertips — I discovered the ball did funny things when thrown.

With a knuckler, a pitch could become a magic act. And it helped a kid with an average arm sit down some batters.

Because the unique grip minimizes spin, a ball can’t make up its mind when you throw it. The aerodynamics — most of the time — make its flight unpredictable. A knuckler flutters in flight, mimicking a butterfly, its destination uncertain. The mystery novel of pitches, it has confounded generations of hitters and catchers with devilish dances and darting movements.

“The knuckleball,” wrote the famous sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, “is a curve ball that doesn’t give a damn.”

Joe Torre, sometimes tasked with being on the receiving end of the can’t-make-up-its-mind pitch for part of his long and distinguished career in the major leagues, said, “You don’t catch a knuckleball, you defend against it.”

Toad Ramsey, a 19th century pitcher, is cited by some historians as the originator of the fluttering, frustrating pitch, but the ballplayer who first brought a lot of attention to it was Eddie “Knuckles” Cicotte, of the Chicago White Sox. Cicotte possessed a legendary repertoire of junk pitches, a knuckleball among them, before being caught up in the scandal of 1919, when he admitted being one of eight Chicago players taking cash to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

My youth coincided with the final seasons of the 21-year knuckleballing career of Hoyt Wilhelm, the most famous athlete to come out of Huntersville, N.C., north of Charlotte, before Drake Maye, the current New England Patriots quarterback. Like successful knuckleballers who followed, Wilhelm, the first relief pitcher to make it into the Baseball Hall of Fame, lasted a long time, appearing in more than 1,000 games and retiring when he was just shy of 50.

Other top knuckleballers enjoyed similarly lengthy and successful careers because the slower pitch is less stressful on the arm: Wilbur Wood, Charlie Hough, Phil and Joe Niekro, R.A. Dickey and Tim Wakefield among them. In 1973, Wood started both games of a doubleheader; knuckleball pitchers can pitch on little rest and don’t have to ice their arm after games.

Despite the plusses, fewer than a hundred major leaguers have thrown the baffling pitch. Speed has become the realm of modern baseball. A lone knuckleball pitcher, Matt Waldron, of the San Diego Padres, is on a MLB roster at the start of this season. The pitch that the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Willie Stargell referred to as “a butterfly with hiccups” is practically grounded, its vexing vagaries left to history.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

Wearin’ o’ the Green

A little luck goes a long way

By Bill Fields

I’m going to wear something green on St. Patrick’s Day.

I’ve never been fully committed to doing so, but upon reviewing my ethnic origins for the first time in a while, I’ve decided that this March 17 I ought to get dressed with more purpose.

An updated DNA report shows there is more Irish in my background that I had thought, with single-digit percentages of my roots linked to each of three areas in Ireland: Connacht, Munster and Donegal. Some 18 percent of my heritage comes from the ancestral region of “Central Scotland and Northern Ireland.” Ancestry doesn’t break down that number; I hope the latter locale is well-represented.

Last summer, for the second time in a decade, I spent an enjoyable week working at The Open Championship in Portrush, Northern Ireland, where the commute from hotel to NBC Sports television compound consisted of a 15-minute walk through town or along the beach. The twice-daily stroll, including stops at friendly establishments for coffee in the morning and Guinness in the evening, was a pleasant antidote to many long drives in snarled traffic to major golf events over the years, trips sometimes punctuated by a parking lot attendant on a power trip.

It felt like luck was on my side in Portrush, including the day that a bat flew around the TV tower while we were on the air, causing analyst Kevin Kisner to duck and cover as it darted right over his head. Having had to receive a series of rabies shots after a close encounter with a bat while I was taking out the trash at dusk on a summer day in 1997, I was grateful our visitor stayed clear of my workspace. Someone purchased a large, long-handled net that we had at the ready the rest of the week, but to the relief of everyone in the tower, the bat never reappeared.

Luck is an apt topic in March, regardless of how one feels about the origins of “Luck of the Irish.” Rather than considering the idiom as ironic or derisive (as was the case when used about the success of Irish miners in the American West during the late 1800s), this seems the right time to simply place it in the context of extremely good fortune.

The enduring Irish symbol of luck and prosperity, the shamrock, is a three-leafed clover. Come March — which not only includes St. Patrick’s Day but marks the start of spring and the arrival of golf season in many places — I think of the much rarer four-leaf variety, believed to be a truly lucky plant.

Years ago, while I was researching a story for Golf World about the legendary golfer Glenna Collett Vare, one of the things people remembered about the record six-time U.S. Women’s Amateur champion, a trailblazing athlete of the 1920s and ’30s, was her uncanny knack for finding four-leaf clovers.

One such instance occurred at the 1950 Curtis Cup at the Country Club of Buffalo when Vare captained the American team that included a young Ohioan, Peggy Kirk, later known as Peggy Kirk Bell, the matriarch of Pine Needles. Kirk trailed late in her singles match when Vare approached to ask her how she stood. Learning of Kirk’s deficit, Vare stepped away for a few minutes, then returned with a four-leaf clover and a message — “Go get her” — for Peggy. Kirk won the match, 1 up.

Given how finely groomed golf courses have become since Collett Vare’s era, it’s harder to find clover of any kind these days, not that modern players haven’t gotten some very good breaks. Less than a month prior to St. Patrick’s Day last year, in a playoff at the Mexico Open, Brian Campbell badly sliced a drive that was surely headed out-of-bounds until it struck a tree and caromed back in play, setting up his subsequent victory.

Campbell’s was as lucky a moment seen on the PGA Tour since 1992 when Fred Couples’ ball defied the odds and clung to the steep bank of Rae’s Creek on Augusta National’s 12th hole; or perhaps The Crosby in 1984 when Hale Irwin’s tee shot, headed toward the ocean left of Pebble Beach’s 18th hole, bounced off the rocks and onto the fairway, the ball appearing as if a seal had headed it to safety. Irwin birdied, then defeated Jim Nelford in a playoff.

From personal experience, I can report those rocks aren’t usually so kind.

2026 Department Hometown

Hometown

HOMETOWN

The Way We Were

Let your fingers do the walking

By Bill Fields

While cleaning out my childhood home almost a decade ago, I held on to some random items, one of them having been tucked in a cabinet below the wall-mounted phone in the hallway, an instrument through which good and bad news, salty gossip, and the time and temperature had been received for decades. In the final days of 692-8677, the long cord hanging toward the floor looked like it always did, a tangled mess that made privacy or pacing difficult.

I salvaged an old phone book that had been published in November 1975, its white and yellow pages good for the following year. “A Century of Telephone Progress” was heralded on the cover, along with renderings of antique and current phones — a state-of-the-art pushbutton model! — and the bearded visage of Alexander Graham Bell, who received a patent for the telephone on March 7, 1876.

Perusing the thin 6-by-9-inch volume of residences and businesses compiled by the United Telephone Company of The Carolinas five decades after it landed in our mailbox is nothing short of time travel to the way we were, before the Southern Pines area had grown and phones had shrunk.

Some of the “instructions” in the directory’s early pages are so rudimentary they are a reminder that, 50 years ago, a land line was considered a modern marvel.

“One way to avoid wrong numbers is to keep the area code and number before you as you dial.”

“When you make a call, give your party time to answer — about 10 rings — before you hang up. This could save you having to make a second call later.”

“You can save money by dialing all your calls direct without involving an operator.”

Making an out-of-state call? There was a 35 percent discount on weekday evenings and 60 percent off on Saturday and Sunday. Trying to describe a “collect” call to someone who came of age during the cellphone era is like explaining when gas was 49 cents a gallon or that airplanes had smoking sections.

By the time this directory came out my father was a policeman, and we had elected to have an unlisted number, not that teenagers joyriding through the Town & Country Shopping Center parking lot to whom he gave a warning would have done us any harm. My Grandmother Daisy, born 16 years after Bell’s invention, and Uncle Bob, both Jackson Springs residents, are listed.

So many familiar names were in the phone book: neighbors and friends, teachers and pastors, doctors and dentists. If you needed to reach the editor of The Pilot after business hours, Ragan Sam was on page 87; the owner of radio station WEEB, Younts J S, could be found on page 112.

There were lots of Blues and Browns, Davises and Fryes, Jacksons and Joneses, McKenzies and McNeills, Smiths and Thomases. Perhaps more Williamses than any other name, among them John W, otherwise “Coach” to so many for so long.

When you “let your fingers do the walking in the yellow pages” there was plenty to see.

Remember “Service Stations” where you’d get your windshield cleaned and oil checked while filling up? Dezalia Phillips 66, Poe’s Texaco, Red’s Exxon, Styers Gulf were among the dozens of such establishments listed in the yellow pages.

Restaurants? There was The Capri and The Chicken Hut, Dante’s and Duffy’s, Lob-Steer Inn and Park-N-Eat, Cecil’s Steak House and The Sandwich Shop, Mr. Flynn’s and Tastee Freez. None of those exist today, but Bob’s Pizza (“Call for Quicker Service”) does.

St. Joseph of the Pines was still a hospital. Mac’s Business Machines could set you up with a typewriter. You could get lodging at the Belvedere Hotel or Fairway Motel, groceries at A & P, Big Star, Piggly Wiggly or Winn-Dixie (“The Beef People”). The Glitter Box is no more, but Honeycutt Jewelers still sparkles.

Among the clip art (dogs, golfers and termites) and bold fonts, one of the categories caught my eye: “Ice.” Half a dozen places were listed, including Brooks Min-It Market and Ice Masters Service of Carthage, which boasted “clean, hard ice cubes” and “ice never touched by human hands.”

Now, we hold computers in our palms and text with our thumbs. That’s “person-to-person” these days.

2026 Department Hometown