George Dennehy was nervous as he stepped on the turf at Camden Yards.

He was invited to play the national anthem for the 18,630 fans attending an Orioles game on a recent June night. He had played at similar-size venues and sung the anthem before, but he felt pressure.

Nonetheless, Dennehy, who was born with bilateral upper limb deficiency — meaning he has no arms — sat and began to play.

His Taylor GS Mini guitar laid face-up on a foam pad. The crowd watched with their hands on their hearts as he strummed with a pick clenched between his toes and belted out the tune. He was surprised when the stadium shouted “O” at the end of the song. After the crowd cheered, he waved to them with his right foot.

He wasn’t a huge fan of the Orioles before his performance, he admitted in an interview, but now he has a soft spot for the team. “There’s that love for it now, you know. So, I’ll watch Orioles games when they’re on and cheer for them, for sure,” he said.

George Dennehy, known on social media as “ThatArmlessGuy,” was invited to play after an Orioles employee saw a video of him on social media, he said. He has been a musician since he was a child and now travels the country sharing his story of perseverance with businesses, religious congregations and schools.

The journey began in Romania

Born in Romania, the future guitarist spent the first two years of his life in an orphanage until he was adopted by Mike and Sharon Dennehy. When the American couple met him, he was just over 2 years old and weighed only nine pounds.

“We were coming back from church one day, and my wife said we ought to really try to do something that’s a little more meaningful than just check all the boxes and have the little white picket fence,” Mike Dennehy said.

So they decided to adopt a child no one else in the world would and, after seeing George Dennehy’s picture on the back of an adoption agency’s newsletter, they decided he was the one. The baby born without arms joined the Dennehys in Connecticut.

For the first few years of his schooling, George Dennehy went to public school, but then he switched to a mixture of home and private schooling.

He has been interested in music since he was a kid. His father remembers him coming home from watching “The Lord of the Rings” and re-creating the theme music on their baby grand piano.

When he was old enough, his family asked a local cello teacher, who taught the three eldest Dennehy children, if she could teach the fourth.

At first, the teacher, Jennifer Petry, did not give the family an answer. But, after a week, she came back and played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with her feet.

“She admitted that she wanted to wait to give an answer until she could just see if it was possible,” George Dennehy recalled. Now that she realized it was, she took on George as a student and his musical journey began.

Finding himself

When he was in seventh grade, he and his family moved to Richmond, Virginia, and he started going to public school. He described it as a culture shock because he was bullied and felt he did not fit in.

“I really walked through a lot of sadness and anger and depression, and just feeling like I didn’t matter, and feeling like I would never amount to be anything,” he said.

He says music played a part in keeping him going, but the real shift came when he decided to focus on what he can control. “I do have gifts, and I do have talents,” he said. “And not everybody in the world can play the cello with their feet, I don’t think.”

In high school, Dennehy decided to teach himself how to play guitar. He did that because, in short, “the cello isn’t always cool as a teenager,” he said.

He continued playing and practicing guitar throughout high school and, just after he graduated, he played the Goo Goo Dolls’ song “Iris” at a local festival. Someone in the audience recorded the performance, posted it on YouTube and it went viral — viral enough for the Goo Goo Dolls to see it.

The band found the video inspirational, he said, and they invited him in 2012 to play at Musikfest in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And he did.

“I was just two months freshly graduated from high school, and then next thing I know, I’m on stage with the Goo Goo Dolls in front of 15,000 people,” he said.

He played three songs before the band came on and they played “Iris” together as an encore.

‘My story is everybody’s story’

That performance sparked his career. Within days, he had 50 news organizations, churches, schools and businesses asking him to perform for them.

“All these opportunities began to just show up out of nowhere, and I remember just feeling like this could be something,” he said.

So he started performing and hasn’t stopped since. Along the way, he added motivational speaking to his repertoire and started writing his own music. He has one album and five singles.

In 2017, he spoke at TEDx Youth@RVA, an independently organized TED talk in Richmond, Virginia.

Now this is his full-time job. In his career, he has performed all over the United States and in Canada and Romania.

Throughout the years, he also worked as a worship director at churches and a spokesperson for Holt International, a nonprofit that supports impoverished families and children in orphanages.

The motivational speaker lives with his wife and two children in Richmond. He says he wants to keep doing what he’s doing and maybe write a book about his life.

“My story is everybody’s story, and I’m just one person who’s gone through it,” he said. “And it’s an honor to be able to share it.”