(Courtesy of Perry Bergson, The Brandon Sun) Byron Penstock hasn’t set foot in Brandon in two decades but he carries a little bit of the Wheat Kings with him everywhere he goes.

The former Western Hockey League goaltender, now 42, appeared in 191 regular season games, 20 playoff games and once in a Memorial Cup tournament in a career that spanned five seasons from 1990 to 1995.

Since then, he has worked on Wall Street and with top investment firms in California, but none compared to the organizational culture he found playing junior hockey in Brandon.

“When I look back at the Wheat Kings, and I’ve followed their success since I left, when you turn your entire team over every four years and the best teams pick last in the draft, it’s very, very hard to win consistently,” he said. “So for a team like the Wheat Kings to have done that over 20-plus years, it really comes down to culture. Culture is the only competitive advantage that you have.

“I’ve been part of a lot of pretty impressive organizations since I left Brandon, but the Wheat Kings have the best culture of any organization I’ve been a part of. The values that they have of hard work, perseverance, humility, teamwork, that’s what I came away with more than anything. To the extent I’ve had success since I left Brandon, I think it’s mostly because of the values that were instilled in me playing for the Wheat Kings.”

Penstock, who grew up on a farm near Estevan, Sask., but also spent time in Regina, was listed by the Wheat Kings at age 14.

He first came to camp as a 15-year-old, a year he went on to spend at Notre Dame, but he was intent on earning a job a year later. Hockey in Estevan had prepared him for what lay ahead.

“I always played against older players,” he said. “My parents lived on the farm and had to travel quite a bit to play hockey and I had an older brother who was a year-and-a-half older and so they didn’t want to travel for two teams. I would always move up to play on my brother’s team. And my parents realized that by playing with older kids, I was getting better, so they wanted my brother to get better as well. So they moved him up an extra age group, and I was still with him, so I was playing two age groups ahead.

“I had always played against older kids and loved it. As a goalie, I wanted the shots as hard as they could come.”

Penstock was the last 16-year-old goalie to earn a full-time spot with the Wheat Kings, serving as Trevor Kidd’s understudy in the 1990-91 season until the all-star starter was traded near the deadline in January 1991.

“As a 16-year-old, I had a lot of confidence and really felt like I could succeed at any level,” he said. “But the truth is, I probably wasn’t as mature as I needed to be as a 16-year-old. We didn’t have the best team, and we lost a lot of games and I hadn’t played as well as I wanted to play. Emotionally, I probably wasn’t as developed as I needed to be to handle losing as many games as we did. It was a tough year. It was an overall great experience, but it was a challenge.”

Penstock went on to play 35 games that season on a team that went 19-51-2.

After his rookie season, he was dealt to the Tri-City Americans, where he spent one season, appearing in 33 games.

Brandon general manager Kelly McCrimmon re-acquired Penstock prior to his 18-year-old season and he would spend his final three years with the Wheat Kings.

“There are a lot of ups and downs as a hockey player and even more so as a goalie, so you really have to be able to keep your composure and not let your highs get too high and your lows get too low,” he said. “Looking back, I don’t think I ever did as good a job as I should have.”

Penstock always wanted his gear to be smaller and lighter so that he could move more quickly. Assistant coach Mark Johnston once caught him removing deer hair from his pads and made him put it back in, noting that he was facing forward Bobby House and his cannon-like shot in practice every day.

Penstock received a free-agent tryout with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks after his 19-year-old season. The Mighty Ducks, as they were still known until dropping the word Mighty in 2006, offered him a contract and wanted him to play his overage season in the American Hockey League but Penstock asked if he could defer the deal for a year.

After going to the Memorial Cup in 1994-95 with the Wheat Kings, he turned pro a season later.

“I wanted to be a professional hockey player. That was my dream and I was still pursuing the dream,” he said.

He played in some exhibition games with the Mighty Ducks, and then played with the Baltimore Bandits of the American Hockey League and Raleigh IceCaps of the ECHL.

But Penstock enjoyed school and learning and eventually made the hard decision to leave the game behind.

“There were a lot of things that I wanted to do and I didn’t want to be Al Bundy going through life in my forties talking about the big glove save I made when I was 19,” Penstock said of the fictional protagonist from the TV show “Married With Children.”

After a year at Brandon University, he was accepted into Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. Following graduation, he ended up doing mergers and acquisitions law on Wall Street in New York with the prestigious firm Skadden Arps.

He was there, two blocks from the World Trade Center, on Sept. 11, 2001 when the hijacked planes struck.

“I saw everything happen,” he said. “When the buildings fell, people ran into my building for shelter.”

Penstock calls it a traumatic, surreal experience that he’s not sure he has ever completely processed.

His career path led him out of New York a year later.

After stumbling upon investment guru Warren Buffett after reading his biography, Penstock became fascinated with investing and returned to school, this time at Harvard Business School. He graduated in 2004, and has worked in the investment management business with high-end firms in San Francisco ever since.

He’s engaged to actress Shelly Bhalla.

Penstock kept in close touch with McCrimmon for many years, and although they haven’t spoken as much lately, Penstock reached out to him this summer after McCrimmon was given his job in the NHL with the Las Vegas franchise.

“He was a father figure to me, no question,” Penstock said of McCrimmon. “He wrote my recommendation letter to get into Harvard Business School, he gave me a lot of career advice along the way. He’s one of the most influential people who’s ever been in my life.”

Penstock said it’s a testament to the organization that not only do the Wheat Kings produce NHL players, but those who don’t make the big time never seem to have high-profile problems with the law or drugs and alcohol.

He looks back at his Wheat King days fondly.

“Everyone always told me when I played that those are the best years of your life and when you look back you realize that they were,” he said. “To be able to play at such a high level of competitive hockey with such great people and have so many good times along the way, there’s just nothing like it … To be able to wake up every day and do what you love with 20 guys who are all your best friends, there’s nothing like it in life.”