Clint Hurdle’s office sits just down the hallway from the boisterous Rockies clubhouse. It’s a cozy place with an overstuffed leather sofa and the kind of big, masculine desk you’d expect a major-league manager to sit behind.
The walls are adorned with baseball photos. A prominent one features a more youthful, dark-haired Hurdle, putting a bear hug on a beardless, baby-faced Todd Helton. Yet the place looks more like a college professor’s den than a cubbyhole for a man drafted into professional baseball in 1975 at age 17.
Pictures of Hurdle’s family are everywhere. So are books: on history, philosophy, sports and religion.
“I learned to love reading from my mother (Louise). That’s her passion,” Hurdle said. “When I’m not reading something, I feel kind of lost.”
And then there are the compact discs. Stacks and stacks. Music is Hurdle’s constant companion.
“My tastes run from what I call Americana – guys like Tom Russell and Ray Wiley Hubbard – to classical, to opera to old-school metal,” he said. “I still listen to Grand Funk and Led Zeppelin.”
It’s fair to say that the man who leads the Rockies into their first World Series on Wednesday is an amalgam of contradictions.
He’s part jock and part philosopher. He bypassed a chance to attend Harvard on an academic scholarship as well as the University of Miami to play quarterback and opted instead to play baseball. At age 20, he was a Sports Illustrated coverboy, pegged “This Year’s Phenom.” But, by his own admission, he wilted under the weight of expectations.
The consummate family man today, he partied like a rock star when he hit the big leagues.
Now, finally, after life experiences that threatened to rob his natural lust for life, it’s fair to say Hurdle has never been in a better place.
“I think he was born to manage. I really do,” Hurdle’s father, Clint Sr., said. “I don’t think he’s ever loved baseball as much as he does right now.”
Added Rockies bench coach Jamie Quirk: “Clint absolutely made a choice to change his life. I think he’s found what he’s looking for.”
Hurdle comes full circle
Quirk knew Hurdle long before Hurdle was a man in full. They were teammates with the Kansas City Royals in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The third member of their trio was Hall of Famer George Brett. Together, the group pounded Kansas City’s watering holes.
At that time, the Royals were battling for American League supremacy and Hurdle was projected to be a superstar. Instead, he became a prisoner of his potential, underachieving in 1978, and getting sent down to the minors in 1979. He rebounded with his best pro season, hitting .294 with 10 home runs and 60 RBIs, for a 1980 Royals club that advanced to the World Series. The Royals lost to Philadelphia in six games but Hurdle hit .417 (5-for-12) and received a ring, one he immediately sized for his father.
“After all these years, it’s still one of the most precious gifts I have,” Clint Sr. said.
After sustaining a serious back injury in 1981, Hurdle was shipped to Cincinnati the following year and spent the remainder of his career bouncing between the minors and the majors before retiring from the New York Mets in 1987. His rise and fall has been told many times. And, no doubt, it will be retold many more times during the World Series. Yet Hurdle is interested in his past primarily because it helped shape the man he is today.
Ask him when he turned his life around, and he recalls the moment as if it were an epiphany.
“It was in ’98 when I asked Karla to marry me,” said Hurdle, who had already been through two failed marriages. “Karla looked me directly in the eye, I mean directly, and told me, ‘You have to find a way to make yourself happy. You have to find that for yourself before we can be married.’ It’s been 10 years now and it’s still working, still going strong.”
The couple had been dating for more than six years when Hurdle proposed. Karla had seen him change some, but wasn’t satisfied that he had changed enough.
“He still had a lot of things in his past he hadn’t settled,” she said. “I think he was trying to live up to that whole ‘phenom thing,’ and that was pretty deep-rooted. He was still trying to please too many people, instead of making himself happy.”
Karla’s words sparked Hurdle’s conversion. He stopped drinking. He reaffirmed his Christian faith. He was once a man who preached to friends but that waned. Now he lives by a quieter code.
“It goes back to the saying, ‘If you don’t feel close to God today, who moved?’ That’s what happened to me. I had moved,” he said.
From his 5-year-old daughter, Madison, he was given a gift he never expected, in a way he never expected. She was born with Prader-Willi Syndrome, a rare and complex chromosome disorder. Maddie, as everyone calls her, requires special care and a special kind of love.
“Having her in my life has taken me to places I never dreamed of,” Hurdle said. “She has brought more love and closeness into Karla and my life. And it’s made me a better father to our son (Christian, nearly 3).”
In August, when Maddie turned 5, Hurdle had her birthday announcement played on the giant scoreboard at Coors Field. Saturday mornings are marked on the calendar with a star. Maddie wakes up her daddy early for their trip to the local Starbucks.
“She’s taught me about true, unconditional love,” Hurdle said. “I think we lose that as we get older, as we grow up. She doesn’t lose that.”
No regrets
Hurdle said he doesn’t regret his life’s path but, he admits, he sometimes wishes he’d gone to college.
“That was a tough decision, but I had played baseball in my backyard and dreamed of being in the World Series since I was 5,” he said. “That was the dream I wanted to chase.”
Besides, he’s endeavored to make real life his classroom.
“There was always a little vacuum there, so I’ve tried to continue my education,” he said. “It’s not a way of catching up or making up, but it’s been a way to enrich my life.”
When he’s not managing or spending time with his kids, Hurdle is reading, going to concerts or devoting time to charity. Quirk marvels at Hurdle’s energy.
“A few years ago, I told Clint he needed to slow down, that he was spreading himself too thin,” Quirk said. “Then I realized that’s what brings him to life.”
With a voice that can shake a room like a boom box, Hurdle is not shy about broadcasting his philosophies. This season, he’s repeated pet phrases – “It takes courage to have patience” or “We respect everyone but fear no one” – so often that reporters roll their eyes.
But Hurdle believes what he preaches.
“Absolutely I do,” he said.
He is aware of his critics in the media and in the stands, but he doesn’t let them get to him like he once did.
“That’s the beauty in life, everyone has their views and opinions,” he said. “A few years ago, it might have hurt and I would have cared what everybody thought. I don’t go there anymore.”
The manager’s increased self-confidence enabled him to loosen the reins on a young team that no longer needed a tight leash.
“I think Clint has changed quite a bit in the last couple of years,” National League MVP candidate Matt Holliday said. “As we’ve gotten older and we have a little bit more experience, he’s let us go out and play and just kind of sat back and made the moves he needs to make. At the same time, he’s let us go out there and have the free will to go out and play.”
The result was a late-season run for the ages. The Rockies head into the World Series with 21 victories in their past 22 games.
Twenty-seven years ago, when Hurdle played in the World Series, he was a shockingly handsome 23-year-old kid with a bushy head of black hair, blessed with immense talent but in way over his head.
Today, he’s a 50-year-old man with a silver flattop and life experiences lining his face. Yet he’s so content with himself and so proud of his ballclub.
Karla Hurdle said friends and family expected Hurdle to be stressed out by this postseason ride. She said it’s been the exact opposite.
“Everybody was saying, ‘Oh, you must not be sleeping a wink,”‘ she said, laughing. “But we’re sleeping great. When I got to the hotel that first night in Philadelphia (during the NLDS), Clint was already in bed, sleeping like a baby. I think he’s in a very good place right now.”
Hurdle says this season has rekindling those backyard World Series dreams he conjured up so many years ago.
“This year has been one of the finest experiences – no, it is the finest – experience that I’ve ever had in sports,” he said. “If I had a Little League team, I would bring them to watch this team. I think that tells you a lot.”
Patrick Saunders: 303-954-1428 or psaunders@denverpost.com
