National Post: Q&A: Blue Jays pitcher Dirk Hayhurst

Well…this certainly trumps having Chlorophyll Kid as a hero.

So you didn’t have heroes who were alive and playing sports? Your heroes were fictional?

...Now later on in life, when we’ve all matured, it’s a lot more accepting. I was always competitive, and I wanted to be outstanding and be an individual. I went through that passage of manhood. But when you get here [in the major leagues], you’ve afforded yourself the right to be a little unique. If you look at Roy Halladay, for example, here’s a guy who’s not like anybody else. 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.

When you’re young and you idolize people on TV, you don’t idolize who they are. You don’t know them. You idolize an image or an ideal of something that’s been sold to you by the media. It’s an industry; we’re an entertainment industry. But then when you’re older and you get here, you tend to buy into the lifestyle. We’ve got to spend money on expensive stuff, we’ve got to buy the best cars. It’s ridiculous to me. But I am not the norm. I think differently about that stuff.

So when you see these individuals that break free of the norm and excel on a stage, to me that is what I always idolized when I was a kid. If I wouldn’t have gotten here, I never would have seen it in person. I guess that is what I’ve always kind of wanted to emulate