Joe DePugh may not ring a bell, but you’ve heard his story of what might have been many times through the years.
On the grass at Nowlan Park. In the comfy seats above in Croker. Out in the RDS. Around the stands at Thomond. Yes, you know the details of his yarn by heart. About all that wondrous teenage potential ultimately coming to naught.
Of course, you never met Joe in person. Or even saw footage of him in action. You didn’t need to. There’s always a version of his biography playing in your head, every time you hear that distinctive opening riff and these words.
“I had a friend was a big baseball player / Back in high school
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He could throw that speedball by you / Make you look like a fool boy.”
That was Joe. A sliver of his otherwise unremarkable childhood in Freehold, New Jersey immortalised forever in a Bruce Springsteen lyric on Glory Days. He died of metastatic prostate cancer in Florida last week at the age of 75 but in his youth he was apparently something to behold on the mound. A high school pitching phenom bulwarking a team where the future “Boss” was a benchwarmer nicknamed “Saddie”. The kind of scrub only pressed into action when other kids didn’t show up,
Saddie once cost DePugh a Babe Ruth League championship game when he caught a routine fly ball with his head instead of his glove. No biggie. The pitcher and the reserve right fielder remained on good terms thereafter and right through high school.
DePugh’s talent earned him a tryout with the Los Angeles Dodgers before he pivoted to playing college basketball while earning an English degree. Following his mother’s death when he was 20, he assumed legal guardianship of his younger brothers. A hard station.
Four years later, by then a substitute teacher, he was leaving The Headliner, a bar in Neptune near the Jersey Shore, when he bumped into his former classmate, bearded and just starting to regularly blow the doors off Max’s Kansas City up in New York. No longer answering to Saddie. Or anyone.
As old school pals and one-time team-mates invariably do, the pair climbed a pair of stools to sip the heady brew of nostalgia. They closed the joint that night, recalling long-forgotten games, epic classroom japes and fearsome nun teachers. Stuff that could only matter to those who were there. Stuff that mattered to them.
DePugh never made it to the Big Leagues but long after he peaked as an athlete this chance encounter subsequently inspired the first verse of a typically bittersweet Springsteen elegy for lost promise, unfulfilled dreams and the curse of the eternal wondering about what might have been.
“Saw him the other night at this roadside bar
I was walking in he was walking out
We went back inside, sat down, had a few drinks,
but all we kept talking about . . . Glory days.”
Long before any of us ever figured out the intricacies of pitching, Irish people appreciated the significance of the evening. Meeting by happy happenstance. The impromptu, beery saunter down memory lane. Wistful retelling short stories that become tall tales. Chances missed. Catches dropped. Shots not taken. The chatter of freshly grown men low-key yearning for the simplicity of childish things, the more innocent joys of their previous life.
American pedants have always moaned about Springsteen deploying speedball instead of the more traditional fastball. We cared not a jot about that. We didn’t need to understand the sport to appreciate the sentiment at play here. The dreams of youth foundering on the rocks of adulthood is the most universal concept. A story as old as time.
In any bar in America you hear tell of the kid with the golden arm who never made it to the show. Just like everybody in Ireland can recite the local legend about the boy who might have gone all the way. Coulda. Shoulda. Woulda. That fella had everything. World at his feet. Blessed by the gods, cursed by the demons. Injury. Drink. Women. Misfortune.
One of the curious joys of talking sport incessantly is name dropping inevitably obscure prodigies who fell by the wayside. Gifted youth who peaked too early. Blue-chip prospect who somehow went off-colour. The Cork fella who was better than Keane. The Dubliner supposed to be the next Brady. Where did it all go wrong? You could hum the tune from memory.
For a man dealt a tough hand, Joe DePugh lived a decent life, raising his brothers, moving on from education to work as a contractor between Vermont and Florida. A perfectly ordinary, anonymous existence until the release of the Born in the USA album in 1984 and his discovery he’d earned a footnote in American folklore.
At first he thought his old pal was having a pop at him, then he fully understood and embraced the true meaning of the song. And one night years ago, his most famous classmate gifted him and other old school buddies tickets to a concert at Giants Stadium and, just before launching into Glory Days, Saddie roared, “Joe D, are you out there?” He was. And loving it.
“He was a good friend when I needed one,” wrote Springsteen of his friend in a statement last week. “‘He could throw that speedball by you, make you look like a fool.’ … Glory Days my friend.”
They just pass you by.
