Bruce Springsteen is paying tribute to his late classmate Joe DePugh, a former star pitcher from New Jersey who inspired Springsteen’s wistful hit “Glory Days.”
The Boss, 75, shared a Instagram post on Sunday, March 30 remembering DePugh, who died of cancer in Florida at age 75, according to The Athletic.
“Just a moment to mark the passing of Freehold native and ballplayer Joe DePugh. He was a good friend when I needed one,” Springsteen captioned his post. “‘He could throw that speedball by you, make you look like a fool’….Glory Days my friend.”
DePugh’s prowess on the field as a teenager and a run-in with Springsteen years later at a Jersey shore bar were key inspirations for the rocker, who recounted their reunion in the opening lyrics of “Glory Days,” featured on his 1984 album Born in the U.S.A. and released as a single a year later.
“I had a friend who was 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 walkin’ in, he was walkin’ out/We went back inside, sat down, had a few drinks/But all he kept talking about was glory days,” Springsteen sings.
DePugh told the Waterbury Record in 2012 that his fateful encounter with Springsteen came in 1973 at a bar in Neptune, N.J. He’d been there for dinner with his girlfriend and kids after a basketball game, and as he was leaving, ran into his old Little League buddy Bruce.
“We just sat and talked at the bar,” DePugh told the Record. “He told me what he was doing and we talked about the old days, just like it says in the song.”
The two had met at St. Rose of Lima elementary school in Freehold, and played baseball together, though DePugh nicknamed Springsteen “Saddie” for his lack of skills. They drifted apart after going to different high schools, and DePugh went on to graduate from King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
He eventually began working as a contractor and moved to Stowe, Vt., which is where he was living in 1985 when a friend alerted him that Springsteen’s newest song was about him.
“He says, it’s the same story that you always told us, about running into him at the bar,” DePugh told the Record of his friend. “Look, I am just flattered that he put me in the song. Maybe he took a little shot at me, but the song is about how you can’t live in the past and I understand that… The fact that he put me in any song is such a tribute. I mean, who gets that?”
DePugh told the outlet that he’d only met with Springsteen twice since the song came out, but praised the singer as “so freakin’ humble.”
“Whenever we’re together, it’s the same dynamic: I’m the star and he’s the guy at the end of the bench,” DePugh told the Palm Beach Post in 2011. “That’s who he has always been to me, my right fielder.”
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The identity of just who had inspired Springsteen to write the lyrics was something of a mystery for many years, according to The Athletic. In 2011, the answer came when Freehold historian Kevin Coyne helped organize a 60th reunion for Freehold Little League.
Springsteen did not attend, but a classmate who did said he’d talked to the rocker and confirmed that DePugh was the star pitcher he was singing about, the outlet reported. Coyne later made DePugh’s identity public in a 2011 New York Times article.
“There’s nothing about that song that bothered him. There was nothing about it, because he was not that person. He was not a person who was living in those days,” Coyne told the Athletic. “He had had those days, he had thrived in them and he had loved them, and then he had a nice life… He was a charming, charming, gracious, modest, lovely human being.”
