Hayhurst's superhero story is a little different
When it comes to childhood heroes, Dirk Hayhurst has a different story ... as you might expect.
Hayhurst is a major-league iconoclast whose pitching performance and personal philosophy have left him happily on the fringe of baseball's insular culture. The Jays reliever is starting a long rehabilitation from shoulder surgery just as his first book, The Bullpen Gospels, is drawing rave reviews.
He says he never found the baseball lifestyle particularly appealing, even as a child. And when his athletic ability brought him to professional baseball, Hayhurst began an agonizing journey that led to a revelation: his job does not define his identity. His book, by turns dark, comical and raw, is a candid chronicle of that journey.
"Most of my life," Hayhurst says, "I didn't agree with what everybody else thought."
And as he writes in his book: "Baseball is such a small thing, comparatively speaking."
So no, he had no sports heroes as a boy, and has none to this day. Well, perhaps one -- a former teammate whom Hayhurst describes as "close to a superhero." And a superhero was exactly the role Hayhurst aspired to as a youngster in Canton, Ohio.
"When I was a kid I played sports because my dad wanted me to play sports," he said during an interview at the Jays training camp in Florida. "I liked to pitch, but I never really thought the lifestyle was that fascinating. I was too busy reading comic books and playing with my Transformers toys. I always wanted to be like a superhero."
He wanted to do "incredible" things, he said, to nurture his imagination and exploit his creativity. The cultural norms of sport generally contradicted that world view, he found.
"The thing I think is most interesting about superheroes or supervillains is they were all so unique for who they were," he said. "They were all individuals. I think in sports, everybody wanted to be just like somebody else."
Well into his enlightenment at 29, little has changed for Hayhurst, except that his baseball success, modest as it is, has given him permission to express his unconventional views without being labelled a pariah. Along the way, a few teammates have even found his off-beat ways endearing. Ditto for his legion of followers on Twitter.
"When you get here [to the big leagues], you've afforded yourself the right to be a little unique," he said with a wry grin.
Which brings us to the superhero Hayhurst found in his midst last year, when he pitched well in 15 games for Toronto. Sitting several lockers away in the clubhouse was the ace of the staff, who filled his work day with, well, work. Roy Halladay was hardly anti-social, but he rarely found time for the lighthearted communion common to clubhouse camaraderie.
"If you look at Roy Halladay, here's a guy who's not like anybody else," Hayhurst said. "He's very unique unto himself. He's as close to a superhero as anyone I've ever seen in sports, with his work ethic and his dedication. He isn't like everybody else, and no one's going to contest him because he's different. Look at his ability to separate himself from the social norm to focus on what he does. It's almost superhuman, his ability to break free of all the norms in this culture ...
"I break the norm in a different way. I'll never have his talent but I respect his ability to be himself. It helps that he's the best pitcher in baseball. I am not, however, but I still respect that individuality and that commitment to following his own drum. It obviously works for him. And it's worked for me too - just differently.
"Superheroes don't conform, I guess."
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/sports/story.html?id=2731776#ixzz0jo2R91Ys
.jpg)
Posts
