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.

Hometown

Polyester and Plaid

The ghosts of fashion don’ts

By Bill Fields

After retrieving the items from a box and making a cursory inspection, one thing was as clear as my vision after cataract surgery: Moths have better taste than I did.

This particular sweater and sport jacket are nearly 50 years old but, notwithstanding a few small stains, they have survived the decades intact, their synthetic fibers not even on the menu for a couple of generations of nocturnal insects.

These are not just any clothes. They were two of my go-to garments during high school, possessions I wore with pride despite their effect on my social life. I loved them.

The canary cardigan and tan, blue, red and white plaid coat weren’t exceptions but the rule for my 1970s dress code. Multiple photographs in my high school yearbooks are proof of these fashion crimes. Among plenty of denim and flannel there I am, over and over, ready for a tee time.

I blame golf for leading me down the polyester path, although I take full responsibility for my rust-colored corduroy suit (with vest). If what I wore led to where I was on Friday and Saturday nights — upstairs in my room, alone, reading and listening to the radio — I was OK with it, such was my obsession with the game.

Part of playing golf was dressing the part, and I did my best. I was aided and abetted in this pursuit. In ninth grade, by which time I had abandoned other sports to concentrate on making the tour, my social studies teacher was Mrs. Troop, a kind, young woman whose husband, Lee, was an assistant pro at the Country Club of North Carolina. Told of my golf habit, he gave me a trio of lightly used, 100 percent orlon, men’s size large Izod sweaters in blue, red and yellow. They were Crayon-bright colors with a green crocodile on the left breast, what cool golfers (as opposed to cool teenagers) were wearing in 1974.

I donned those sweaters regularly, in class and on the course, over the next several years. They were in my regular cool-weather rotation along with a zip-up crafted from velour, the poor man’s cashmere. Regardless of the season, chances are I had on a pair of polyester slacks, some of them in plaid or check patterns purchased with my employee discount in the pro shop at Mid Pines Golf Club, where I worked part time as a golf cart attendant. And I might have been wearing my casual deerskin shoes popular with the septuagenarian crowd.

The synthetic-fibered sport jacket (Andhurst by Belk) had padded shoulders and was of a sturdy hand. It was plain ugly, yet I often wore it senior year while delivering the sports on Pinecrest’s student-produced daily closed-circuit television show over a golf shirt with a wide, hard collar. The garish jacket is in the annual, too. I am telling the score of some Patriots’ game while sitting next to the weather girl, who that day was wearing a shirt with “Foxy Lady” inscribed on the front. At least I wasn’t the only one committing a fashion faux pas.

Besides playing much better than we did, I’m sure the golf-mad teenagers at Pinecrest these days dress better as well. Golf clothing still has its quirks — quarter-zip anyone? — but the game’s fashion doesn’t, for the most part, scream like it did during the Synthetic Seventies.

That said, there probably are a few Rickie Fowler wannabes who will feel about their head-to-toe Creamsicle-colored outfits the way I recall the days I looked like a goldfinch. At least my yearbooks were printed in black and white.  PS

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

Hometown

Young Friends

In our old days we know what it means to have them

By Bill Fields

There is a beauty in friends that you’ve had since childhood, generational peers with whom you’ve darted around a basketball court, consumed too much beer and sweated out the college boards. These friends know what it is like to go gray or bald, to wish for a WD-40 for creaky knees, to see a parent decline and pass away.

In the last couple of years, I’ve discovered the pleasure of a different kind of friend, someone young enough to be my son.

I’ve always tended to have older friends. There were a couple of reasons. One was the influence of my sisters, who are 12 1/2 and 14 1/2 years older than me. I pored over their copies of the Lance, the East Southern Pines High School yearbook, well before I got to Pinecrest. After I immersed myself in golf, I played with plenty of folks who could have been older siblings or benevolent uncles and will always be grateful for those relationships. The rounds and practice-range sessions with these older friends were as enjoyable, and likely more meaningful, than all the hours with contemporaries who were searching for the secret, too.

When I began to freelance for NBC Sports in 2017 as a researcher/statistician in the main booth, eventually traveling to a dozen or so golf tournaments a year for the network, I was thrust into a new and hectic world. I’d done lots of media tasks over the decades — reporting, editing, photography, on-camera appearances talking about golf history — but TV production was a different beast and took some acclimation.

My friend Harrison, who will turn 30 this year, already was an old hand. He comes from a family with a history in sports television going back to his grandfather being instrumental in the development of ESPN. As I discovered, lots of golf TV folks start out as runners on the crew, working long hours helping everyone else get their jobs done. It is invaluable experience, and for those who are motivated and talented, can be the gateway to bigger things. NBC producer Tommy Roy, who has won dozens of Emmys, started as a runner, and so did quite a few of our colleagues.

Harrison began as a runner and has been a scorer/statistician for a handful of years, usually working with tower announcer Gary Koch. He knew the ropes I was trying to learn, but not long after he had helped me find the right trailer or truck — and trust me, there are a lot of them — we started spending time together outside the TV compound.

I have three nephews — another tragically passed away when he was 27 — and while we certainly get along, geography doesn’t help foster relationships when you live hundreds of miles apart. Harrison and I have become good friends in part because we regularly spend time together when we’re on the road.

We’ve shared fantastic cheesesteaks in Philadelphia and mediocre Indian food in the Chicago suburbs, sipped bourbon on an Orlando hotel balcony, played golf on a legendary Texas public course, Lions Muny in Austin. I chipped in at dusk on the 18th to win our match, then we went to a barbecue joint with another colleague, Mike, to chow down on ribs and brisket.

Harrison and I have broad conversations. He has seen a lot of the world and has traveled much more than I had by my late 20s. We talk a lot about work, as people do, but our talks cover plenty of ground. It has been refreshing to get the perspective of a smart person half my age. When I had to leave a tournament early to travel to see my ill mother in her last months, Harrison was a supportive sounding board over a meal before I went to the airport for my cross-country, red-eye flight.

We kid each other in the easy way that happens between good friends. I forgave him after he called my driving “soft” as I cautiously turned left onto an Atlanta freeway ramp. Sometimes, he even listens to me. When Harrison showed me the footage of a toast he offered at his sister’s wedding, I was pleased that he had followed my advice: Be brief and use humor.

On a table by the water in a Connecticut park last year, Harrison, his mom (whom I hadn’t met) and I ate pizza and salad and drank pinot grigio out of paper cups as the sun went down. There was a long week ahead for the two of us at the U.S. Open, but the takeout meal in a scenic spot was a perfect calm before the storm.

When we aren’t working together anymore — when we aren’t comparing airline upgrades or grading the telecasts — I have no doubt Harrison and I will keep in touch. Life throws you curve balls when you get older, some of them mean, but our friendship has been one of the good surprises, and I’m grateful for it.  PS

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

Hometown

Map Mysteries

Navigating the old-fashioned way

By Bill Fields

On a Golf World assignment in Nebraska in 2013, I procured something for the first time in many years. Not bubble gum, a baseball glove or bottle of Brut 33. I bought a road map.

I had decided, in addition to reporting on the action in the U.S. Senior Open at Omaha Country Club, to see some sand-green golf courses for the first time. There used to be a bunch of them in the Midwest and Southwest; only dozens remained. We were well into the GPS era by then, but as I discovered on my first late afternoon drive to explore the throwback brand of golf, a smartphone wasn’t so smart on the byways of rural Nebraska. The $6.95 map I purchased at a convenience store turned out to be as essential as my cameras and notebook as I drove hundreds of miles around the Cornhusker State.

Maps used to be free at gas stations for decades, of course, as anyone who remembers 40 cents a gallon or less is aware. From the 1920s through the 1970s, all the big brands — Esso and Shell, Gulf and Phillips 66 — offered them as a service and promotion. Sometimes an attendant dug them out of a drawer, but often they were in a display between the fan belts and the wiper blades. Put a tiger in your tank . . . and a map in your glove compartment.

They were tool and talisman, objects of both utility and aspiration. It wasn’t just about where you were going on this trip but where you might go on the next one if you twisted Dad’s arm just right.

A highway map was a neat 4 inches by 8 inches in its pristine state. Unfolded, the 16 panels would cover a lot of the backseat in the family Fairlane. A friend recently remembered how much of a master his father, an engineer, was in map usage, from pinpointing various routes to putting it away so the creases were like new on the next trip.

A map would not age as well in our possession. One trip from Southern Pines to Ocean Drive Beach and it would be rumpled and guaranteed to contain Toast Chee cracker crumbs and Salem ashes the next time it was put into action, perhaps accompanied by a line drawn in Magic Marker from the Sandhills to the shore. (When you got to Loris, South Carolina, you knew you were close.)

It was all there on the map, the size of towns and cities delineated by font and type size. As the state capital, Raleigh got boldface and all caps. Greensboro was bigger than Lexington, which was bigger than Thomasville. You knew Southern Pines had a bigger population than Vass. Hoffman, Candor and Tramway? Tiny places all.

Ours was a North Carolina/South Carolina map family because we rarely ventured out of the two states. But this edition, regardless of which gasoline brand distributed it, still provided for a bit of dreaming. The mileage chart always included Atlanta, a whopping 350 miles from Southern Pines. And there was some extra territory on the map’s edges: a tiny strip of Virginia, containing Danville; a wedge of Georgia denoting Augusta and Athens; a sliver of Tennessee showing Bristol, Johnson City and Kingsport. Also, on the Volunteer State portion, on the outskirts of green-shaded Smoky Mountains National Park, Gatlinburg.

My father was a let’s-get-there kind of guy, especially if home was the destination. He once set out from High Point to Southern Pines during a heavy snowfall, convinced it wasn’t that bad. I got a call that evening in my freshman dorm room at college from the Holiday Inn in Asheboro, where my parents were lodging because the roads were impassable.

After an early 1970s trip to Nashville to visit relatives, “Gatlinburg” became code for Dad’s road ways. Traveling east after our visit, my mother and I pestered him about stopping in Gatlinburg. It would be great, we assured him. He grudgingly relented and made the detour so we could see the wonders of this mountain town he thought was a tourist trap with little redeeming value.

Dad wasn’t always right, but he was right this time. Gatlinburg was all trinket shops. It was hard to find a parking spot. The miniature golf course was poor and crowded. We didn’t stay long. Dad got out the map, took a long look, passed it back to me for folding, lit a cigarette and put the car in gear. We would visit other spots on the map, names in both bold and light type, but as for Gatlinburg, it was definitely one and done.  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 Best-Laid Plans

Or, what I did on my summer vacation

By Bill Fields

It was a good plan. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

The first five semesters of college, I carried a full academic schedule, but as the spring of my junior year at North Carolina approached I decided to take four classes instead of five. I was incoming sports editor of The Daily Tar Heel, a position that would take up a lot of time. Most of the requirements outside my major, journalism, had been met.

That semester, when the time came to register for classes in Woollen Gym, I signed up for two courses in J-School and one in the department of Radio, Television and Motion Pictures. I filled out my lightened load with Sociology 95, the Sociology of Sports.

For someone who loved sports, thought that sports writing or broadcasting was a likely career path, and had already shown some potential in that field, the sociology course sounded enjoyable and useful. What was not to like about a couple of hours a week studying games and the people who play them?

Moreover, Sociology 95 was known around campus as one of UNC-Chapel Hill’s easier classes, its seats populated with scholarship athletes who wore familiar numbers and fraternity boys majoring in keg operations. A student journalist busy putting out five editions of the school paper each week in addition to his studies would fit right in.

There were no exams in professor James Wiggins’ course; the only requirement was a term paper explaining a particular sport or team. It seemed right up my alley — I blithely figured to add another A to the handful of top marks I’d earned in two-and-a-half years, along with a bunch of Bs, a few Cs and one D, in calculus. The math grade was no shock. I was in the National Honor Society during high school, but numbers were not my strength. Mrs. White had mercy senior year, passing me when it could have gone the other way and sabotaged my hopes of getting into Chapel Hill. But the Sociology of Sports? I was as confident as Al Wood open in the corner.

It was an eventful semester. I made what turned out to be a terrible spring break trip to visit a friend I’d hoped would be more than a friend. I came down with mononucleosis. Soon after regaining my strength, my father passed away after a tough illness. As the term wound down, though, I just knew I could type my way to an A in Sociology 95. I chose a subject I knew well: the Tar Heel men’s basketball team, detailing the dynamics and history of Dean Smith’s program, and handed in the paper on time.

In early May, during exam period, on one of those perfect spring days that gives resonance to Chapel Hill being called the “Southern Part of Heaven,” a friend and I played 18 holes at Finley Golf Course. Driving back to my apartment, a well-worn but cheap place down Hillsborough Street, I stopped by campus to find out what I’d made in Sociology 95.

There was a box of graded papers on the floor next to Dr. Wiggins’ closed office. The light was dim in the hallway, but it wasn’t too dark to quickly see what was written on the onion-skin page. I got an F in the Sociology of Sports.

Wiggins contended that my paper had not met the requirements set forth by the class syllabus, a view that, to my shock, was upheld when I formally appealed the grade. The first and only F of my life stood. My adviser, then the J-School dean, seemed mystified as well.

The F kept me from going to commencement at Kenan Stadium with my classmates a year later. I got to participate in a ceremony for journalism graduates at Howell Hall but received a blank sheet of paper instead of a diploma. I got my sheepskin in the mail a couple of months later after going to summer school to get my necessary credits.

Taking English and psychology courses, my syllabus for that session called for playing a lot of darts, drinking many beers and spending most afternoons at the Townhouse Apartments pool. I passed with flying colors.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.

Hometown

My Two Cents

What’s your oldest possession?

By Bill Fields

This particular Sunday afternoon more than a half century ago was different from the others.

On a regular weekend visit to my grandmother Daisy’s house in Jackson Springs, looking for entertainment beyond the porch swing and GRIT magazine, I found a jar of coins on a table in a dim hallway. Ma-Ma, as we called her, gave me permission to examine them. 

Some of the coins might have been change Ma-Ma carried home from the Red & White grocery in West End or Kimes Blake’s store just down the hill. I discovered others, though, minted much earlier. With Ma-Ma’s blessing, a few Mercury dimes, buffalo nickels and Indian head pennies became the foundation of my boyhood collection. So did two badly tarnished coins, each slightly larger than a quarter but smaller than a half dollar, about 1 1/8 inches in diameter.

“They’re very old,” Ma-Ma told me. I confirmed this after borrowing her magnifying glass. One was so browned and worn that no date could be ascertained. The other, though, was in a bit better condition — it was an 1854 one-cent piece with a lady’s head encircled by 13 stars.

After I purchased a coin guide from The Country Bookshop — then located in a tiny space at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Bennett Street in Southern Pines — I found out my treasures were copper “large cents.” I later learned this denomination was produced from 1793 to 1857, when it was replaced by the smaller penny. A half-dozen variations were minted in that span. My discoveries were of the “braided hair” final design that debuted in 1839. All of the millions of large cents were made at the Philadelphia mint.

“Old things are better than new things because they’ve got stories to tell, Ethan,” one character says to another in Beautiful Creatures.

My large cents — under a jeweler’s loupe the other one appears to be from 1851 — remain my oldest possessions. They pre-date the Civil War, the telephone, automobiles and manned flight. They were minted during the California Gold Rush. The New York Times came off the press for the first time in 1851, the same year Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, and the Great Flood ravaged the Midwest. In 1854, the Republican Party was founded, and George Eastman and John Philip Sousa were born. There were just over 23 million people in the 1850 U.S. Census, including 3 million slaves.

The early 1850s was a time of pungents, leeches and tinctures, cod liver oil and pickled oysters, parasols and goatskin bootees. A large cent went a long way: It was 11 cents a pound for flour. A bushel of potatoes ran 90 cents. You could buy a lard lamp for 25 cents and a ton of coal for $6. Board might be $1.50 a week, and steady work could leave something left over for a bottle of Scheidam Schnapps, for medicinal purposes, of course. Life expectancy at birth was less than 40 years.

I’ve pondered whose pocket or purse held my large cents more than a century before I claimed them. Had they been passed along to my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1861, when he was a boy? Where might the coins have been other than Montgomery and Moore counties, where my family has roots?

Although it is a coin-collecting no-no but aware that they aren’t worth much as collector pieces, recently I couldn’t resist cleaning my Coronet cents. I soaked them in various solvents — vinegar, ketchup, Coke — and rubbed their surfaces with a pencil eraser. The wear and nicks are still there, but the original copper color is nicely revealed.

Their history always will be a mystery, but I hope my youngest relatives, now of elementary-school age, some day will wonder about their heritage decades down the road the way I do now. If they have children and pass the cents along, these mid-19th century coins could be the oldest things owned by someone in the 22nd century, when they will be very, very old, and cash itself might be ancient history.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.

Hometown

How Southern Am I?

The latitude changes, the attitude doesn’t

By Bill Fields

I can hear traffic on Interstate 95 from where I live. The cars and trucks are far enough away that the noise usually doesn’t annoy — you hear it, but you don’t. I became part of the automotive Muzak not long ago, heading down South, as I’ve done many times over decades, 620 miles from home to home, even if the latter doesn’t have four walls and a roof.

Thanks to cataract surgery I was seeing great — I would have been a formidable foe in the license plate game if there had been someone in the passenger seat — but my vision of who I am felt clouded.

After almost 35 years in New England, how Southern am I?

I’ve asked myself this question before, yet it seemed more acute during this journey. Near the tail end of a year when so many considered so much, it was natural to ponder the reach of one’s roots. Spending nearly two weeks in the South without having a bite of barbecue made it essential.

I sound no different than childhood friends who stayed put. Syllables can still glide together as if there is WD-40 between them, same as when a college roommate from New Jersey made me the front man when we were subletting our apartment in Chapel Hill one summer. Yet I never called my parents “Momma and Daddy,” nor a store a “bidness.”

A work colleague said I was driving “soft” two years ago in downtown Atlanta when I was less than aggressive making a left turn. That critique notwithstanding, I contend anyone who negotiated the toll area of the George Washington Bridge at rush hour in the days when you had to give money to a person is forever hardened behind the wheel.

Commuting up North was no picnic either, in particular those days when a lot of drivers seemed angry at the world not just their boss. Sometimes they were. In the mid-1980s, the first time my mother rode in a New York City taxi, not far from Penn Station after getting off Amtrak’s Silver Star, the cabbie jumped out and ran after a driver who had cut him off.

I associate the South with good manners while acknowledging they sometimes are like one coat applied to an old house that needs more. Others can judge whether I’ve grown more blunt as I’ve grayed, but I’d like to think being nice endures. And I know, after many years as a transplant above the Mason-Dixon Line, that the South has no monopoly on kindness or treating others the right way.

I’m proud of where I’m from, but during a time when there is heightened awareness about racial injustice, it’s jarring to be less than an hour from my hometown and drive past several Confederate flags flying in front yards a couple of curves down the road from the former North Carolina Motor Speedway. The symbols used to be plentiful at the track on race days; they wouldn’t be allowed were it still a NASCAR venue.

I know folks who, for one reason or another, don’t ever go back, don’t long for a taste of the familiar, don’t enjoy a reunion with a place or its people. There are often good reasons for such judgments, but I don’t think I will ever feel that way.

There was a distinct pace where I grew up, and that speed, or more to the point, lack of it, was related to the room we had. Much of what I recall — relish — as Southern simply was small-town. Much has changed, a point reinforced when I visited the Southern Pines cemetery where my parents are buried. It was a warm, clear morning in early November, and Boy Scouts were placing small American flags on the graves of veterans such as my father. As the teenagers did their service, I was alone with my thoughts and the sound of cars on Morganton Road, a noise not of memory but of now, that I heard but didn’t hear.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent. Bill can be reached at williamhfields@gmail.com.