“I had a friend was a big baseball player

Back in high school

He could throw that speedball by you

Make you look like a fool, boy

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 he kept talking about was …”

… Glory days.

Here is my boring story:

It was 1968 or thereabout and I am on a two-year sabbatical from golf, having been pinched on the cheek one too many times by C.M. My new hangout is Footsie’s pool hall, the one located at what was then Biggs Park Shopping Center, the final rung in my ascent to Varsity Lanes and the foosball table.

With $2 in my pocket, most likely through the sale of soda bottles which pulled in a nickel apiece, I would ride my Schwinn to Footsies to play 9-ball all day, with the loser paying the dime it cost to play. I rarely lost, so that was enough money plus some to buy two hot dogs, all the way, an order of fries, and a Coca-Cola at Eckerd’s, which was a short walk away.

The jukebox would be blaring such classics as “Hey Jude,” “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” “Mrs. Robinson,” and, apropos to today’s scribbling, “Those Were the Days.” We were on the cusp of the best generation of music, which a half century later remains the best generation of music.

I remember as well my brother Doug and I riding our bicycles to do a little scavenging at Clarks, a department store that was under construction at the south end of the shopping center, when I stepped on a nail that went through my right foot. We scurried back to our home at 3504 Rowland Ave, leaving behind a trail of blood. When my folks saw my injured foot, they thought tetanus shot and Band-Aid, not lawsuit and payday. Tellingly, my folks blamed me for my stupidity, and no one else.

It was an era when children played outside instead of holing up in their room playing video games. You could go to a high school football game without fear of being shot. We knew our neighbors as surrogate parents, the setting sun told us it was time to go home, and we would gather at the dinner table as a family, hopefully for lasagna.

I flashed back to those days recently when it was announced that Stanford, California and SMU would be joining the Atlantic Coast Conference, just another nail in the coffin of my good old days. This almost ensures the next foot to drop, the departure of UNC from the ACC, putting into jeopardy those rivalries that determine my level of gladness or sadness until the next game.

I remember it being 1968, and the North Carolina Tar Heels basketball team, led by Larry Miller, Charlie Scott, Rusty Clark, Bill Bunting and Dick Grubar, losing 78-55 to the UCLA Bruins, which was led by a fellow named Lew Alcindor, in the championship game. I watched it late at night on a small black-and-white TV, sprawled a few feet away on the living room floor.

My love affair with UNC athletics was launched. It continues, although collegiate athletics, with the NIL, transfer portal, and the disintegration of geographically configured conferences, is being corrupted by, as Jackson Browne warned us back in those days, the “struggle for the legal tender.”

It has been a joyful if sometimes bumpy ride, the bumpiest being my high school years that David Thompson almost single-handedly ruined, relief finally arriving my freshman year at UNC thanks to a fellow named Phil Ford.

I will be in Kenan Stadium on Saturday, watching as my Tar Heel football team, off to a promising start, takes on Minnesota. During the game, it will seem like the good old days, when players played for a free education not cash, and the name on the front of the jersey mattered more than the one on the back of the jersey.

But it will not be those good old days, and never will be again.

“I think I’m going down to the well tonight,

And I’m gonna drink till I get my fill

And I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it

But I probably will

Yeah, just sitting back, trying to recapture

A little of the glory, yeah

Well time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister

But boring stories of”

— “Glory Days,” by Bruce Springsteen