However, it might have been very different. In terms of football he began as a half-back and a good one, in 1895 capped at junior level as such, whilst playing for local junior club, the Greenock Volunteers and with regard to profession at seventeen he was a Law Clerk. But in 1897, he now twenty and with the town-club, Morton, the former was to change and the latter as a result also. The story is that the team's goalkeeper joined the Army and Harry stepped back to fill his place with such success that he never stepped forward again in a senior 'keeping career that would take in fourteen seasons, include the best part of four hundred club appearances for Morton itself, Hearts, Hibernian, Rangers and Kilmarnock, winning a League and Cup, and from 1900 to 1908 being awarded thirteen caps.  

So what did Rennie bring to goalkeeping? In essence he was, perhaps as a legacy of his half-back days, the first 'keeper/sweeper, known to advance well up his half as attacks took place. Then in defence he was the first to mark his area for position and also to study the opposition attack, all of which he put in 1904 book, The Art of Good Goalkeeping, and used in coaching some of those who followed in his footsteps after his retirement in 1911, notably in the 1940s Jimmy Cowan, born in Paisley and but dying in Greenock  too.

And it is same Paisley/Greenock combination, in fact the Renfrewshire triangle formed by the two and Renfrew itself that provides the backcloth to Harry Rennie's life after football. When he passed away, although it was in the town of his birth, he did not stay there at the time but in Renfrew. And in the forty years since he had last stood between the uprights he had also lived in Gourock. Indeed, after football he had played cricket for Greenock but golf for its neighbour. Moreover, in that same interim he had been recorded not just as an Engineer but also as a Joiner and owned business properties in Paisley, Greenock and Renfrew. In 1915 it was the first of the locations. By 1940 and retirement age it was all three and constituted, in addition to his others trades, a small but continuing and expanding property business, which probably saw him through to his death at the age of eighty.