Spring training 2006, Dunedin, Fla. In late February, I approached Roy Halladay with trepidation. He was, after all, a towering, intimidating presence, poker-faced, constantly on the move, as though he had just finished a job and had another urgently waiting.

Which, of course, he did.

Even when he paused at his locker in the Blue Jays’ clubhouse that day, I felt like I was interrupting something important. But I waded in.

He did not look at me.

Roy, I said, I’m interested in doing a story on your workout routine. Could we set up an interview in the next day or two?

He turned, almost warily.

“Sure,” he said. “Tomorrow morning. After I finish working out.”

Okay, I said. What time?

“Seven,” he replied.

You finish at seven?

“I finish between 6:30 and seven,” he said. “Seven’s good.”

The next morning – after I persuaded a security guard that I really did have an interview with Roy Halladay at sunup – Halladay became a different person from the stoic I’d watched from a distance. He patiently talked me through each day of his regimen, explaining what he did and why.

His workout program was legendary. Each spring, a new teammate would vow to run and lift alongside the man they called Doc. That spring, it was fellow pitcher A.J. Burnett. He lasted three days.

No one could keep up.

But everyone was welcome to try, Halladay told me.

“They can go and do exactly what I’m doing,” he said.

Except they couldn’t.

I asked if he ever were tempted to take a day off.

“Not yet,” he said. “If I were just coming in to work out, it might be different. But when you’re preparing for something important, then there’s more excitement in doing it. If I was retired and had to get up in the morning and go work out, I don’t know how much I’d look forward to it. When you’re preparing yourself for something, that’s when it’s fun.”

===

Doc Halladay, dead at 40?

In the water off the Gulf Coast of Florida?

In that sleek amphibious aircraft – the Icon A5 – that he long coveted, then purchased so recently and raved about on Twitter?

I have dreamed about owning a A5 since I retired! Real life is better then my dreams!! Thx Kirk & everyone @ICONAircraft pic.twitter.com/wkk6TtjAY4 — Roy Halladay (@RoyHalladay) October 13, 2017

It doesn’t seem real.

As I write this, that knot in my stomach just won’t go away. I know that scores of former teammates, hundreds of industry folks and millions of fans share that forlorn feeling today.

So a lot of this dispatch is personal. I covered most of Halladay’s big-league career. I watched him zoom to the top in 1998, then sink and then swim again. I wrote about his Groundhog Day lament in 2008 – he was great but the Jays refused to rise to meet his hopes – and I covered his first post-season game in Philadelphia, which happened to be a no-hitter.

And after his body finally failed him as a Phillie in 2013, I took pleasure in his Twitter feed, which chronicled the happy turning of a page.

He fished with old friends. He coached his kids. He flew his plane. He looked relaxed and happy, not at all the way he looked in the clubhouse when his intensity filled up the room and intimidated even his teammates.

Roy Halladay epitomized the hope of Blue Jays fans in the first decade of this century. Then he left because he burned to pitch for a winner, and became beloved in Philadelphia too.

Jays’ fans picked their tickets for his start days. Phillies fans did too, but in Philadelphia, at last he had a supporting cast.

That, in part, is why an avalanche of shock and sorrow saturated social media on Tuesday.

#RIP my friend. One of the toughest competitor in the game. Great teammate #classact https://t.co/uLQpvZ89bJ — Carlos Delgado (@carlosdelgado21) November 8, 2017

When people ask me if I could re-live any moment in baseball-1 that I always say would be to watch Doc pitch again! Today my heart goes out to Brandy and the boys. He was a great husband, father, friend and teammate. Such a special man! You will be forever missed! #RoyHalladay — Cole Hamels (@ColeHamels) November 8, 2017

The best I've ever been around. Incredible athlete and more importantly, an incredible man. My… https://t.co/4ogBU5WthS — AJ Burnett (@wudeydo34) November 7, 2017

Not only because Doc was one helluva pitcher. But also because Doc, in the baseball firmament, was a unique human being.

Amazingly gifted. Incredibly hard-working. Professional to the core. Humble. Universally respected.

A family man who maybe was having more fun in retirement, coaching his kids and flying his new airplane, than he did when he mesmerized Blue Jays fans over a decade-plus of pitching magnificence.

I love the Players & Parents of our Florida Burn! They keep proving why they’re the best team on the field but more important the classiest! pic.twitter.com/4agAeCO4wY — Roy Halladay (@RoyHalladay) November 6, 2017

Most of us in the reporting business generally adhere to the impartiality principle. Don’t get too close, lest you become co-opted.

Doc would not let you get too close. He was always too busy.

Although we did share a cab from La Guardia to a New York hotel one day in a year I can’t remember. We wound up on the same flight, Halladay flying in alone, following the team after a day off.

En route to the city, he called his wife. He spoke softly for a minute or two. I tried not to listen.

At the end, he told her he loved her.

I offered to split the fare with a man making $10 million. He waved me off.

At the hotel, our rooms were not ready. Halladay did not raise his voice, but he turned on that glare. They quickly found a room.

My glare did not produce the same effect.

I was driving on Tuesday afternoon when the news bulletin came on CBC Radio about a small-plane crash in Florida – why did the CBC care about a plane crash in Florida? – and immediately I thought about Halladay and that new plane that brought him such joy, and I said to myself, no.

Then the sheriff came on and said yes.

As the memories rushed forth, I thought of Roy Halladay, dying doing what he loved, and in the process, leaving those he loved most, his wife and two sons. And the knot started to form.

With all the strife in the world today, it is always the personal that hits hardest. For the Blue Jays family, and Blue Jays fans, and yes, a few writers who have been around for a while, this was personal.

Roy Halladay (middle) poses for a photograph with his sons Braden (left) and Ryan during Blue Jays batting practice. Photo credit: Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty Images

===

I remembered watching Halladay’s second start in the majors, those 8 2/3 sensational innings on Sept. 27, 1998. With two outs in the ninth and the Jays up 2-0, only one Detroit batter – Tony Clark – had reached base, on an error.

Statement of #MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark on the passing of Roy Halladay. pic.twitter.com/nnSnjEO7CG — #MLBPA (@MLB_PLAYERS) November 7, 2017

Then, with an 0-2 count, pinch-hitter Bobby Higginson hit a home run.

Halladay retired future teammate Frank Catalanotto for the final out.

Doc was 21. A star was born, or so it seemed.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2000. At the end of July, Halladay’s 10.64 ERA was the worst in the majors. The Jays sent him to the minors.

To start 2001, they sent him all the way back to class A Dunedin and brought in veteran pitching coach Mel Queen to put Halladay through a virtual boot camp.

New delivery. New grips for his pitches. New mentality.

Two years later, Halladay won the Cy Young Award.

“There’s no one I made that drastic a change to and verbally abused the way I did Doc,” Queen told me on the day his protege was honoured.

“There aren’t many people that would have gone through what I put him through. I had to make him understand that he was very unintelligent about baseball. He had no idea about the game.”

Gradually, the Jays had moved Halladay up the minor-league ladder in 2001. I went to Syracuse to cover one of his starts. He was chastened but confident and itching to get back. When he did, he logged a 3.16 ERA over 17 games with the Jays.

It was a remarkable transformation, from nascent star to the worst starter in the game to a remodelled pitcher who understood pitching better than ever and had become a devout disciple of sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman. Through the rest of his career, Halladay carried a dog-eared copy of Dorfman’s book, The Mental ABC’s of Pitching, everywhere he went during the baseball season.

“I think the combination of Mel being so hard on me and Harvey there to help me digest what I was being told really helped me grow up … It changed me, I think, as a person,” Halladay said last February after the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame announced his induction. “I felt like it was really a growing-up point in my life, and obviously for my career it turned things 180 degrees.”

Dorfman died in 2011. Two years later, Halladay got off to a rocky start with the Phillies, the team that had finally allowed him to reach the post-season. He needed Dorfman’s counsel, and found it in the emails he had kept during the waning years of Dorfman’s life.

“There’s a lot of information there,” Halladay told Todd Zolecki of MLB.com. “But I think, obviously, you’re going to miss talking to him. I’m going to stick to the stuff he left behind, I think, as much as possible.”

The stuff Dorfman left behind was not enough. Halladay’s fine-tuned body was failing him. It was the last season of his glorious career.

===

I wasn’t working on the last Saturday of the 2003 season, but I bought a ticket along the first-base line at the Rogers Centre. Doc was pitching. He had a chance to win his 22nd game. Four other pitchers also had 21.

It was a grind. He allowed Cleveland eight hits and four runs. But he left the potential tying run on base in the ninth, and after 122 pitches, he emerged a 5-4 winner.

His teammates mobbed him. To that point, it was the only time I had ever seen him smile on a baseball field. That image is embedded in my memory.

Halladay won his first Cy Young after that season (22-7, 3.25 ERA, 8.1 bWAR), and soldiered on for another six years, the lone beacon of light on a Blue Jays’ team that annually embodied mediocrity.

Finally, in 2008, his frustration seeped out.

It was media day at the all-star game in New York. Along with his teammates, Halladay sat at his assigned cubicle and took questions. His answers said he was sick and tired of Blue Jays’ management treading water and seemingly being satisfied with that.

“We sit down every spring training and we talk about the same things and it’s almost like a little bit of Groundhog Day. That definitely gets frustrating,” he said.

“You want to talk about why we’re succeeding, what we’ve done to help us get to the point of where we’re at and we just haven’t done that. It’s hard to keep talking about the same thing.”

Two years remained on his contract. But on that day, in Yankee Stadium, everything changed for Roy Halladay. He had accomplished all he could in Toronto. He was tired of trying to drag his team out of third place. He yearned to play for a winner.

And when regime change finally happened at the end of the 2009 season – J.P. Ricciardi gone, Alex Anthopoulos crowned – the new general manager knew what he must do.

===

In his first trade, Anthopoulos honoured Halladay’s wish – call it a demand if you will – and sent him to the destination he coveted: Philadelphia. The Phillies had finished first three years in a row and had won – and lost – a World Series.

After he left Toronto, he told the city how he felt.

Here's Roy Halladay's thank-you letter in @TheTorontoSun to fans in T.O. following his departure from the Blue Jays. Dec. 22, 2009. #RIPDoc pic.twitter.com/tS9KvHHOJ7 — Toronto Sun (@TheTorontoSun) November 7, 2017

In his first year with the Phillies, Halladay pitched a perfect game and went 21-10 with a 2.44 ERA and won his second Cy Young Award.

And then, in the opening game of the National League Division Series, he made more history.

I was lucky to be there. After the Phillies took an early lead, tension gradually engulfed the 46,411 fans at Citizens Bank Park. Doc was dealing.

As the game progressed, I was certain someone would shank a ball over an infielder’s head or beat out a dribbler down the third-base line or, more likely, whack a mistake pitch on a rope into the outfield.

That’s what usually happens when a pitcher has a no-hitter going, right?

Instead, after a walk in the fifth inning, we got perfection, ending with this, perhaps the most difficult play of the game:

1 of the GREATEST Moments in Phillies History Roy Halladay’s Playoff No Hitter in 2010!#RoyHalladay #RIP #Philliespic.twitter.com/hIXbwa1GHb — Jeff Skversky 6abc (@JeffSkversky) November 7, 2017

In his post-game press conference, Halladay behaved as usual, deflecting the credit to his teammates. No one deserved to make that final play more than his catcher, “Chooch” Ruiz, he said.

And his legendary concentration on his team’s goal – a fixation throughout his career, through all those lean Toronto years – kept him grounded against the Cincinnati Reds, he said.

“The best part about it is when you’re out there, your only job is to help your team try to win the game,” he said. “And if you can keep that focus off of yourself, on the team, trying to help, it makes your job a lot easier.”

Most important, he said, was that his wife and two sons were in the house.

“You want to share things like this with family and friends,” he said. “My family’s here, and I feel like my friends are on the team, so it makes it special.”

On Tuesday, as Roy Halladay soared and then crashed, his family and friends and countless fans lost someone very special indeed.

An extraordinary pitcher. A most remarkable man.

What do clouds feel like? I didn’t know either until I got my new Icon A5! I’m getting bruises on my arms from constantly pinching myself! pic.twitter.com/BaObEUj3Xo — Roy Halladay (@RoyHalladay) October 13, 2017

First official day of summer break for my son! What a day! Icon A5 we spent 5hrs 3.2 flying, 1.8 chill'n, 100% buds! pic.twitter.com/DCclvMMvhs — Roy Halladay (@RoyHalladay) May 19, 2017

Take that Drake!! No photo shop either!! pic.twitter.com/LKtK4DuBDC — Roy Halladay (@RoyHalladay) August 14, 2016

Statement from the Blue Jays organization on the tragic passing of Roy Halladay: pic.twitter.com/Ih8D0RQE9p — Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) November 7, 2017

I've covered a lot of athletes. I've never covered anyone who was as respected by his teammates and as revered by fans as Roy Halladay was. — Dan Shulman (@DShulman_ESPN) November 7, 2017

Just heard the tragic news about @RoyHalladay and I'm speechless. One of the best pitchers I've ever seen play. Very sad day for our game. — Jon Lester (@JLester34) November 7, 2017

In shock over the terrible news about Roy Halladay… a pitcher I grew up admiring & rooting for. Praying for his family & friends. #RIPDoc — Mike Trout (@MikeTrout) November 7, 2017

We are saddened by the tragic news that Roy Halladay, 2-time Cy Young Award winner & 8-time All-Star, has died in a plane crash. He was 40. pic.twitter.com/SOFv3bOLyt — MLB (@MLB) November 7, 2017

(Top photo credit: Andy Lyons/Getty Images)