It’s the Spirit That Moves Him

GARDEN GROVE —  He emerges from between the bleachers, sporting a boy’s bowl cut that stands out against his 48-year-old face, marching down the sideline with an unmistakable sense of purpose. The crowd leaps to greet him.

“All right, everybody up, let’s make some noise!” he yells as he launches Pacifica High fans into a cheer: “Gimme a ‘P!’ ” he begins, trying his best to form the letter with his arms. One letter follows another, and with the final “A,” he whirls onto one knee and the crowd roars its approval. A lopsided grin splits his face.

Ask anyone on campus about this beloved figure they call “Peter Pacifica” and most likely they’ll gush niceties. Why, he’s the spirit of Pacifica. The team’s unofficial mascot. The school’s No. 1 fan.

They politely look past, or no longer see, the developmental disabilities that led to the cruelty he endured when he attended this same school more than 30 years ago.

His name is Gary Freeman. When he walked through the front doors of Pacifica High for the first time in 1965, he had already grown numb to the name calling in elementary school and junior high. What he wasn’t prepared for was the physical abuse and the unique brand of humiliation that only insecure teens can deliver.

The cool kids picked on the nerds. The nerds picked on the kids in special education. And almost everybody picked on Freeman.

For a boy whose brain damage had made him markedly slow, “it was like being on a barbarian ship with pirates on it,” Freeman recalls, the hurt still evident in his voice.

Lunchtime meant eating alone in some faraway nook where others in the cafeteria wouldn’t point and laugh. On the bus, he never had to shove his backpack to the floor because no one wanted to sit next to him. Home wasn’t a haven either. Neighborhood bullies egged his car. They stuck lit firecrackers in the screen door. A dead rabbit was strung across the porch steps.

There was only one place where Freeman felt safe: the high school football field.

He was first drawn there on Friday nights to escape his neighborhood enemies. He stayed because the football players--stereotypically the very teens known for instigating harassment--offered Freeman a measure of kindness he found nowhere else.

The sophomore became the team’s water boy, helping out during games. Whatever task or errand begged to be completed, Freeman would take care of it. He would beam when players recognized him and waved hello on their way to class. He became a constant figure at pep rallies and games.

For the first time, he felt like he belonged and was needed.

When he graduated in 1969, Freeman had nowhere to go. College wasn’t an option, and his mother discouraged him from finding a job.

So the next fall, he went back to Pacifica. And when the Mariners’ 2000 football season gets underway Friday with a game against Woodbridge High at Bolsa Grande High, Freeman will be there too--for his 354th consecutive appearance at a Pacifica football game.

“Like the sun is going to rise,” says school Principal John Johnson, “he is going to be out there every game, cheering Pacifica on.”

Freeman almost died when he was in the third grade. First came the mumps and a high fever, then meningitis.

He learned to read, but the resulting brain damage severely blunted his skills in areas such as math and cognitive thinking. He also suffered from chronic lower back pain.

His classmates in high school sensed and fed off his weaknesses. He was pelted with everything from corn nuts to nails and screws.

Freeman recalls a classmate telling him to “shut up and sit down” when he got up to ask a teacher for help with a problem. Seeking a reprieve, Freeman turned to the teacher only to be told, “Yeah, shut up and sit down.”

“Many times I wanted to quit school,” he said. “But I didn’t want to let them push me around.”

In 1967, Freeman’s father took him to a Pacifica football game and asked the equipment manager if his son could help out. The manager said sure, so Freeman sat with the players on the bench and distributed water during timeouts.

There weren’t any water bottles back then, so players drank from a ladle Freeman dipped into a pail.

Freeman was surprised and delighted to find that the players, even the cool ones, didn’t mind chatting with him.

“It was one of the highlights of his high school time,” said Jim Perry, who attended Pacifica with Freeman. “It gave him a chance to feel a part of some things that he couldn’t be a part of as an athlete. . . . There was a part of him that came out [at the games] that you didn’t see in school.”

*

After his graduation two years later, Freeman went from water boy to unofficial mascot, flailing his arms through the air to spell P-A-C-I-F-I-C-A while fans followed his lead at Bolsa Grande High, where Pacifica plays its home games. He had found his place.

“I wanted to do something that I could never do when I was there,” Freeman said.

At first it seemed a silly novelty, said Raymond Wallace, a longtime counselor at Pacifica. “I thought it would run its course and it would die. But after years and years and years of this, you realize it’s not going anywhere.”

Invariably swathed in Pacifica blue and white, Freeman shuns the spotlight, rarely joining Pacifica’s designated Sea Dog mascots in their routines. But he remains an opportunist. Once, when a cheerleader dropped out with a leg injury, Freeman took her place.

By 1973, Freeman was at practice every day, standing behind the goal posts to catch field goals. Soon he was running wind sprints with the team. He even has his own mouthpiece.

*

While his legend grew, Freeman never talked at home about his feats. His brother Mitchell, 11 years younger, discovered his brother’s secret identity while playing football for Rancho Alamitos High, a Pacifica rival. Looking over at the opposing sideline, he was shocked to see Gary waving wildly toward the fans.

Eventually, Freeman started supporting the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams as well as the baseball and softball programs. He had become Peter Pacifica.

The nickname, which many people assume is his real name, came from members of the drill team. Freeman heard two girls whispering, and the next thing he knew, they were chanting, “Hey, Peter Pacifica!”

With the help of a score of English teachers, he is writing a book titled “The Spirit of Pacifica” that chronicles the history of the school.

“He bleeds Mariner blue,” said Bill Craven, Pacifica’s head football coach since 1976.

When a baseball, the last on hand, plunged into a nearby swimming pool during a game, Freeman retrieved it, pausing only to remove his socks, shoes and watch before diving in.

In return, Pacifica has given Freeman a lifetime pass to athletic events, pictures in the football and basketball programs and assorted autographed balls. He even has his own letterman’s jacket, with “Peter Pacifica” stitched in white letters on the back.

The Pacifica boys’ basketball team has even gone to see him in action. A recreational ice skater, Freeman was performing in a 1993 Christmas show when the players poured out of the team bus for a stop on their way to a tournament in Laguna Hills.

“It was very great,” Freeman said, glowing.

He still faces occasional insults, but most of Pacifica’s students, teachers, coaches and parents zealously protect him.

“Our fans will straighten out the other fans and say, ‘Hey, you don’t make fun of Peter Pacifica,’ ” said former Pacifica basketball Coach Bob Becker.

*

Freeman’s limitations are hard to pinpoint. He speaks in short, rapid-fire sentences and then looks away. Years of being harassed, of having his every word dissected and rejected, have resulted in acute insecurity that seems to dissolve only when he’s cheering before Pacifica fans.

He can drive, shuttling off in his 1987 Ford Tempo from his home in Garden Grove to work at the Ice Chalet in Costa Mesa every weekday, then returning home to his mother, with whom he and two of his three brothers still live. His father passed away long ago.

He has worked at Ice Chalet for the past 12 years, cleaning the bathrooms and mopping the black rubber floors that circle the rink--”the dirty work”--as he puts it.

Freeman can hold normal adult conversations with a striking amount of insight; go ahead, ask him anything about Notre Dame football. Yet even simple requests can be too much. His mind goes aflutter when his boss asks him to do more than one task at a time.

“What do they want, for me to split in half and one part go this way and the other part another?” he said, frustration in his voice.

He considers himself a lucky man.

“You see some of these other less-fortunate people who are almost vegetable-type. I thought I was going to be something like that. But I’m not.

“I think it’s a reminder that God cares for you. He could have made me a lot smarter, a lot more intelligent, but I think he did his best to save me. It shows that he likes me very much and lets others know to like that person right there, no matter what they have.”