34 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {punchline} Given these hard-wired passions, it’s easy for Gary to reconcile why he dropped out of law school after a year. “I just didn’t love it,” he reflects, which prompted him to hightail it out West. “I was California dreaming,” he adds. “And I thought, ‘There’s too many lawyers in the world.’” As he pursued film production work and acting gigs—look for Gary in Porsche, Sony and John Deere commercials—he also took courses at City College of San Francisco so he could play baseball. Galvanized by running the bases again, he bought a lathe on Craigslist and turned his first bat. “The first time I hit a ball, the bat blew up into a bunch of pieces that went flying out over the field,” he admits, but Gary kept iterating and carving away. Meanwhile, his brother Mark (now a Birdman partner) was simultaneously playing baseball at Savannah College of Art and Design. In what turned out to be a lifealtering act, he sent Gary a “goofy drawing” he had made for a project. “He said it was an 1800s ball player head on a bird—it was just silly,” Gary recounts. Knowing his brother’s tendency to get “all up in his head,” Gary put the drawing on a sticker, slapped it on to one of his handmade bats and shipped it to Mark. “Baseball’s so cerebral and mental and you think too much,” he explains. “So this was like, ‘Look at your stupid doodle and stop being so stressed.’” Handmade wood bat + silly logo = origin of Birdman Bats “That was the first bat,” Gary affirms, continuing, “And then
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