Honolulu man will revisit title season
By Curtis Murayama
Advertiser Sports Editor
Honolulu car dealer Gary Wassel, 60, has been to five Super Bowls and played in pro-am golf events with Ernie Els and Fred Couples.
Kyle Sackowski • The Honolulu Advertiser
But ask him of his fondest sports memory and there's no contest: It's being a member of the 1954 PONY baseball team from Monongahela (Pa.) that won the World Series.
Honolulu car dealer Gary Wassel, a member of the 1954 PONY World Series championship team, keeps the memories alive in a display case at home.
"Every time I think of this little town winning the national championship I get chicken skin. This is a memory that lasted forever," said Wassel, who, in 1954, was a 13-year-old first baseman.
Wassel will revisit his past this month when he reunites with four teammates of the '54 team in Washington, Pa.
The celebration is part of the 50th anniversary of PONY League baseball. (PONY is an acronym for Protect Our Nation's Youth; originally, it was called Protect Our Neighbor's Youth.)
PONY will honor the first four World Series champions during the same week of the PONY World Series, which starts Saturday.
The opening banquet, at which former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda is the featured speaker, will be tomorrow. The 1953 and 1954 teams will be honored on the field Monday.
"I'm looking forward to it," said Wassel. "It's going to be a treat. People ask me why I travel so much. I tell them I'm making a memory. I like making memories and this is going to make a memory for a long time."
Wassel, who has lived here since 1968 and is now president of Jardine Hawai'i Motor Holdings (dealers for Mercedes Benz, Jaguar and Porsche), was a backup first baseman on the championship team.
He said when teams reached the playoffs back then, first- and third-base coaches had to be players.
"I was the third-base coach," he said. "This was my first managerial position ... in every game we played no one ever got thrown out."
The 1954 series also featured teams from Chicago, San Antonio and Beverly Hills.
"This was a national title (game), not some rinky-dink section," he said. "I don't think anybody thought we could win it and we weren't smart enough to think we could lose."
Wassel was 5 feet 3 and 105 pounds then.
Today, he's 6 feet and "has a manly physique ... that means that he enjoys eating," said his wife, Pat.
Actually, it was Pat who found out about the reunion.
She was pondering what to get her husband for his 60th birthday. She noticed his PONY memorabilia and thought, "maybe I'll call the PONY people to find out if they had any memorabilia. They said they didn't but said they were having a 50th anniversary in August."
Said Tom O'Connor, the event coordinator: "Pat Wassel was the driving force behind locating many of the addresses for the Monongahela team . . . (she) located 12 of (the) 15 (players from that team)."
O'Connor said four will be making the trip.
"I don't think I seen any of these guys ... it's gotta be 40 years," said Wassel, who is taking Pat and is paying for the trip. "They might not recognize me. (I went) from 5-foot-3, 105 pounds to 6 feet and 243."
