Two friends of mine recently told me about their bucket list, and it sounded like something I’d like to try.

Unlike the list in that movie with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, theirs doesn’t include skydiving or driving a race car. It’s a list of restaurants where they want to eat.

Call it a dinner bucket list.

These places are scattered all over the country, and they’ve learned about them by word of mouth or from food shows on television. The list involves real people food like hot dogs, steaks, seafood and fried chicken. One of their favorite places to eat is in Lonaconing.

A New England eatery on their dinner bucket list features fried clams, and the male half of the couple described with hand movements the size of an order. It could probably fill a defensive tackle’s football helmet.

My parents and I often went to Howard Johnson’s Restaurant in LaVale on Wednesday nights for the all-you-can-eat fried clam special. Except for one place in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where they served freshly shucked fried clams, HoJo’s were the best I’ve ever eaten.

I asked my friends if their list included that place in Texas where, if you eat a 72-ounce steak within one hour, you get it for free.

The guy — who’s retired from the Air Force and has traveled extensively — said it’s called The Big Texan, and he’s already been there and seen the steak.

“It’s like trying to eat a beef roast,” he said.

Seventy-two ounces ... that’s 4 1/2 pounds of steak. Plus, you have to eat the potato, salad, shrimp cocktail and roll that come with it, or it doesn’t count. Whether you wash it down with anything is up to you. The steak will cost $72 if you don’t finish it in an hour.

Out of approximately 40,000 people who’ve tried, 8,000 have succeeded. Competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut (the reigning July 4 hot dog-eating champion with 59 in 10 minutes) ate one in 8 minutes, 52 seconds. Brian Gookbong Lee of Pasadena, Calif., ate four steaks in less than an hour.

The largest cut of meat I’ve ever seen on a dinner plate was served to a friend of mine at the Elks’ Club in Myrtle Beach.

Prime rib was on special, and Digger ordered an end cut. Either he won a lottery that nobody told us about, or the cook decided to get rid of the chunk he was carving and start another, because what the waiter brought weighed at least five pounds.

Digger put both hands to his face, leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a while. The rest of us looked on in silent disbelief. Digger ate until he was absolutely stuffed, then had the remnants put into a go-box. Enough was left to make two days’ worth of sandwiches for eight people.

Gluttony is its own reward and its own punishment. A friend of mine once ate a 9-inch pepperoni pizza in 90 seconds. I thought he’d have to push his eyeballs back into his head. On another occasion, he ate a medium pizza, 12 hot wings and two hoagies and washed it down with a 48-ounce Big Gulp. It took him exactly 20 minutes, and he didn’t feel well for some time. If anyone had sympathy for him, I was unaware of it

The biggest eaters I’ve ever seen in action were the Baltimore Colts. Suter Kegg, our late sports editor, took me to their training camp at Westminster, and we had lunch with them. Probably the only time I’ve been in a room full of people who were bigger than I was.

Most started with a cafeteria tray filled with bowls of tomato soup. Then they got a tray full of burgers — in some cases, two layers thick — and followed that with a tray of desserts.

Bob Maddox played football for Frostburg State University and then for the Cincinnati Bengals and Kansas City Chiefs about 30 years ago. His eating exploits became so legendary that the wire services and magazines wrote about him.

Gene Goodrich, one of our former reporters, struck up a friendship with Maddox. He asked Maddox what he ate for lunch, and Maddox said, “My mom fixes me a kettle of soup.” Breakfast as I recall was a loaf of toasted bread, a dozen or more eggs, one or two pounds of bacon ... that sort of thing.

Maddox played defensive tackle and defensive end, and was 6 feet, 5 inches tall but weighed only 237 pounds. That’s a problem when you’re going up against guys who (in those days) outweigh you by 40 or 50 pounds.

In a 1977 story, Sports Illustrated described the Bengals’ efforts to put some weight on Maddox:

“He'd sit down at the table,” says (trainer Marv) Pollins, “with six or seven T-bones and five ears of corn. He’d just stack the steaks on his tray, cover them with A1 Sauce, pick them up in his hands and start eating. For breakfast Bob would have a whole box of corn flakes with half a gallon of milk. He was such an attraction in camp that I think he kept it up just because we all expected him to.” Another reason he kept it up was that, after months of gluttony, Maddox had gained only six pounds.

The Associated Press recently reported that a man named “Humble Bob” Shrout won $2,500 in an Ohio eating contest that involved spaghetti with chili on it.

Shrout was Ranked No. 5 by the International Federation of Competitive Eating and narrowly defeated the No. 1-ranked eater, our old friend Joey Chestnut.

Mason won by eating 11.5 pounds of spaghetti and chili in 10 minutes.

My first bowling ball weighed only 11 pounds.

This isn’t someone I’d want to car-pool with.