New Book Tells Life Story of Ex-Met and Yankee Slugger Darryl Strawberry by Matt Gagne Daily News Sports Writer
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New book tells life story of ex-Met and Yankee slugger Darryl Strawberry By Matt Gagne Daily News Sports Writer Updated Thursday, April 30th 2009, 11:31 AM More than 25 years after he was named National League Rookie of the Year in 1983, Darryl Strawberry has finally arrived, full of promise and potential, a decade since retiring from baseball but back on top after defining what it means to hit rock bottom. He sinks into a chair during a recent taping of CenterStage, the YES Network show featuring interviews with celebrities and athletes. Strawberry is here to promote his new book that tells his painful life story. The show's host, Michael Kay, cuts right to the heart of Darryl Strawberry, a tragic hero if there ever was one. "New Yorkers love you despite everything you've gone through," Kay says. "Why, Darryl, why?" Strawberry is perhaps in the perfect place to answer this question, to retrace the steps that led to the book's title, "Straw: Finding My Way." On this particular afternoon, CenterStage is being taped in the same studio as the Maury Povich Show, where any of Strawberry's 22 chapters could fill a week's worth of daytime television, big ratings all but guaranteed. "We were like the precursor to those dysfunctional families you see all over reality TV these days, living out our little trials and traumas in the full glare of the media lights," Strawberry writes about his Mets teams of the mid-1980s. "We were the boys of summer. The drunk, speed- freak, sneaking-a-smoke boys of summer. More like juvenile delinquents of summer." The book is as sordid and salacious as they come, a confessional detailing what Strawberry describes as an "infamous rolling frat party" of drinking, drugs, groupies, gambling, sex and a World Series championship along the way. Some of the anecdotes would seem improbable, a work of fiction, if not for the reputation of the author. "There's some raw stuff in there," Strawberry tells Kay, repeating himself for dramatic effect. "There's some raw stuff in there." "The truth is the truth, we were what we were," Strawberry tells a reporter during a recent interview at the Millennium Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where he stays when he's in town working as a baseball analyst for SNY. "I don't want to sugarcoat it. I'm telling the truth of what I was, of what I was like. And I'm telling you what I'm like today, that I don't do that anymore." http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/mets/2009/04/30/2009-04-30_straw_story.html#ixzz0gieFowrH His past is full of more than just raunchy sexcapades or back-in-the-day anecdotes about riding in limos with his partner in crime, Dwight Gooden, throwing $100 bills out the window just because they could. Fueled by handfuls of amphetamines, Strawberry often played games either drunk or with massive hangovers. And his well-known addictions to alcohol and cocaine, which put him in and out of rehab over his 17-year career and beyond, led to several violent outbursts. He once punched a former wife in the head and held her at gunpoint while her horrified mother looked on. He also once drove around Tampa with Ambien, Percocet and Vicodin in his system, with no recollection of crashing his car. "My troubles and mistakes made it clear - sometimes painfully obvious - that I'm just a human being," Strawberry writes. ". I was great at baseball right from the start. It's taken me a whole lot longer to get good at life." Strawberry opens his book with the back story, about being 13 years old in Los Angeles and having his father point a shotgun at him in a drunken rage and threatening to kill the entire family. A year later, Strawberry again finds himself staring down the barrel of a gun. This time he has teamed up with his brothers and - armed with a skillet, frying pan and butcher's knife - plotting to kill his father before the man stands down. "This book is not about baseball, this is about me as a person and what I experienced as a child growing up. The media never knew that in my life," Strawberry says. "Before I pass away, I wanted to be able to give my true insight about me - who I am, what I am and the difference that I make today." Strawberry, now 47, has lived in St. Louis since 2006 with his wife, Tracy, who has helped him stay on the straight and narrow - a path she once struggled to get on herself. At one point, they were living in the basement of her parents' house. In his book, Strawberry recalls waking up one morning, surrounded by boxes and worn linoleum, and bursting into tears. "I felt that I was a complete loser as a man and a human being," he says. "No career, no money, no prospects. Nothing." Strawberry, an eight-time All-Star and four-time World Series champ with the Mets and Yankees, says he has found a higher calling, working with children and adults affected by autism. He also continues to serve as a special adviser to the Mets, telling up-and-coming players about all of his failures. He calls it a "road map not to follow." "It's not about me. When you realize you're not here for yourself and you're here to help other people, that's what I do today, I help other people," Strawberry says. "That's the gift that I believe I'm able to give back, for people to say, 'He knows about failure. And he's still standing. He's standing here today telling us.' That's hope to young people." http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/mets/2009/04/30/2009-04-30_straw_story.html#ixzz0gieFowrH That he is still standing, despite all the drug use and his scare with colon cancer in 1998, amazes even Strawberry himself. "This is the God's honest truth: I'm no different than someone that you see homeless on the street," he says. "They once had a life, but they got lost. That could have been me . (but) I didn't quit. I didn't give up." Asked if he still finds himself staring down temptation, Strawberry cuts off the question. "Those days are long gone," he says. "I have no desire for it." But what about Kay's question, "Why, Darryl, why?" Why will hardhats go out of their way, some 10 years after Strawberry last wore a major league uniform, to bang on the windows and give him the thumbs-up as he sits for an interview at the Millennium Hotel? Why will a petite blonde wait out the 30-minute interview just so she can ask to have her picture taken with Strawberry in the hotel lobby? Why have New Yorkers always held a soft spot for one of the city's most notorious athletes? "I think fans love me because I never blamed nobody else for my mistakes," Strawberry says. "I never talked about who I was out doing it with. You never heard me say that, and I never will. That's just the code I'm under." He appears a changed man, but still the same man at heart, wisdom finally catching up to all the years of learning and living the hard way. "I had all the money, sex and drugs a young man could want, and none of it helped me become a man," is how Strawberry puts it in the book. "Baseball is a young man's game, and I'm just happy to be alive." http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/mets/2009/04/30/2009-04-30_straw_story.html#ixzz0gieFowrH .