Blue Jays broadcaster receives honorary doctorate from Huntington University in Sudbury, Ont.

When Jamie Campbell returns to the TV studio to host  Blue Jays Central on Sportsnet in April, he will have a new award to celebrate.

The veteran anchor was awarded an honorary doctorate of sacred letters on Thursday by Sudbury's Huntington University.

It's in recognition of his years of broadcasting work, but also for his charity work and advocacy. In Sudbury to receive the honour, Campbell talked about his affinity for northern Ontario, born out of a summer job as a teenager that sent him to Timmins.

“It was 1984, I was 17. I had planned a summer of going to as many Blue Jay games as I could and my parents put an end to that by signing me up for something called the Junior Forest Rangers program.," he said.

"So the next thing you know, I'm on a train to Timmins and totally uncertain about what I was going to encounter. It turned out to be nine weeks of hard labour at $10 a day and it may have been the greatest summer experience I ever had. So the north of this province gets into your blood if you spend enough time in it, and that's exactly what happened to me."

He said when he got a chance to give a shout out to Northern Ontario when broadcasting the Jays games on TV, he found a way to do so.

“I wanted to find a way of honouring Timmins in some way," Campbell said.

"And every time a Blue Jay, whether it was Bautista or Encarnacion or Justin Smoak, would hit one deep, I would say ‘that ball must have landed somewhere near Timmins.’ It caught on, and the best part about it now is that during most home games, anybody that's from that area comes by and introduces themselves to me at the set, which is just wonderful.” 

Among his off-screen interests, Campbell does a lot of advocacy work for people who are struggling with mental health, and he said he knows the feeling, as he had some difficult days along his life’s journey.  

“Back in late 1990s I was on TV and in a great job, but I was also in a really dark place at that time. And I never let on to anyone that I was struggling mentally," he said.

"My own parents and my brother and sister didn't even know. One day, I just looked in the mirror and asked myself if I had ever done anything for anybody other than me. And the answer was no, I had not. I was 32 years old at the time, and I made a promise to myself that minute that I would change in a dramatic way.”

Campbell said the next day, he called the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and began volunteering to read to kids in the hospital library, which he did, every Thursday for months.

“It was part of a promise I made to myself at that time to live more of a life of service as opposed to a life of, shall we say, independent gratification. And thankfully, the switch to that kind of lifestyle made all of that darkness in me dissipate,” he said.

Campbell was also part of a charitable group that was delivering personal protective equipment (PPE) to front line workers around the Toronto area during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he organized a special PPE delivery trip up to Timmins after getting a request from a paramedic there.