Doc elevated everyone’s game
Pursuit of perfection, on and off the field, defined late Blue Jays great to the end
The first time Roy Halladay ever made eye contact with me in a major-league clubhouse, he made me feel like some sort of village idiot for the clichéd question I had asked. He was always making you think and be better.
It was in March of 1997, in the visitors clubhouse in Sarasota. Halladay had this way of making you second-guess the wisdom of a question to the point where it improved you as a columnist or reporter. Be prepared and, yes, you could make him smile.
Halladay was just a 19-year-old kid at his first major-league spring training, making his first appearance as a nonroster player with the Blue Jays in a Grapefruit League game. After two shutout innings, three reporters went down to the clubhouse to speak to the top prospect who’d just finished his first successful outing.
Not yet nicknamed Doc by hall of fame broadcaster Tom Cheek, the kid sat on a long bench in the middle of the room, head down, apparently deep in thought. He didn’t see the trio of reporters standing in front of him, waiting for him to snap out of his trance and offer up words of wisdom for an early column, or a voice clip from a pitcher who may or may not ever make it to the Show.
Eventually Roy looked up, seemingly startled that the media were allowed in the clubhouse while the game was still going on. I opened the questioning with an innocuous observation about how good he must feel after those two shutout innings in his first big-league chance. Had he yet been able to call his parents back home, or was that going to be the first order of business when he got back to Dunedin?
That’s the moment when he locked me in his steely gaze with his brow furrowed. No, he hadn’t called, and why would he? What kind of a dumb question was that? Clearly Halladay, even at that stage of his career, had bigger accomplishments in mind than just pitching two shutout innings against a springtraining lineup of White Sox prospects. In hindsight, it seemed he knew that this was just a stepping stone, the first rung on a ladder that would take him where he really wanted to go. It revealed who he was and what he wanted to be: the best at whatever he did.
Anyone who knew him well must believe that in his own mind Halladay, despite his accomplishments, never reached his lofty goals of perfection.
He was a great pitcher — with two Cy Youngs, a perfect game and a playoff no-hitter to his credit — but in his mind he was not ever as good as he wanted to make himself. Halladay was a great father, a great husband, the best in the majors at being prepared for the job of pitching: arriving at the park before anyone else, getting his work in all alone before others could report and distract him. But internally, he felt that surely there had been other athletes more prepared who had come before him — although nobody who knew him could name one.
Halladay never demanded that others follow his work ethic in order for him to accept them as peers, but clearly he was the Pied Piper of preparation, of work ethic, welcoming those who chose to fall in line and join his early-morning world.
Using this same life logic — Halladay as the inward-looking perfectionist, striving to be better — it becomes easier to understand how he died, and was later criticized by some outsiders for doing dangerous stunts before a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico last Tuesday. Much the same way Halladay could make a thrown baseball do things that other men couldn’t, he may have wanted to control his recently-acquired toy — a just-invented ICON A5 twoseater — in ways that no other man could.
He was not showing off to others or putting himself in danger with total disregard for his wife and two sons. If that were the case, he would have been flying off a crowded beach where more people could watch him perform. Instead he was out over the gulf, far from the madding crowd, testing his own limits. While chasing that perfection, he found his mortality.
The true measure of a man is in the influence he had on the lives of others.
Not only was Halladay an example of how to maximize one’s athletic ability, he made us feel we could all be more caring as men and women, as human beings.
In late March of 2009, down the right-field line outside the home clubhouse in Dunedin, Halladay had been tasked with hosting a Make-A-Wish family, including the parents of a stricken child who wanted to meet his hero. Halladay took the child around the batting cages and then into the clubhouse to meet the players.
It was an unusually hot spring day with no breeze as I stood against the fence watching Blue Jays practice, noticing the parents sweating and fretting. Suddenly the clubhouse door pushed open and Doc walked over to the mother and father, handing them two bottles of water. He let them know their child was having a great time and went back inside. Another measure of Halladay the man.
On Tuesday afternoon at the Phillies’ spring training ballpark here, the world will come closer to discovering the perceived measure of Roy Halladay as friends and family join in a celebration of life, and a memorial to the man and his influence on them, that will be televised at 3 p.m. on the Sportsnet family of networks.