While watching “The Irishman” on Netflix the other night I suddenly realized that I was on the road as a nonunion truck driver when Hoffa had strikes going on across the country in 1967.

I was only 23 on my first job as a driver of an owner-operated rig out of Dallas, Texas. Not being member of the Teamsters Union made driving anywhere, especially through New Jersey, dangerous as the labor group ruled the roads and a national strike was taking effect. Gunshots were being fired from overpasses across the windshields of any rigs still out on the road, and fights were breaking out in truck stops and picket lines across the country.

This emerging memory hit me hard. How had I managed to put this one away in the dark corners of my mind? How many more are there?

By 23, I had already driven a car back to Connecticut from Florida, hitchhiked to California, been lost at sea in a small boat, worked as pot washer in the galley of a merchant ship and completed basic training and jet mechanic school for the Air National Guard.

The realization of just how “off the charts” my life has been snuck up on me for what I know will not be the last time.

I have done so many different things, tried so many different jobs and made so many impulse decisions that I feel fortunate to be alive.

After failing to graduate from high school, I attended a prep school in Maine where I got to know this black kid from Alabama, Ben Davis, who was on track to become a great defensive back and punt returner.

Benny would go on to play at Defiance College in Ohio. I went to visit him on campus after I had lost a soccer scholarship by flunking out of college and was working for an appraisal company in Ohio. It was 1965 and Benny was still on track, drafted into the NFL in 1967 by the Cleveland Browns.

That same August, as portrayed in “The Irishman” when the Teamsters were on strike, I was driving a tractor trailer through the rolling backwoods of Tennessee. While dialing my AM radio, I picked up a strong signal from Ohio of a Browns exhibition game, and Benny was fielding a punt for a 20 yard runback. Benny was now on track to lead the NFL in punt returns.

At that moment my rig was overweight and I was on track to run around four more scales while using two different log books to deliver my load of freight on time in Boston 18 hours later while not being able to sleep.

Benny would go on to play seven more years for the Browns, but it wasn’t until 1971 that I would get a chance to meet Benny in person after a Chargers game in San Diego. By this time I was a long-haired hippy living in South Mission Beach.

Benny still had that great smile as he figured out it was me behind the hair as we shook hands and laughed.

Extrapolate out my life another 45 years with my current trajectory of distractions and comparing my life to where Benny was at that time should have registered as a wake-up call for me.

You would think, as these six years had passed, that I might recognize the error of my ways compared to what Benny had accomplished in the same time frame, but I was hell bent for nowhere with years of distractions in front of me while Benny was about to retire from football and start a new life.

At that moment I was a bartender at a local pub riding my cheap bicycle 10 miles to junior college with no intention of finishing. I would quit that, become a laborer, borrow money to buy a better bike, try racing with limited success, quit that and start riding my bike across half the United States and Canada.

Somewhere out in the middle of the Kansas wheat fields, the vision of what I really wanted to do began to surface.

It turns out I was not done with bike racing, somehow convinced from my years as a 4:35 miler in high school that I could succeed at cycling. I would turn 28 on a rainy day of riding through Wisconsin and kept saying to myself that if I don’t get killed on this trip I was going to be one strong bike rider by the time I reached the East Coast.

My confidence was growing stronger with each mile. But I had little inkling then that my dreams of becoming a truly competitive cyclist would turn out to be an accomplishment beyond my wildest dreams.

The following years were filled with the pure audacity of racing internationally, coaching the USA team, living at the Olympic training center and traveling on three continents, while trying to figure out the next step with no direction home.

“The Irishmen” I got to know during my competitive days were hardnosed, but fun-loving cyclists who took me under their wing. We were members of the first fully sponsored American cycling team to ever ride a stage race in Europe, the 1973 Tour of Ireland.

They would set the table for future Irishmen to become top professional riders and gain legendary status in the process, very similar to what our team was doing for the next level of American riders.

Now I had a track, but it was more like a roller coaster ride where you could get only a glimpse of the future. The constant travel began to wear me out, and even with the relatively smooth transition from rider to coach completed, the next step to marketing and promotion was very unclear with no set guidelines.

After several attempts to “settle down,” get married, buy a house and have kids did not work out, I would finally go back to college get my bachelor’s degree, land a mid- management job for Bicycling Magazine, then get married, have a kid and buy a house at age 53.

I had finally joined mainstream America, but I kept looking over my shoulder wondering if I really belonged. My young co-workers in the surrounding cubicles had accepted me, but only I knew the long, roundabout route it took to get there.

Ultimately I would end up behind the wheel of a tractor trailer again at age 65. By this time, Benny was long retired and probably a grandfather. There was no Irish hit man, the Teamsters were not the force they once were and Hoffa’s body hadn’t been found, but the flood of memories that descended upon me at that moment was staggering.

Was being back in a “semi” the final bookend to my life?

The songs on the radio late at night while driving my rig down some lonesome highway bring back an amazing array of recollections that have been sparked once again by “The Irishman.”

What really struck me was the boldness of the life I have lived, just going with whatever came my way with no direction known, and the memory of my dad saying to me while I was still in the early stages, “Son, are you writing this all down?”

Bill Humphreys, known as “the Bike Guy,” lives in Old Lyme. He was a member of the 1970s national cycling team in his late 20s and became the team’s coach at age 33.

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