He was a skinny little kid from the West End of Vancouver. No one paid him much attention around school, except his friends and when he played sports - especially baseball.
Baseball became his outlet, his release, his passion, his way of breaking down the barriers he faced growing up without his father, who left his mother when he was a young boy.
Gary Pennington has had a remarkable life and has been afforded lots of opportunities, thanks to sports.
"Sport became the most important thing in my life," Pennington said. "My fondest early memory of my dad is when we were playing catch with a tennis ball on the grass by the tennis courts in English Bay in 1947 - it was the day before he left - I was 11 years old."
He remembers in Grade 2 playing in the upper corner of Lord Roberts playground that he could hit a baseball - he could do something - and people started to forget that he was that skinny little kid from the West End.
"In the West End we had a gravel school yard and a playground. We had no baseball field. We played pepper by the hour, balls and strikes [throwing and catching]," he said.
That time spent in the West End with his friends playing baseball slowly gravitated to Connaught Park where they would take over the fields.
"We formed the Rockets, a multi-age West End team, and we challenged everyone we could," Pennington recalls. "The police tried to shut down the games, but we'd just pick up and go someplace else. There was this guy who had a truck and we'd all pile in the back and he'd take us to other parks and we'd get in a game. Baseball was everything to me. I always wanted to play."
At the age of 14, Pennington tried out for the Mt. Pleasant Lions, a U16 team. He didn't think he would make the team in the beginning.
"Here I am, a 14-year-old kid from a single-parent household. We didn't have a lot of money in those days - mom did an amazing job keeping this together," he said. "I think that's when my coaches, my mentors over the year took over and became my father figures. One coach, Bill Birdsall, was so kind to me. That's what is so great about baseball and sports in general. It can do so much for you. That experience and the experience of playing under coaches like Bill is what made me who I am today."
Lance Hudson, former Olympic basketball coach, was another strong mentor.
"Lance had me to his home for dinner each Sun-day and was my surrogate father. Alex MacGillvray and Don Brown, who knew I was a dead-end kid, took me for meals after our ball games and gave me rides home (actually a couple of blocks away since I didn't want them to know where I lived)," said Pennington. "Most of all, thanks to my late mother for her tremendous support of me despite huge problems of bringing up four children on her own after being abandoned by her husband and having major problems with alcohol."
Sport was an escape for Pennington, a chance to gain some self-confidence.
"I finished high school at 19 and was a man playing with boys. We had no coach in high school. We had a sponsor and we won two city championships. The sponsor had us coach ourselves. We made the decisions. It was really a good degree of independence," he said. "One thing about the West End was that a lot of kids had single parents, so we'd look out for each other. We formed really strong bonds in the West End through adversity, and sport afforded us an outlet to fight through that adversity."
When Pennington finished high school, several major league scouts started knocking on his door. He was offered to sign with the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox."The chance was there to sign a big contract - well, what was considered a big contract in those days - but one of my coaches urged me to stay in school, get a degree and the offers would still be there," Pennington said. "In my last college game, I was poised to sign with the Vancouver Mounties, but I got hit on the hand and broke it. That was it."
The next year he started his masters degree at the University of Washington. He was married too, and between marriage, school, starting a family and working, baseball was not a high priority."But it was never far from my mind," Penning-ton said. "I went down to California for spring training and dove for a ball and separated my shoulder. By that time, I was 23 with a child and finishing my masters degree, so I said it was time to shift my priorities and I came back to the Lower Mainland and started teaching in West Vancouver. I continued with sports and played handball and rugby and took baseball off."
But Pennington couldn't stay away from baseball.
In 1975 he made a comeback to the game and went to Australia, playing in the Country Baseball League. He played for one year and came back to Vancouver where he immersed himself in teaching at the University of British Columbia, where he taught for 30 years, and working with community groups.
In 1988 he went back to Australia and played again, only to come back to Canada where he started playing with the senior men's baseball league.
"I was in Horseshoe Bay and saw a guy with a T-shirt and they were starting the Howe Sound Hounds. They didn't take walk-ons, but I went anyway, and I love it. It's been the best part of my life and I've been playing with them for 15, 16 years," he said. "I look back sometimes at the time when I was being offered contracts and encouraged to quit school and go pro. I think you always want to see how far you could go, but it was sound advice to stay in school. I have no regrets."
Pennington and his family have bounced around between Australia, the Lower Mainland and the Sunshine Coast the past few years. Pennington is still coaching, still mentoring and still playing baseball. He's also been encouraged to pen his memoirs.
"There are some good stories there, not so much about me, but the people that I interacted with and who had such a profound impact on my life," he said. "I think there are a lot of good stories that should not be lost. The meaning is not 'hey Gary you did all these things and overcame so much,' it's telling the stories."
And the stories are amazing.
Pennington played major level university sport in all three West Coast states: baseball at the University of California, Berkeley; baseball and basketball at Seattle University; handball as a grad student at the University of Washington; and rugby at the University of Oregon when he was a PhD student.And at one time or another, he led every league he ever played in batting. "Sport, and baseball in particular, has meant so much to me because it became my escape as a boy in an otherwise drab, grey and intimidating world," he said. "Sport was and continues to be my passion.Some sage has said that little is accomplished in life without great passion, and I believe this is true. I love this game and the challenge and satisfaction that it brings. Like life, some days it does not go as hoped, but on days when you turn a couple of double plays, hit a line drive, dive and catch a ball, hear your teammates say, 'Great play, Penn!' - there is nothing better.
"It was the anthropologist Ashley Montague who said, 'We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.' And I believe this fervently and plan to keep playing until the proverbial cows come home. It really is a field of dreams out there, and I can't think of any place I would rather be."
