He played the day his dad died. He played the day after he had 52 stitches sewn into his wrist following extensive surgery. And he plays today with a herniated disc in his back that causes him sheer agony whenever his six-foot-one, 280-pound frame barrels around the bases.
Mind you, Scott Fenton did not play June 26, marking the first game he's missed in the PoCo Over-30 men's baseball league since he joined the faction eight years ago.
That day, the 38-year-old catcher was in Atlanta, Ga. tending to industrial-sales job demands from which he couldn't escape but likely would have if he wasn't roughly 2,000 nautical miles away from planting his spikes into the diamond dirt at Thompson Park. And that's what dead-stopped his streak of what he measures to be 400 straight games, including playoffs, PoCo Over-18 fall ball and serving as a spare "at least 50 times" at one time or another on each of the PoCo Over-30's other eight teams.
Sounds like a fair excuse. Just don't let it happen again, man.
"I take a lot of pride playing in this league," said an earnest Fenton, who played 133 straight games, clobbered a league-best 102 RBI and batted for a .335 average since the PoCo Over-30 loop began keeping official stats in 2006. "It's not about being an individual on an individual team. It's about doing what's best for the league as a whole."
Fenton played PoCo minor ball since he was age 5 when he was first influenced by his father, Darryl, a former playing great with the old Vancouver Pharaohs senior men's squad. At 13, Fenton toiled for the national-champion Coquitlam Little League Junior division team which now, remarkably, houses six players on his PoCo Over-30 men's squad, the Redhawks.
Fenton wears No. 9 in memory of his dad, who used to wear the same digit when he played and died from a stroke suddenly at home in summer 2009. Later that day, Fenton suited up and played for the Redhawks in a league game at Maple Ridge's Larry Walker Field.
"He would have wanted me to play," reasoned Fenton, noting that the day this story ran, ironically, marked the second anniversary of his dad's passing. "I've gone through a lot of adversity, without saying. You've got to be a diehard to play at this age."
U. SCHOLARSHIPS GALORE
A group of standout Tri-City high school students achieved athletic scholarships in 2011 to some big-name universities.
Among those were: Mallory Sall (volleyball), at North Dakota's Minot State; Jordan Varga (baseball), at South Dakota State; Bret Macdonald (basketball) at UBC Okanagan; Bobby Pospischil (football), at Simon Fraser; Katie Woo (volleyball), at Thompson Rivers; and Cam Canales (football), at UBC.
