Joe DePugh, the Little League teammate of Bruce Springsteen who inspired the rocker’s hit song “Glory Days,” a rousing, bittersweet anthem to their hardscrabble childhoods in Freehold, N.J., where time passed by “in the wink of a young girl’s eye,” died on Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 75.
The cause of death, in a hospice facility, was metastatic prostate cancer, his brother Paul said.
In the early 1960s, before Mr. Springsteen became the Boss, he was a clumsy baseball player whose athletic abilities were so sad that Joe, the team’s star pitcher, gave him the nickname Saddie.
“Bruce lost this big game for us one year,” Mr. DePugh told The Palm Beach Post in 2011. “We stuck him out in right field all the time, where you think he’s out of harm’s way. But this important game, we had a bunch of guys missing, and we had to play him.”
In the last inning, Saddie dropped an easy fly ball.
“Actually, it hit him on the head,” Mr. DePugh said, “and we lost the game.”
They remained friends in high school, bonding over their turbulent home lives and their distant, alcoholic fathers. After graduation, Saddie took off to play rock ’n’ roll in bars and nightclubs. Joe, who excelled at multiple sports, tried out for the Los Angeles Dodgers but wound up playing basketball at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
In 1973, when they had been out of touch for years, these two boyhood friends bumped into each other at the Headliner, a roadside bar in Neptune, near the Jersey Shore. Mr. Springsteen was walking in; Mr. DePugh was walking out.
“We were 24 years old, and he was just hitting it big in the music industry,” Mr. DePugh told the Wilkes-Barre newspaper The Times Leader in 2011. “We went back in and started talking about grade school, the nuns we had, Little League and high school.”
Afterward, they drifted apart again: Mr. Springsteen, to worldwide fame; Mr. DePugh, to a vagabond life as a contractor, splitting his time between South Florida and Stowe, Vt.
“He was a rolling stone,” Mr. DePugh’s brother said. “He didn’t really live anywhere for any length of time.”
Wherever he went, Mr. DePugh told stories of his friendship with Mr. Springsteen and the night they reunited at the bar. In 1984, the Boss released “Born in the U.S.A.,” his seventh album. The fourth song on Side 2 was “Glory Days.”
Scott Wright, a friend of Mr. DePugh’s in Vermont, heard it on the radio.
“He told me, ‘Springsteen has a new album out, and there’s a song on there about you,’” Mr. DePugh told The New York Times in 2011. “‘It’s exactly the story you told me.’”
Mr. DePugh didn’t believe him, so Mr. Wright called the radio station and requested the song. Half an hour later, the D.J. came on and said, “This is going out to Scotty Wright up in Stowe, Vermont,” Mr. DePugh recalled on the public radio show “Only a Game” in 2011. “This is the new Springsteen song, ‘Glory Days,’ and apparently it’s about a friend of Scott’s.”
A guitar strummed. Then Saddie sang:
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
Mr. DePugh was floored.
“I knew immediately it was about me,” he told The Times Leader. “It described exactly what happened that night.”
Mr. DePugh was like a lot of characters in Mr. Springsteen’s songs: wounded by loss and disappointments, but also resolute, and certainly never hopeless.
Joseph Francis DePugh was born on Aug. 8, 1949, in Yonkers N.Y., the eldest of five boys. His father, Joseph, was frequently absent. His mother, Joan (Campbell) DePugh, a typist and clerk for the state of New Jersey, died of cancer in 1969.
“We didn’t have much, but, like Bruce, we had enough,” Paul DePugh said in an interview. “We always had a roof over our heads. But after my mother died, everything went to hell.”
Joe became the legal guardian of his younger brothers, who were shuffled between foster homes.
He went on to graduate from King’s College with a degree in English and worked as a substitute teacher before starting a contracting company. He made a good enough living as a contractor to shuttle back and forth between Florida and Vermont. His marriage to Nancy Saunders in 1987 ended in divorce.
For years, there was debate among his Freehold buddies about who the real “speedball pitcher” in the song was, but Mr. DePugh always insisted it was him. In 2004, Mr. Springsteen gave Mr. DePugh and other friends in Freehold tickets to a concert at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands.
“Before he sang ‘Glory Days,’” Mr. DePugh told The Times Leader, “Bruce yelled into the microphone, ‘Joe D., are you out there?’”
The following year, their mutual friend Don Norkus got them together for lunch at an Italian restaurant in Red Bank, N.J.
“Bruce pulls in and I point at him and he points at me, and that’s when the hugging started,” Mr. DePugh told The New York Times. They reconnected again a few years later at a restaurant in Freehold.
“He said, ‘Always remember, I love you,’ not like some corny Budweiser commercial, but a real sentimental thing,” Mr. DePugh said. “I was dumbfounded. I said, ‘Thanks, Saddie.’”
Last week, after Mr. DePugh died, Saddie posted a statement on his website.
“Just a moment to mark the passing of Freehold native and ballplayer Joe DePugh,” it said. “He was a good friend when I needed one. ‘He could throw that speedball by you, make you look like a fool.’…Glory Days my friend.”
