DOC FOUGHT DEMONS HE COULDN’T DEFEAT
New book reveals how former Jays ace suffered from relentless drive to be the best
There were tears as Brandy Halladay stood on the podium on a blistering hot July afternoon in Cooperstown, N.Y., no doubt an emotional mix of joy and sadness.
There she was, surrounded by dozens of past inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the sport’s shrine that her late husband Roy was officially being inducted into as part of the class of 2019.
In her heart, Brandy knew how much the moment would have meant to the former member of the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies, how being there on a stage with the giants of the game would have been a crowning validation to the obsession that was his life’s work.
At the same time, Halladay was still living with the raw consequences of her husband’s tragic death and the aftermath of a life that was as complicated as it was accomplished.
In the compelling soon to be released book Doc: The Life of Roy Halladay, Brandy is front and centre as author Todd Zolecki dives into the brilliance of the pitcher’s career and the tragedy that ended his life in a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico on Nov. 7, 2017.
Helped by Brandy’s candour, Zolecki leads readers through compassionate journey through Doc’s highs and lows and the personality strengths and flaws that led him to the top of the game and a troubled retirement.
“He couldn’t ever just stop and appreciate where he was and what he had,” Brandy Halladay tells Zolecki in the book. “Roy, his whole life was about work, so when he wasn’t working he was lost. He was so lost. Then the depression came.”
Later, Brandy laments that an addiction to painkillers troubled Halladay both late in his career with the Phillies and in retirement, including two separate trips to rehab facilities.
“It broke my heart to see him like that,” Brandy said. “It was endless, the things we wanted to do and then he would hurt. And all of a sudden he’s spending all of his time trying to make himself feel better. He fought to live a healthy, functional life but it wasn’t easy.”
As biographies go, the book hits the important moments of what is a fascinating story of an athlete blessed with exceptional talent. Zolecki’s work is meticulous in detail and always with an eye to what drove Doc to the point of extremes and compulsion.
Jays fans who lived through the lows of Halladay’s heyday when he was a rare star on a struggling team will recall some of the details of his all-star years. Zolecki also takes readers from Doc’s childhood days when his father helped fuel the obsessive personality, to draft day and beyond.
In the opening chapter entitled Doctober, Halladay’s playoff no-hitter with the Phillies is chronicled in detail, including the joy Doc displayed in a rare instance in which he let his guard down in public.
The Toronto chapters are well documented, from the time he was drafted by the team in the first round (17th overall) of the 1995 amateur draft, to his early struggles and on to the subsequent demotion and complete rebuild of his pitching mechanics that ultimately set the groundwork for his mental and physical brilliance that would follow.
In detail from former teammates, we learn of the type of competitor Halladay became and how that played out in the clubhouse and on the diamond.
“I think the first time I ever went out there (to the mound), he looked at me and said ‘What the ( bleep) are you doing out here,’ ” former Jays catcher Gregg Zaun told the author.
Through it all, Zolecki artfully and respectfully paints the picture of an athlete so driven that it was to the point of obsession. The competitiveness bubbled to the surface in so many ways, including his regular runs by the Toronto waterfront where Jays strength and conditioning coach Donovan Santas accompanied him.
Santas recalled the times when the two would be out for a run outside of the Rogers Centre when a casual runner would pass them and, in Santas’ words, “all hell broke loose. He would run them down and pass them. He would not let them beat him.”
Slavery to his routine would later contribute to his self-destruction, when later in Halladay’s career, injuries would lead to his body breaking down and him taking desperate, medicinal measures to fix it.
“By 2013 her was hooked on (pain killers),” Zolecki writes. “The medications became part of his routine, like a run along Lake Ontario.”
Those issues, sadly, would never end.
When a National Transportation Safety Board report last month detailed the drugs in his system at the time of his death — amphetamine levels about 10 times therapeutic levels, antidepressants and morphine — Brandy Halladay released a statement through the Phillies asking for the public to respect the family’s wishes for Roy to rest in peace.
In interviews with Zolecki, she eloquently and forthrightly speaks of the challenges the Halladays and their two sons were facing as he adapted to life, post MLB. He was getting gratification from some work as a mental coach with the Phillies, for example, and from coaching eldest son
Braden’s baseball team in the Clearwater, Fla. area.
And then there was the love of airplanes, an infatuation passed down from his father, Big Roy.
As much as it was an outlet for Doc, Brandy said she didn’t want him to fly until he had his other issues under control.
“Until I knew he was OK, I just didn’t want him doing it,” Halladay says in the book. “He just needed to get everything else under control and focus on some other things. The last thing we needed to do was spend more money and have more hobbies.”
“We would talk about it all the time. It was an unnecessary risk.”
Roy Halladay’s own words addressed the obsessive personality and the mental strain and self doubt he created. To those on the outside, he may have appeared as a hyper-driven athlete determined to be the best and to get there by outworking everyone else.
“The easiest thing for me is to do the physical work,” Halladay is quoted as saying. “The weightlifting, the conditioning — for me, that’s the easiest part of baseball. For me, the hard part is controlling my emotions, controlling my thoughts between games. Some of the things you put in your own head are ridiculous.
“That’s my problem, all those demons.”
It would appear that the demons never truly left. Brandy was adamant that his death was not by suicide, but acknowledged Roy was taking anti depressants on top of pain medication.
“He struggled a lot with depression,” Brandy Halladay tells Zolecki in the Triumph Books production. “He struggled a lot with anxiety. Social anxiety. He never felt like he was good enough or funny enough or liked. He was a sad spirit, but I don’t want that to overshadow all the great times.”
With a perfect game, a playoff no-hitter, two Cy Young Awards and eight trips to the All-Star Game, Halladay was a natural first-ballot inductee to Cooperstown. But as with so much of his life, that too came at a cost, a reality hammered home in the thorough detail of Zolecki in his fair and balanced retrospective of the Hall of Fame pitcher.
“I feel like the baseball world got the best of him,” Brandy Halladay said in the closing chapters. “But I feel like there was enough of him left for us, too.” rlongley@postmedia.com