Hometown

Passing of a Friend

When news doesn’t travel as fast as it should

By Bill Fields

To be engrossed in all things golf when I was a teenager during the 1970s meant having your own category of “golf cool.”

Johnny Miller was cool. A Wilson 8802 putter was cool. The opening music for ABC’s U.S. Open television broadcasts was cool. And in my book, so was Jim Boros.

It is a familiar golf name, of course, made famous by Julius Boros, Jim’s uncle, who had three major titles among his 18 PGA Tour victories. Julius represented the Mid Pines Club, as it was then known, for a long time as its touring professional, and his brother, Ernie, was the head pro during the 1960s.

When Ernie needed some help, Jim, who had gotten out of the Air Force, came south from his native Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1966. After several years as a Mid Pines assistant, Jim took a job in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. In 1973, after Quality Inns purchased the resort from the Cosgrove family, Jim returned as head professional.

Jim hired me to park golf carts and clean clubs on weekends and in the summer. I made some money, had access to the wonderful course and got to buy stuff in the shop — All-Star gloves, DiFini slacks — at cost. We played games on the practice green, Jim often wearing the white loafers and white golf shirt he favored most of the year. The preferred competition was putting two balls at each of the green’s 18 holes trying to make the most aces. I had 14 once, but it was never easy to get the better of Jim. He advertised and sold by mail for a couple of bucks a little pamphlet that he called the secret to putting: Apply the most grip pressure with the pinkie and ring fingers of the top hand and the index and middle fingers of the bottom hand.

He was a good player. As a 17-year-old he won the 1960 Connecticut State Junior, defeating an opponent named Bob Palmer in the final. That victory earned him a trophy and a “Boros Beats Palmer” headline over a small story in Golf World magazine that made Jim smile years later.

Savvy about the game, Jim knew that I wasn’t going to develop into a top-level golfer despite my enthusiasm and effort. But he was kind — unless you hit a shank in his presence, which he couldn’t abide — and helpful. He appreciated that I tried to do a good job and sensed I might have a promising future. My dad once passed along a flattering comment that Jim had made to him about me.

It was a little, but confidence-inspiring thing, an assessment that meant more than a golf tip, not that Jim wasn’t good at those too. He was head pro at Mid Pines for a decade prior to taking a similar post at Whispering Pines.

Jim loved a cold beer and a ripe tomato, the latter all the better if it came from his garden, which was a passion. He was low-key, smart, smooth.

Until recently I hadn’t known Jim died at age 77 in May 2020 of cancer that had been diagnosed five months earlier. He was survived by wife Juanita, daughter Lancey, son Scott and four grandchildren.

Jim and Juanita, an Aberdeen native, were married for 55 years, having met at the Capri in Southern Pines, not long after he had moved south to work for Uncle Ernie. Juanita, visiting from Greensboro, and her brother Wilson had come in for a pizza after going to the movies. Jim came over to pay off a basketball bet to Wilson, who had become a friend. It was the best five dollars Jim ever lost, for it was only seven months from their chance meeting to marriage.

Theirs was an enduring love story. After his wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1990, Jim retired to support her. I had seen Jim about a decade ago when we played golf at Whispering Pines with his good friends and weekly golf partners Bob Drum and Barry Matey, Barry having worked as an assistant pro under Jim for years.

“We had the best times,” Barry said of his long friendship with Jim when I called him after finding out that Jim had passed away. “He was a classy guy.”

Yes, we did. Yes, he was.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

The Spice
of Time

When you see more salt than pepper

By Bill Fields

I got a much-needed haircut recently not long after eye surgery. My vision was limited to the other eye, but that was plenty to notice the clippings on the black cape when the stylist had finished. There was enough white on the cover-up to make it seem as if a polar bear had been in the chair.

Forty years after finding my first gray hair, on my 22nd birthday, there is much more salt than pepper to be swept up after getting a trim. It’s been headed in that direction for two decades, an inexorable journey that, like achy joints after a taxing day, is just part of the landscape when you’re north of 60. As P.G. Wodehouse said, “There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.”

Don’t think for a minute I’m not grateful to have a head mostly full of hair at my age, regardless of its hue. I thank my maternal grandfather, B.L. Henderson, for whom a pocket comb remained a useful stocking stuffer as he made his way into his 90s, if one’s hair prospects are indeed rooted in that part of the family tree.

Plenty of men are dealt a different hand, losing their hair, or most of it, at a relatively young age. The combover can be a comical reaction — see images of former Purdue basketball coach Gene Keady for confirmation. This is the ultimate losing battle, and the willingness of more folks to go the shaved-head route when faced with a bare minimum is a victory not only for style but common sense.

I’m glad I haven’t had to make that decision. A couple of years ago while getting a haircut down South, as I sat down in the chair, I asked the barber if he could do anything about all the gray I could see in the mirror.

“Better to go gray than go gone,” he said.

Those seven words of barber philosophy have become my mantra.

If my father had heard them as he started getting lots of gray as he approached his 50th birthday, he might have avoided his brief hair dye experiment. Something looked different about his appearance as he sat down to supper one evening, but the real evidence was in the bathroom sink — black stains from the hair dye he had applied. We teased him so much that he never altered his appearance again. For the last decade of his life, he let his short flat-top go increasingly toward white, and set against his blue-green eyes it was a very handsome look.

“No play for Mr. Gray” has been a catchy line for Walt Frazier to say in the “Just for Men” television commercials, but I’m not sure how accurate it is.

If someone wants to dye his or her hair to maintain a look that has been theirs for years, more power to them. It’s none of my business. But tell me that singer Emmylou Harris doesn’t look gorgeous these days with that silvery hair of hers, and I’ll wonder what you’re smoking.

When it comes to hair color, I’m leaning toward letting time tell its story.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

The Boys of Spring

Toting dreams of breaking par

By Bill Fields

We were a mostly scrawny bunch dressed in sharp collars and loud pants, convinced that with a bit more practice and little more luck, we could be the next Tom Watson. This ignored the fact that most of us on the Pinecrest Patriots boys golf team during the mid-1970s considered breaking 80 an excellent day, but there was no point in letting the facts get in the way of our dreams.

By this time of year, the season would have begun after a couple of weeks of practice. Cool weather wasn’t a problem. If one of those cheap nylon jackets didn’t do the trick, there was always orlon or velour on reserve. My first match during my sophomore year, on March 3, 1975, happened to coincide with my parents’ anniversary. That evening Dad splurged on dinner for the three of us at Cecil’s in the Town and Country Shopping Center. The steak was better than my score, 84.

Pinehurst No. 1 was our home course for practice and matches, and I came to know it well over those years of preparation and competition. I even prepared a rudimentary yardage book in a First Union pocket calendar. There was the fear of the O.B. fence to the right of the opening fairway and the fun of trying to bag an early birdie on the reachable par-5 fourth. In those years No. 1 concluded with a short par-3. Everyone who had finished would gather around the green, a rare gallery that made the 8- or 9-iron shot harder — and the walk to the parking lot longer if you botched it and bogeyed.

Despite my familiarity with the course, the best I shot there — or anywhere else during prep play — was 72 during a match senior year as the team combined for a four-man total of 292, a school record at that point in Pinecrest’s young history. Although we were proud Patriots that particular Monday afternoon, more recent generations would scoff at our scores. Pinecrest’s young men and women have won multiple state titles in recent years, becoming the powerhouse you would have thought prep golfers in a golf-rich area would have been all along.

We made it to the state tournament once, in 1975, which in those years was played at Finley Golf Course in Chapel Hill. Shooting an opening round 89 was bad enough, but that evening, while we were horsing around outside after eating, I got stung by a wasp over my left eye. By morning, it was swollen partly shut, which didn’t help my cause. It is never a good sign when you don’t have enough fingers to signal how many over par you are to a teammate in an adjacent fairway. I played terribly on the front nine, shooting 52.

But the eye started to get better as I made the turn, and I vowed to turn things around to avoid complete embarrassment. Somehow, I did, making three birdies, three pars and three bogeys to shoot an even-par 36 and break 90. If that 16-stroke improvement between front and back isn’t a state record, it must be in the neighborhood.

Golf was not a priority at the school. The football team got a sit-down pre-game meal of steak and potatoes at Russell’s before its Friday night game. Our golf coach stopped the station wagon or van at McDonald’s as we traveled to an away match. As for staying hydrated during a round, we hoped there was a functioning water fountain somewhere on the course.

Two of the courses we played in conference matches — Arabia in Hoke County and Richmond Pines in Rockingham — closed years ago. Others remain, such as Scotch Meadows in Laurinburg and Pinecrest Country Club in Lumberton. Quail Ridge, in Sanford, home to the sectional tournament my sophomore and junior years, is still around. So is the Sanford Municipal Golf Course, site of the sectional in May 1977 during my senior year.

The good form that I’d shown earlier that season was gone by the time we arrived in Lee County trying to advance to the state tourney. I was not going to be the next Tom Watson after all. Our fourth-best score that day as the team successfully advanced was an 85, so I was north of that. I believe I shot 89, or it could have been even higher. My high school golf career ended not with a whimper but to the sound of constant beeping from machinery at the nearby brick company. If the trucks were in reverse, so was my game, at just the wrong time.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

One Degree of Separation

And other brushes with greatness

By Bill Fields

The first celebrities I saw in the flesh weighed about 2,000 pounds apiece.

They were the Budweiser Clydesdales, parading down Broad Street in Southern Pines in the 1960s, and they didn’t yield to the left if they didn’t want to. To a 60-pound kid, a one-ton horse seemed as big as a brontosaurus.

My celebrity encounters veered from the equine over the years, but star sightings outside the golf world — on which I’ve reported for four decades — have been few and far between.

Sadly, Meryl Streep never looked forward to commuting on a train to Grand Central Terminal with me as she did as Molly to Robert De Niro’s Frank in Falling in Love. I did get a hello from Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis on a 1988 flight to Boston. Friendly, lots of hair, not a lot of height. In a long check-in line at LaGuardia Airport, Chris Farley, in sunglasses and a hoodie, nodded in my direction when we made eye contact. On a flight to London, Robin Givens, sans Mike Tyson, sat a few rows away.

It wasn’t unusual for folks to see Paul Newman out and about in Connecticut. I walked past him once on a sidewalk in Westport, and his eyes were as blue as you thought they were.

Covering a PGA Tour Champions event at Pebble Beach, I needed a few minutes from Bernhard Langer for an interview after his round, which concluded on the ninth hole a long way from the Lodge. Langer asked me to join him in the shuttle van so we could talk during the short ride back to civilization. Clint Eastwood, who had played in Langer’s group, was in the front passenger seat, and seeing an interloper clamber into the vehicle didn’t make his day.

“You can take the next one,” Eastwood said to me.

“Bernhard told me to come with him,” I replied.

“It’s OK, Clint,” Langer interjected.

Eastwood still seemed peeved when we reached the clubhouse. His demeanor to a stranger was much different from that of another Hollywood A-lister, Jack Lemmon, with whom I had crossed paths at a golf tournament at Pebble Beach years earlier. Lemmon was walking his standard poodle across a parking lot and offered a smile and a friendly hello.

Lemmon was a fixture each winter on the Monterey Peninsula, where he tried in vain to make the amateur cut and play on Sunday in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the old Bing Crosby Pro-Am. I didn’t expect to see Glenn Frey of the Eagles under the big live oak at Augusta National Golf Club on Masters Wednesday in 1997. But Frey loved golf and was there, in a white caddie jumpsuit, to loop for pal Brad Faxon in the Par-3 Contest. I lament having not seen the Eagles in concert during the band’s heyday, but I got to meet Frey and shake his hand that day.

Two iconic figures in sports and entertainment, John Madden and Betty White, passed away within a couple of days of each other near the end of 2021. Tributes focused not only on how much they accomplished during their respective careers but how well they treated people throughout their long lives. I never met either icon — saw Madden dining in a California restaurant once — but the coverage made me think of the time I met one of my childhood baseball heroes, Brooks Robinson.

Back in the late 1980s, I knew the former Baltimore Orioles third baseman was going to be playing in a celebrity golf event in Florida that I was covering. Once on-site, a lot of people were paying attention to the former New York Jets receiver Don Maynard, a Texan who was teeing it up in shorts and spiked cowboy boots. I prioritized finding the baseball Hall of Famer who had worn No. 5 and won 16 Gold Glove Awards.

If Robinson had grown tired of grown men asking him to sign a baseball while hearing about how he inspired them to play the hot corner in Little League, he sure didn’t show it. He was gracious and genuine, and as he signed the brand-new Rawlings baseball I’d brought along, I was 29 going on 12.   PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

The Suds Chronicles

When a cold one comes in downright handy

By Bill Fields

Some people abstain from alcohol during January, but I don’t think I will be one of them this year.

After getting a COVID-19 breakthrough infection in November and isolating at home for 10 days, one of my first stops upon recovering was for a beer in the tap room of my local — and excellent — craft brewery, Aspetuck Brew Lab. Along with the comfort of seeing familiar faces was the welcome taste of my favorite, Turbidity Lucidity, an American IPA.

The brewery says of TuLu that “this citrusy smooth, crushable IPA is capped off with a double dose of dry-hops and Simcoe and Mosaic lupulin power. Citrus-forward and crisp.” I just know that I like it.

The pleasure of that pint, the first I’d had in two weeks or so because I got sick, started me thinking about my beer life. It started with a sly (or so I thought) sampling of my father’s stash. I was 12, and Dad was in the hospital for a few days. While Mom visited him one evening, I built up the nerve to open one of the Budweisers on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. So bitter and unappealing was the taste, I doubt if I consumed 2 ounces of the lager. I poured out the rest and put the empty in the outside trash can. I figured Dad wouldn’t notice there were now four cans in the fridge instead of five.

“I see you’ve been into my beer,” he said upon coming home.

“Didn’t like it,” I replied.

That would change in the ensuing years. I wasn’t much of an underage drinker — Dad being a police officer probably had something to do with that — but sure wouldn’t refuse an occasional beer from a friend when we left the Castle of Dreams disco on Tuesday teen night.

Upon turning 18 in 1977, a couple of friends and I were happy-hour regulars on Fridays at 21 Club on West New Hampshire Avenue in downtown Southern Pines. A cool, dimly lit place on a hot summer evening with $1.50 pitchers of Bud to pour into frosted mugs just about defined high living at that point in our lives.

Quantity trumped quality when it came to beer consumption during college in Chapel Hill, whether at Troll’s, Harrison’s or He’s Not Here. Only the place with the great name has survived the decades, but I’ll always remember a Friday afternoon journalism “class” at Harrison’s with the visiting journalist Tom Wicker. The North Carolina native, UNC graduate and New York Timesman held court for three Heinekens and lots of stories before excusing himself to attend another engagement.

I painfully had (way) more than three beers on a Saturday evening in 1985 in Cincinnati, prior to photographing the final round of the LPGA Championship the next day. Nancy Lopez won the tournament by a whopping eight strokes. My victory was making it through the hot afternoon despite a lethal hangover. It was a valuable lesson for the rest of my years on the golf tournament photography trail: all things in moderation, particularly on Saturday night.

I’ve had beers in the den of Curtis Strange, the first person I knew to have a keg in his home (being on the Michelob staff had its advantages, and there was no doubt he believed in the product). I drank a Rolling Rock on Arnold Palmer’s jet and went to a chicken-and-beer place (it’s a thing) with my South Korean hosts on a business trip there. Working at the Tokyo Olympics last year, our activities were restricted because of the pandemic. Fortunately, there was a 7-Eleven in our hotel complex that wasn’t off limits. A 7-Eleven in Japan is stocked with many items, including different kinds of beer, which wasn’t a bad thing to have on hand while watching Olympic rowing or table tennis at night on the Japanese channels.

That Yebisu tasted much better than the Budweiser I had 50 years earlier.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

 

Photograph by Bill Fields

Hometown

Two Thousand Miles I Roam

Just to make this dock my home

By Bill Fields

I have a modest stash of record albums, LPs that spark memories of people, places and parties. The number of scratches pretty much tells where each ranked on my personal charts, but no visual cues are required to identify the vinyl that meant the most to me.

Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman was the first album I owned, and I thought it was 29 minutes of gold. It was released in November 1968, when I was 9 years old. Given that pop culture took the slow train to Southern Pines in those days, I obtained it a bit later.

The love of my first album coincided with my loathing of fourth-grade music and having to learn how to play the recorder. I didn’t like the teacher and couldn’t get the hang of the instrument. The combination caused me to loathe that class to a degree unmatched until calculus came along.

Amid the unpleasantness created by a one-dollar piece of plastic with holes in it, putting Wichita Lineman on the record player was bliss even though there was a lot of melancholy within the lyrics of those 11 songs. Campbell had a beautiful, pure voice and was, as I would learn, a world-class guitarist.

As I listened over and over to the album, Campbell became an obsession, my first outside of sports. If, in the summer of ’69, you’d told me I could meet either Brooks Robinson or Glen Campbell, I might well have chosen the famous Arkansan who didn’t play third base.

My mother and sisters could sing, and the Campbell record convinced me to see if I could, too, although there wasn’t a boys’ choir in America that would have signed me. I made up for the talent deficit with enthusiasm. Santa Claus brought me a TrueTone reel-to-reel tape recorder, affording me a make-believe opportunity to be a sports announcer or, after Campbell’s music became part of my life, recording artist.

I sang the title track plenty of times, but the second song on side one, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” became my favorite. It was written by soul singer Otis Redding with Steve Cropper and recorded not long before Redding died in a plane crash in December 1967, when he was only 26 years old.

I must have heard Redding’s song played on the radio after it was released in early ’68, but Campbell’s cover was what I tried to mimic. I recorded it on the TrueTone and forced my parents to listen to me perform it live in the living room. I was far from being a lonely child, but Redding’s song of loneliness, sung by Campbell, fascinated me.

When Campbell came to town to play golf in the pro-am preceding the U.S. Professional Match Play Championship at the Country Club of North Carolina in 1971, he was the celebrity I was most eager to see, even though Mickey Mantle and astronaut Gene Cernan also were in the field. Campbell was dressed in yellow and offered a wide smile when I called out from behind a gallery rope before snapping a picture with my Instamatic camera. After the round, he signed my program. I collected many golfers’ autographs that day — Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Julius Boros and Ray Floyd among them — but at home that evening I lingered over the signature of the man whose music had meant so much.

About 20 years or so later, when karaoke had become a thing, I was in an airport hotel in Orlando, having arrived to photograph a story with well-known golf instructor David Leadbetter the next morning. I hadn’t sung outside the shower or alone in my car in years. But it was karaoke night at the Marriott, I knew no one in the crowded bar, and I wanted to sing. There was no doubt about the song.

I was waiting for my turn when I heard a familiar voice. It was my colleague John Huggan, a Scot with standards and opinions. Suddenly, I did know someone in the crowded bar. My plan for off-key anonymity was gone. Huggan and I chatted over a beer as a handful of karaoke performers grabbed the microphone. My name was called. The lyrics scrolled on a monitor but having sung “The Dock of the Bay” over and over as a kid, I could have done it without assistance.

I sang the song. A few people clapped. I warily returned to my barstool.

“You weren’t the worst,” Huggan said.

I considered it high praise  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

Strikes, Spares and a Baby Split

Filling an open frame with something to cherish

By Bill Fields

A couple of months before my mother died, she had to be hospitalized because of an infection. At 95, with dementia, Mom was tiny. On the last day of my visit, she had rallied but still was very frail. I stood by her bed. Putting the large fingers of my right hand on her right palm, for reasons I don’t know, I said, “Squeeze.”

Her eyes took me in and she did, holding the grip for several seconds. I was stunned by its force. My fingers hurt. When she let go, I saw the hint of a smile on her face. I shook my head — and my hand — as I left the room.

Driving my rental car to RDU, I thought about bowling.

My mother wasn’t an athlete. She enjoyed watching college basketball and professional golf — Mom spent quite a few minutes with me on her land line lamenting what Phil Mickelson or Carolina had done — but that was about it.

She would shoot a basket in the backyard if I made her and play miniature golf with the rest of the family at the beach. Once, when she was in her early 60s, Mom joined a Wiffle ball game with kids and grandkids at the home of her younger daughter. Twenty years or so after that, I coerced her into a few golf swings on the Knollwood range. By that point in life she was content to watch Phil on TV, and her assisted-living room was decorated with an autographed picture of Lefty.

Once upon a time, though, Mom had a been a bowler. It was the winter of 1964-65. I was 5 years old and would have been in kindergarten, but East Southern Pines School started with first grade. I watched Captain Kangaroo, played in the dirt with toy soldiers or Tonka trucks, and pored over the World Books. Dad had taken a job at a tool-and-die plant in High Point, coming home on weekends.

Mom worked as a teller at The Citizens Bank and Trust Company. The bank had a team in a women’s bowling league that competed in the bowling alley that stood on North West Broad just before the intersection with Morganton Road. That winter, on Tuesday nights after Mom made supper for the two of us, she put on her white team shirt with the bank’s name in green script on the back and drove downtown with her boy riding shotgun. I was given a dime to use in the candy machine and told to behave, which wasn’t a given for me at that age.

The bowling center was an exotic place to a kid who hadn’t seen much beyond his block. Shiny wooden lanes brightly lit. Bowlers in their matching team shirts.  The rumble of flying pins. More than once, another spectating child and I had to be shooed away from the air vent where bowlers dried their hands, so fascinating was that feature. The women who smoked put their lipstick-stained cigarettes in a big glass ashtray when it was their turn. I didn’t know what either body English or camaraderie meant at the time, but recognize now that both were present.

There were winners and losers on those Tuesday evenings, results that would be reported in The Pilot, but I couldn’t tell you how the Citizens’ ladies fared against the competition or whether Mom ever rolled a strike. That bowling season came and went. Mom never bought her own ball, one of the colorful ones that looked like a giant marble. Her snazzy shirt became a painting smock when it was home improvement time. The bowling alley would burn down.

She didn’t want to leave her home when it was time. It was her house and her things, lots of them after more than 60 years. My sisters and I toiled for a week to sort through it all. Mom’s bedroom closet was chock full of stuff. I hadn’t seen the bank bowling shirt in many years but hoped to find it. To my disappointment, the shirt wasn’t there. As I cleared things out, something shiny in the closet corner caught my eye.

It was a trophy, chrome with a wooden base, about a foot tall with a woman on top. “TARHEEL BOWLERETTES. 64-65. Most Improved.”  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

Heroes and Helmets

Autumn’s guilty pleasure

By Bill Fields

I don’t usually get nervous before an interview, but a few years ago, when the subject was a childhood hero, I confess to having had the jitters.

A friend of Sonny Jurgensen kindly passed along his phone number so I could try to get him for a story I was writing about his youth in Wilmington years before he was a star quarterback in the National Football League. He was north of 80 by this point, the ginger hair long gone white; the golden arm that could zing passes to a receiver on a down-and-out better than anyone, alive only on NFL Films. Our call was brief and his answers perfunctory. Despite the disappointing substance of the conversation, I hung up pleased that I’d gotten to speak with Number 9 in burgundy, gold and white decades after his autographed photo hung on my bedroom wall.

He was why I drew plays in the dirt and threw passes at the trunk of a pine tree if no one was around. I wasn’t tough enough for football despite all the neighborhood prep; a year of Midget League was enough. But I care about football these days in part because — like many who grew up in pre-Panthers North Carolina — I cared so much about Sonny and his Washington teammates more than 50 years ago.

I still root for the team that Jurgensen led out of the huddle from 1964 to 1974. My alma mater, the University of North Carolina, is supposed to be strong this season. Maybe the Tar Heels will make it to the ACC title game and beat Clemson. My adopted college team, Ohio State, has enlivened my autumns since I became a fan thanks to my girlfriend, for whom Buckeye football is her only sporting interest. We went to a game in Columbus several years ago. Even though it was a cakewalk non-conference matchup, the stadium was filled on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, making it a day I won’t forget. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, thanks to the annual Michigan game, has become much more than another day in a long holiday weekend. What football fan doesn’t hope that the pandemic will have eased enough to allow the stands to look like they once did?

As another football season kicks off, though, the sport seems an increasingly guilty pleasure given the growing evidence of long-term damage from repeated hits to the head in a game in which the athletes seem bigger, stronger and faster every year. The NFL increasingly is in the same sentence with CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive brain degeneration that can afflict those who play contact sports. Pro football players are handsomely paid in the current era — as opposed to the athletes competing long ago when many of us got hooked on watching them play — but the riches come with a potential cost much greater than arthritic joints in retirement.

It has always been a brutal game, but the CTE studies and evidence have quantified the brutality in ways impossible to ignore, and dementia hurried along by blows to the head is a much different outcome than seeing a man who used to sprint like a gazelle have trouble getting up a flight of stairs.

Like many others, I will still watch, grateful for the games in which nobody is seriously hurt. I hope the rules of the game continue to evolve so that they might lessen the potential for severe injury, that more athletes leave the game without suffering long-term effects from their careers.

This fall I will be thinking about another red-headed football player, my great-nephew, a senior at his North Carolina high school. He is an all-conference defensive end, a quick and strong teenager who loves his chosen sport despite the hand fractures he has sustained as a prep athlete. I hope he has a great season — and decides he’s had enough football.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

Neighborhood Gold

Clearing the bar in the backyard

By Bill Fields

A few years ago, not long after I began freelancing as a booth researcher at golf tournaments broadcast by NBC Sports, someone pointed out a slim, silver-haired man walking into a trailer in the television compound. This particular camera operator, my colleague told me, had a distinct background. It was Ken Walsh, a former American Olympic swimmer who won three medals (two gold, one silver) in 1968 in Mexico City.

I hadn’t seen Walsh since I was 9 years old. Or at least I imagine I probably watched him on ABC during the ’68 Summer Games, because as a fourth-grader obsessed with sports, those Olympics were a very big deal when they flickered on our living room Zenith. (Portions of the Olympics were shown in color for the first time, but we still had a black-and-white set.)

Decades later, some of the competitors’ names from that year — the Summer Games were held in October — jump to mind more easily than those of childhood friends even though the television coverage of that period was a fraction of the airtime today.

There was Bob Beamon, shattering the world record in the men’s long jump with a leap of 29 feet, 2 1/4 inches that wasn’t bettered for 23 years and remains the Olympic mark. Bill Toomey won gold in the decathalon, Randy Matson the shot put and Al Oerter the discus throw (for the fourth straight Olympics). Kip Keino of Kenya ruled in the 1,500 meters and Bob Seagren in the pole vault. Dick Fosbury shook up things by winning the high jump with his novel backward style.

Walsh? As I discovered, he was on the winning 4×100 freestyle relay and 4×100 medley relay teams and finished second in the 100-meter freestyle behind Australian Mike Wenden and ahead of fellow American Mark Spitz, who would win seven gold medals four years later in Munich.

My neighborhood buddies and I ran our sprints up and down East New Jersey Avenue — there was little traffic, and it was slightly downhill to the chalk-drawn finish line heading toward May Street — but come Olympics time in ’68 we really were more interested in the field events.

Chuck, my best friend, and I constructed a high jump behind his house out of stray 2x4s for supports with an old broom handle resting on two nails as the bar to jump over. We improvised a landing pit out of dirt, pine straw and leaves. The long jump didn’t require as much preparation — just a couple of baseballs to mark the take-off spot and a yardstick to measure where our Converse tennis shoes made a mark in the sand. We made a few feeble attempts at the triple jump but couldn’t quite figure out when to hop and when to skip.

The real backyard drama came in an event the younger kids only watched.

One of Chuck’s older brothers, Ricky, was up for most anything. When he wasn’t roaring around on his minibike or tackling opposing players like Dick Butkus, he liked to pole vault — and not just in the Southern Pines school gym or at Memorial Field. Ricky pole-vaulted in his yard, using bamboo stalks he got from a nearby thicket and taped up for a better grip to go up and over. A pile of saw dust and a couple of cheap, inflated beach rafts cushioned the landing.

Ricky’s friends would join him, and so would one of the men who lived on our block, Mr. McNeill, a good athlete who had played on the town’s semi-pro baseball team. He probably was only in his late 30s, but that seemed ancient to a little kid. Clad in his work clothes on those late afternoon jumps, Mr. McNeill gave no quarter to the teenagers. The way those bamboo poles bent after being planted in the homemade box, it seemed like only a matter of time before the rescue squad would have to be summoned for broken bones, although bruises and sprains are the worst injuries I can recall.

I’m slated to go to my first Olympics this summer, the Tokyo 2020 Games that were delayed a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ll be working on the golf production, a long way from where the vaulters will be headed skyward on space-age poles and a long time from the fun and games of 1968.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

His favorite book is North Toward Home by Willie Morris

Hometown

A Week in the Big City

Learning to clear, and run, the tables

By Bill Fields

It was a low moment when my beloved Baltimore Orioles lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1971 World Series after winning the previous season. As the seventh grade got started, though, I still had great memories from that summer and an adventure of the highest order.

Not long after the All-Star team from the Southern Pines Little League was quickly bounced from the post-season with a defeat in Warsaw (North Carolina, not Poland) in which I was hapless against the opposing pitcher’s curveball, Sadie, one of my two older sisters, invited me to spend a week with her in High Point.

Sadie had settled there after going to college at UNC Greensboro, marrying a restaurant owner named Bill Carter, and had an infant son, John. At 12, I was an uncle and, although I would make an attempt to play Pony League baseball the following year, essentially knew that I was a washed-up good glove/bad bat third baseman who would not be following Brooks Robinson to a hot corner somewhere in the major leagues.

I realized it was time to concentrate on other things, and the opportunity to hang out with one of my siblings in a place with about 10 times the population of my hometown wasn’t something to be missed. An intriguing aspect was that thanks to my brother-in-law this was a working vacation, and I would come home with some cash while also getting to enjoy the pleasures of the big city.

As a golf-loving kid fascinated by miniature golf, especially Putt-Putt, I knew High Point had a Putt-Putt facility on North Main Street, 36 holes of putting pleasure that wasn’t available in the Sandhills. A daytime, play-as-much-as-you-want pass was $3, and at least four days that week Sadie dropped me off and picked me up several hours later.

Round and round I would go, the sporting equivalent of an all-you-can-eat dinner, with no anxiety at seeing my colored golf ball go down the chute at the 18th hole because I knew there was a counter full of balls to choose from for my next round and no need to dig into my pockets to see if I had enough money to pay for it. There was also no wait to tee off on those weekday afternoons, the rest of the world obviously not into Putt-Putt as much as I was.

By the end of the week, I had gotten proficient enough to have broken 30 a few times on the par-36 courses, which made me think I could one day challenge professional putting champions like Vance Randall and Rick Smith on the carpet. I became such a familiar face to the proprietor that he let me skim bugs out of the water hazards for a pack of crackers. Unfortunately, he didn’t offer me a discount on the P.P.A. (Professional Putters Association) steel-center golf balls favored by the pros for sale in the kiosk, which I was convinced would drop my score by a couple of strokes. 

My nights were spent working as an apron- and paper cap-wearing busboy at Brinwood, one of Bill’s two restaurants. The menu was huge — steaks, seafood, sandwiches, chicken, spaghetti and much more — and the food was delicious, the latter the reason the place was much more crowded than the Putt-Putt on North Main. I clearly remember two of Bill’s edicts: Never dip a glass into the bin of crushed ice, and never sweep up while customers are eating nearby.

As a relative, I got special dispensation to order whatever I wanted for my end-of-shift meal. One night I picked fried flounder, which was as good as anything you could get at the beach. All the other evenings, though, I chose country-style steak, the waitresses kidding me for being a creature of habit. There were great desserts too, the homemade German chocolate cake being a favorite.

The metabolism of a 12-year-old is a wonderful thing, but I think I still came home with an extra pound or two. After closing Brinwood, we’d go to Bill’s other restaurant, Carter’s, a smaller place closer to downtown, to check up there. While he counted the money in the till, I was free to prepare myself a milkshake in a metal cup just like they made them at the Sandhill Drug fountain. I never looked at a carton of store-brand Neapolitan in our freezer quite the same.

I came home with $60 from my busboy shifts, most of which my mother “suggested” I use to start a savings account. I sure felt rich after my week of living like a king.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.