How Blue Jays studio host Jamie Campbell found peace — in his work, his life and his cancer diagnosis

When Jamie Campbell was a kid there were two things he was really scared of: that his parents would lose their jobs, or that one of them might die. His father was a travelling shoe salesman and his mother worked at a popular women’s clothing store, and they weren’t the moneyed Oakville set but things were OK. They were OK.

But Campbell knew one kid whose father had lost his job and it threw the family into disarray, and there was a kid on his minor hockey team whose father died, just died. And for some reason those things sunk into Campbell’s bones: watching his father load up the car with shoe samples, watching his mom go to work, he worried. It was not a comfortable fear to carry around.

On this day all these years later, Campbell, 56, is dealing with some side effects of his medication for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLC, which are manageable: he gets diarrhea, or a head tension as if his muscles are trying to squeeze against his skull, which really manifests in his jawbone. But he’s lucky, he knows that. He wants people to know that.

“It’s like anything else in the TV business,” says Campbell, the studio host of Blue Jays broadcasts on Sportsnet since 2010. “You sometimes just gotta fake like everything’s perfect.”

On the air, Campbell is eminently comfortable: a familiar face almost every night for months on end. He is one of three Day 1 Sportsnet employees left in the building, along with Brad Fay and Rob Faulds.

“Just a different dude,” says Fay, one of Campbell’s best friends. “Just very quiet and really, really serious, more than any of us, about the business.

“I just felt like he was one of these guys that had a bigger picture of a lot of things when I first met him.”

Campbell was the youngest of three children — the only unplanned child, he learned — and from an early age he avoided conflict and chased obsessions, and especially sports. In high school he would take the train into town and cluster for autographs, cadge hockey sticks or tickets off the visiting baseball players — U.S. players had less use for their two complimentary tickets in Toronto than hockey players — and take the train back. He built up a collection of memorabilia, over time.

“It wasn’t for profit. It was just because I needed to be near that stuff,” says Campbell. “I was definitely a loner.”

Wrote letters to musicians, athletes and others

There was an odd sort of earnestness in him, too. He wrote people letters. He wrote letters to rock and roll musicians, to Olympic athletes, to football players. He wrote a letter to the couple in that iconic picture from Woodstock, who were later married, and one of whom recently died. He wrote letters to ballplayers from the golden age, the 1940s through the ’60s. He got a lot of replies. He still has the letters.

“I figured (the baseball players) were sitting at home in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina, or something like that, just collecting their pension cheques with nothing better to do but to respond to a kid from Canada,” Campbell says. “And in most cases they did, and it was wonderful.”

He made friends with some. He dropped in on Ken Raffensberger, a big-league pitcher for 15 years, on a trip to see Gettysburg. Raffensberger lived in a trailer park in a marsh overlooking a hill with his wife, and he told stories of how racist his manager, Ben Chapman, was toward Jackie Robinson. Campbell, for his part, likes to quote Robinson’s tombstone, now: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

And most oddly, he wrote letters to members of the Manson Family because he thumbed through “Helter Skelter” at his aunt Cath’s home when he was 12 or 13 and, when he picked up the book years later, he thought, how could they have been so awful, so young? Susan Atkins wrote back, with tales of being born again, and other jailhouse rantings.

“I guess I chalked it up to just the curiosity of a young person,” Campbell says now.

He feels a kinship with obsessives, and mentions bird watchers. Like them, it seemed like he was searching for something.

His parents had instilled a work ethic, and he chased a broadcast career. Campbell started as an intern at “Hockey Night in Canada” and got a part-time job at CBC Sports. He sent his demo tape to 60 or 70 stations, and finally moved to Edmonton at 26 as a weekend sports anchor. It was a struggle, and there were times when he wondered if he would ever get a chance. It was an exercise in self-doubt.

“It took a real toll on me,” he says. “It was really f—ing hard. And I had to grind it out.”

After four years, he got a gig at Sportsnet, and came back to Toronto. It was a huge opportunity, a national audience. A pinnacle, he felt.

He was miserable. The late-night anchor slot meant he would work until 2 or 3 a.m., wake up at noon, and enjoy three hours of daylight or so in the deep of winter. His social life was on a different schedule than that of his friends; romance felt next to impossible. He and Fay shared that same life and, as Fay puts it, everyone dealt with it differently.

“It just drained me of every ounce of enthusiasm for one, the business, and two, for life in general,” Campbell says. “This is what I hoped for, it was all I ever hoped for, and none of it felt very good.

“It turned out to be the first few years of just dark times and depression, and I felt completely unfulfilled as a human being and one morning I just couldn’t quite understand why I was feeling so down. I looked at myself in the mirror and basically said, ‘What the f— have you ever done for anybody else in this world?’

“And it kind of occurred to me at that moment that I’d spent so much time trying to craft this career that I’d never done anything for anybody else. Never lifted a finger for anyone else.”

Read books to children at SickKids

The next day he called SickKids and asked if there was anything he could do to help. He signed up to read to patients every Thursday. The kids would pad in in their pyjamas, usually with nerve-wracked parents in tow, and he would read books in his broadcaster’s voice for half an hour. He remembers how some kids would leave trailing their IV bags.

“It just made me realize, goodness gracious, who was that guy five or six months ago that couldn’t crawl out of bed because he felt so down?” Campbell says. “Like, how dare you?”

He was moved to the CFL — on Sportsnet, what an idea — and when they asked him to do baseball play-by-play in 2005, he had never done it except when he was 18, in the grandstand at Exhibition Stadium, into a hand-held microphone he bought at Radio Shack. He was married and had two sons but was doing up to 130 games a year, travelling from city to city. He struggled with the criticism from the hardened baseball crowd to his new-guy mistakes.

“It was a trial,” he says. “And we had young kids, and that was tough.”

The divorce happened in 2006. He was replaced by Buck Martinez in 2009. “That was a huge blessing,” Campbell says. “I was crushed at the moment, but that was a huge blessing.”

Then came the rest of his life. His boys got older, his career continued, and last year came the cancer diagnosis. CLC is very specific: They tell you when your symptoms will change, and that’s when you will undergo treatment. The diagnosis was right on. Fourteen months after the news, Campbell started to get tired, to get night sweats, to get golf ball-sized lymph nodes in his neck and armpits.

He was told it recurs, but there is treatment. Still, he re-evaluated his life. He was 54. He had kids, and had tried to maximize his time with them, and with his parents, too. He had professional success. He felt like he had been good to people and tried to impact others. But he did wonder, at least a little, if he would die.

“Someone who has the acute form of my cancer once said, ‘You’ll be amazed at how leukemia can become a strange blessing,’ ” Campbell says. “And I thought, ‘Oh, OK. Be interesting to find out what that means.’ ”

He found out. He had called elderly Jays fans during the COVID-19 pandemic to make conversation, as if they were Ken Raffensbergers. But he wanted to do more. On a recent trip to London, Ont., with his partner, he saw a minor-league tournament at the old Labatt Park and dropped by and just talked to kids, asked them questions, tried to give people time. Why? “Because I had athletes do that to me when I was young.”

Selling scorecards to raise funds for women’s shelters

He heard repeated stories of abuse out in the dating world; he responded this year by raising money for women’s shelters, including by auctioning off game scorecards.

“Somebody told me that a women’s shelter can house a woman and her children for one day on $10, which doesn’t seem like a lot of money,” he says. “And I thought, well, if I can get $300 or $400 for a three-game series between the Blue Jays and the Yankees, then that would go a long way at a women’s shelter. I got $500 for a Yankees one.”

He took his two teenage sons to Europe almost on a spur of the moment, to London and Paris, and they didn’t even really plan. They just did whatever they felt like doing every day, and had a blast.

“I mean, I wasn’t a huge procrastinator,” Campbell says. “But, man, when you’ve got a job like mine, which can be relentless for six to seven months a year, you tend to put things aside every now and then. And I just said, f— that.’

“It’s opened my eyes to the people around me who I love, in particular my children, and my experiences with them, for whatever reason, just feel different than they did before.

“And it’s the first time in my career I’ve ever been really solely comfortable with where I am at professionally, which is great, because it gives me the freedom to focus on this disease properly, without any worry that maybe I’m not quite good enough at what I do, or that I might lose a job with a company whose benefit plan is actually helping pay for a very expensive medication.”

“I’ve known him for 25 years,” Fay says, “and I don’t remember him being as comfortable as he is right now within his skin, and within who he is, and where he is.”

Campbell’s doctor at Sunnybrook, Dr. David Spaner, has told him the progress on the drugs for his cancer has been exponential, and is very hopeful. Maybe even a cure.

Either way, he might have a roiling stomach and a jaw that feels like it’s in a bear trap and cancer doctors in his life, but Jamie Campbell is at peace. He lost the hero worship a while ago, even as he kept the memorabilia. He lost the anxiousness over achieving while still trying to do his best. Now when he reaches out it’s not letters, it’s trying to make other people’s days brighter, in little ways or big. And those heavy childhood fears have vanished. He is the parent now, and he is not afraid that he will lose his job, or of dying. Some things, you don’t have to keep.

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