The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Major Leauge Baseball’s Legendary Slugger—Darryl Strawberry

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show: from the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com.

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Speaker 2: There are some of our favorites.
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Speaker 1: After years of hard living, blowing through more than thirty million dollars, former slugger Darryl Strawberry found his true calling and sat down with Greg Hangler to share the story. Darryl didn’t waste any time getting to the heart of his dysfunction. Here’s one of Major League Baseball’s greats: Darryl Strawberry.

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Speaker 2: Pretty much, probably my parents. And, you know, that’s really where my story started from, you know, in my life. And I think it was more of the dysfunction, you know, in my life, because of my father. You know, he was more of a, you know, abusive man; a very, you know, alcoholic, and drank a lot and came home a lot, you know, with just so much confusion. And then there was for the last time he came home with the confusion of being drunk again, and then pulling out a shotgun, and said that he was going to kill the whole family. And had it not been for my mother, me and my brothers would have killed him that night had it not been for her getting us out of the house, because we were like really fed up with it because we had seen this so many times over and over again, and we just had reached the point. You know, I was only about fourteen years old. So, me and Ronnie—my brother Ronnie, my brothers that’s a one year ahead of me—me and him had the real run-ins with my father about every little thing, every little infraction that came up. You know, it was always a beating. You know. He had to take our shirts off, make us take our shirt off, and there across the bed and, you know, like a vacuum, vacuum clean extension cord. He used to use that to beat us. And it was like there was no love there. You know, there was no love, and, you know, there was no understanding. And we just, we just kind of grew up. We grew up in a place of hating him and, you know, kind of wishing—you know, the fact that we used to sit in the rooms and saying, wishing that he was dead, you know. Because I remember my brother Ronnie said one time, after he got a beating, he goes, “I’m going to kill him one day,” you know. And, and, and we came closer that night. You know, Ronnie was the first one to grab the butcher knife, you know, and I grabbed a frying pan, and we came really close to killing him that night. And, like I said, had my mother not gotten us out the house, this is the relationship that I had with my father. It was a brutal relationship. And, you know, I just, I just needed some guidance. I needed some, some, some men in my life that, you know, could really help me understand what the importance it is to be a man. So, you know, the beatings from my father and the rejection from my father left me and my brothers like really crippled inside. And my pain would eventually lead me to my greatness, and my greatness would eventually lead me to my destructive behavior. So I always say: if one is not well on the inside, eventually it will play out in their life. I think a lot of people look at celebrities’ lives and think that we should, should have it all together because they have everything, but they don’t really know what the childhood was like and where you actually come from and what happens to a person. So my father’s background was really hard. You know, he was the only child, you know, finding out from, you know, some of his cousins and stuff. His father was very abusive, and his father was alcoholic, and he saw his father actually beat his mother over and over in front of him. So he kind of repeated the same, same habit that his father had, and I would go on to repeat the same habit my father had, too. So, learning that it’s a generational thing, and not until it’s broken, it cannot be fixed. And I realized that, you know, in my life. But I realized that my father had a lot of issues, and it was probably because of what he saw growing up—you know, watching his father, you know, be the man that he was. And, you know, all the things he probably experienced in his household, he brought into his life when he got married and had kids himself. I was brought up in Watts, California, and it was, it was so weird and so different, you know, living in a place like that. It was very challenging. It was a lot of, you know, a lot of crime, you know. And, you know, we were kids, but we were most of the time we were in the house at night. But you can hear the gunshots, and you can hear all different type of things, you know, that we grew up around. And you see all type of things on the streets, you know, during the course of a day, growing up as a kid. And, you know, we really never got into a lot of things because we liked sports, me and my brothers. We were always in activities, liking to play sports. And then it was the coach that was close, close by us, that, that saw us, the three Strawberry boys, and he wanted all three of us on the same team. You know, we were all young, you know, and he put us all on the same team. And he just thought about all of us, and he just said, “I need to raise these boys right, because they don’t look like they have a father figure in their life.” And he raised us right, you know, taking us into places that we never thought we could ever imagine, going to play ball at ballparks and stuff like that. So I grew up in a very broken, empty neighborhood. And I think that was because my mother always wanted to get out, but my father just didn’t want to move forward. And then she finally moved us forward, and he moved forward with us, too. When I moved over into the South Central area of Crenshaw High where I went to school and everything, and from there, you know, after experiencing that time that night, my mother put him out, and he was never there anymore. So it was just us and her, raising five of us by herself. So it was, it was very challenging for my mom. She was a wonderful woman, and she worked very hard to, you know, make things work for us, and she kept food on the table for five of us. That was an incredible job that she was doing just to take care of five kids by herself. She was the secretary, you know, at the Pacific Bell, and she worked there for a long time. She had a steady job. My mom was a very bright woman. You know, she’s well-educated, she spoke well, you know, and she had just such a great peace about herself. And she raised us right. That’s the thing about it. She raised us right. She raised us with principles, respect, and everything else. And she always made us understand that you’re no better than anybody else. And those are the most important things growing up in our household, because we had to respect our household. Because, you know, I thought I was like a really big shot baseball player—Little League baseball player, high school, whatever it was. And I would come in the house with that hat on, and she was like, “You better take that hat off your head before I knock it off,” you know. So there were some real things there, you know. And my mother was little, and I was big. I was a big kid, and, you know, and I would, like, say someone on the side, out of the side of my mouth, and she would say, “What did you say?” And I was like, “Oh, say no.” She said, “Come here,” and she popped me right in the mouth. You know. So that was the teaching of us how to have respect.

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Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Darryl Strawberry, and what a story. And the pain, well, he said it, led to his greatness, but his eventual decline. More of this remarkable story—Darryl Strawberry’s story—here on Our American Stories.

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Speaker 2: Folks.
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Speaker 1: If you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history—from war to innovation, culture, and faith—are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we’re back with Our American Stories and the story of Major League Baseball player Darryl Strawberry. We last heard Darryl tell the story of how his mom once punched him in the mouth after he talked back to her as a big shot baseball player at Crenshaw High in Southern California. Let’s return to Darryl and his story.

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Speaker 2: You know, you think about it: raising five kids, black kids, all by yourself, and it’s a struggle with no father. But I think we were so broken and depleted from the fact that my father was such a raising alcoholic, and the rejection that was so real, it just left—it left me and my brother Ronnie—real crippled inside. And we did. We ended up going down some really dark roads and, you know, growing up. And I went, and when I say dark roads, I mean, like, junior high school. I got kicked out of like four junior high schools because I was troubled inside. And, you know, burning up bathrooms. I was in marijuana every day. And, and then I finally went to high school. They finally, like, pushed me on through high school and got me out of the junior high because I was so, so troubled. And I remember my first year in high school, I got kicked off the baseball team because I was so troubled inside. And a lot of people don’t even know that. You know, I became a big star, but I was troubled, and the coach. Me and the coach butted heads, you know, because I walked off the field one day, and he thumped me on the head. And this is all-Black high school, and my baseball coach was white, and he was incredible. His name was Brooks Hurst. He coached all-Black team, and, you know, he was, he was right about it. I just thought I was a young, hot, you know, phenom out of, you know, out of Rancho Park, you know, Little League ball, and coming into high school and being in on the varsity tenth grade. And I kind of walked off the field like, like it was no big deal, and he just stumped me in the head. And I took the jersey off right there on the field during the game, and I threw it in his face and I quit. And he was just trying to build character in us to, you know, to, to be something different. You know, I think, you know, he’s coaching all Black players, and so you can imagine, you know, what he’s got to go through. He’s a white coach, you know, in a Black, all-Black high school, and he’s coaching all these great, talented Black players with egos flying everywhere. You know, he’s got to maintain whatever he has to maintain to make us understand that we need to hustle, we need to be players, to play the game the right way. And boy, that was, that was a lesson that I had to learn right there—really hard not to ever quit again, and learn to dig, dig through, and fight through situations. And, you know, the coach was, the coach was remarkable. You know, after my freshman year, I came back and played my junior year, and we sat down, had a talk, and I told him I was wrong, and, you know, I just really needed to learn grow up and learn about myself. And he accepted that and allowed me to be back on the team. And then we go on to be this powerhouse baseball team in high school, you know, with myself, Chris Brown—who was our third baseman, and he got drafted by the Giants, and he ended up playing the big leagues with the Giants. And, you know, I played with Match, and Eric Davis was my friend. He played at Fremont, and, you know, we just all just grew up together, and, you know, we played in high school. But I just remember how good we were in high school. We went to the City Championship nineteen seventy-nine, where Coach Hurst—he brought so much discipline to us, and we ended up losing the City Championship at Dodger Stadium in nineteen seventy-nine. Granada Hills, John Elway and them, beat us in the City Championship. And the issues inside of me were stuffed down so far because of being multi-talented. And I took my energy in high school to use it for basketball and baseball and sports, you know, because sports is a great outlet to not think, you know, because you can’t think when you play sports. You have to either be there, are you not there? Because I’ve seen a lot of players that were probably better than me, and a lot of great players in our high school, but their thinking process was just too much, and they could never fulfill the promises over their life. And I was just one of those guys that didn’t think. I just actually went in there and I performed, you know, because I wanted to play. I mean, I was driven because of my father rejection. I think it drove me into greatness because he said I wouldn’t be anything, and I was like, “I’m going to show you that I’m going to be something.” I’m not going to be what you are, and, you know, I’m gonna have a family one day. And I used to talk to myself in the room and watch baseball and says, “I’m going to play in the big leagues one day.” And, you know, that was, that was my driving force, you know, because of the rejection. And it drove me into my—it drove me into being who I was and loving the game. But the issues were always there. You know. We, we need that affirmation. We need that approval from a male figure that we, it’s okay. And a lot of times, a lot of—by the boys—don’t see their dads around because they’re so busy, uh, in life, and because that’s what life make it is. We live in a society that makes you where you have to be busy, you have to be working, and you don’t pay enough tens. And this is what I’ve seen happen in our society, because what happened to me, I’ve seen happen to so many young, young kids. I mean, I used to run a treatment facility, and, and I’ve seen so many young, white, suburban kids all addicted, you know, to opiates and heroin and all kinds of stuff because of rejection and no one’s around. Your dad’s wrong, because the first thing I asked him is, “Where’s your dad?” Well, he’s too busy, wearying about business instead of worrying about family. And, and you leave, you leave people so broken from that, and we don’t understand that it’s so real, especially in the times that we’re in now. And everything that’s out here, you know, it’s, it’s out here at the fingertips of them to be able to get and be exposed to. And you don’t realize that, you know, they get exposed to all the wrong things because they search for so hard for that fatherly figure. Because Mom’s gonna always be there. Mom’s going to take care kids. Where is that male figure, you know? But at the same time, the girls look for the same thing, too, because I just didn’t see boys in there. I saw the girls in there, you know, broken and been slaves to addiction because they didn’t have a male figure in their life. And, you know, people, we don’t understand that as a society. We think, you know, it’s just about going and doing it. Yeah, we have to do, we have to provide. But also, at the same time, we have to make time. I was just me and my wife, just spent the last week with my girls here with their boyfriends, and just being dad, you know. And those things, all those things, are important to me. My kids have never been broken because the curse was broken off of me. And they were young when I was in the midst of using and playing baseball, so they didn’t get to see a lot, but they heard a lot. And people said, “Well, your dad was a great baseball player, but he had so many struggles.” And my daughters be like, “No, my dad, my dad’s a preacher.” You know, “What are you talking about?” You know, they was, so they see me as a different person. But I had, but I explained to them who I was before I got to this place here. And I explained to them, “You never want, you know, be in a place like this.” I told them, “You could pick your sins, but you can’t pick your consequences, because they are real great.” Pushing things—pushing things down—was really hard, you know, because you really don’t know who you are. I mean, yeah, I mean, I played baseball, and I knew I was a baseball player, and I knew I was achieving all these great things, no question about it. But that really doesn’t define who you are. I think, I think that’s what you do. And I think, I think so many people get that confused. And that’s why you see so many guys, whatever celebrities they are, you know, that have problems, you know, have deep problems. They’re a lot deeper than just being successful. And most people think, “Well, you have everything happen.” Everything doesn’t make you well, you know. And that’s what it was for me. You know, things were stuffed down so far. And the things that were stuffed down in me had to do with my childhood. I had to do with growing up and not having the father around and being rejected. I think that left me more broken and empty more than anything, because, you know, when you think about it, my father didn’t see me playing Little League. He didn’t see me playing legion ball. He only saw me when I was in high school and saw me when he heard about me in high school. So I was left in a place where I was sold. I was so, so shallow, y’all know. I mean, I knew I was, I knew what to do far as playing, but as a person, you know, I didn’t have, you know, great confidence in myself and belief in myself because I was left with all this pain inside, and I just wanted to be free of it. And a lot of that had to do with, you know, my father—the rejection and being broken for so long. And I did all these great things. And, you know, I won championships, I hit home runs, I made All-Star games, you know, all that. All that was great, you know, from a standpoint of being Darryl Strawberry, the baseball player. But who am I as the man? You know? And I struggled with that for a very, very long time. My goal was—