Spring, with its blooming crocuses, daffodils and hyacinths, is a time of irrepressible renewal and hope. Unless, of course, you are 39 years old, banned forever from baseball, cursed by addiction and have, statistically speaking, a death sentence smoldering in your very entrails.

Unless, of course, you are Darryl Strawberry.

Perhaps this was why Strawberry bolted Thursday from his Tampa drug treatment center, where he was serving two years' house arrest, and disappeared for four days before turning up Monday night. Was it a coincidence that he was reportedly partying in Daytona Beach precisely as the baseball season, sport's inevitable harbinger of spring, began?

	Darryl Strawberry made a lasting impression in New York, using his sweet swing to help both the Mets and Yankees to World Series titles.

"No," Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, said softly on Tuesday. "Probably not."

Henderson played linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys from 1975-79, but he is as well known for his relationship with cocaine. He saw his career cut short, went to prison for sexual misconduct and, slowly, painfully kicked the habit. Henderson said he has been clean for 17 years now. From his home in Boca Raton, Fla., he said Strawberry's cancer makes a difficult situation worse.

"In order for me to hang onto the idea of staying sober, staying clean, I have to see the prize," Henderson said. "Family, God, my relationships with friends, hobbies -- if you can't see the prize, you wonder 'If I'm going to die, why should I stay sober?'

"That's the powerful dilemma I see in Darryl."

Two months ago, Henderson said he talked with Strawberry's wife, Charisse.

"I said I had been sober for 17 years, and I told her to give him my number," Henderson said. "Hey, I'm not out hustling and soliciting Darryl Strawberry. I just wanted to help. I wanted to ask him, 'How did you survive the darkest hours?'

"He never called. I can't say I was surprised."

Cancer and addiction: a toxic cocktail
Suicide, Strawberry told a judge in one of his many court appearances in recent years, has indeed crossed his mind. Friends acknowledge that since his first operation to remove a cancerous colon tumor on Oct. 3, 1998, Strawberry has been visited by bouts of severe depression.

While professional sports has its share of stars that have succumbed to substance abuse -- Steve Howe, Lawrence Taylor, Ferguson Jenkins, John Daly, for example -- Strawberry has a more toxic cocktail at work.

He has endured two serious operations -- doctors removed one of his kidneys on Aug. 7, 2000 -- and numerous rounds of chemotherapy.

"When you're talking about recurrent colon cancer, in general you're talking about a disease that isn't curable," said Dr. Andrew Salner, director of the cancer program at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut. "I would speculate in Darryl's case, that this is something he's probably going to have for life. Statistically, it's likely to end his life prematurely, and that's hanging over his head.

"Depression and malaise are part of a cancer patient's nomenclature. A lot of what we do in cancer therapy is boosting a person's attitude and level of hope. Treatments tend to lower levels of stamina and reserve. There is probably an interesting interchange in the cancer treatment, the drug problem and his ability to take on this juggernaut."

	“	The two of them are just beating him up. He said he was doing very well in rehab and was trying very hard, but the urge for the drug is too much for his willpower. His head snaps, his brain goes into that 'I want drugs' mode. ”
		— Documentary filmmaker Tony Zumbado on Strawberry's struggles with chemotherapy and drug rehabilitation

Beyond the ongoing chemotherapy and the wide range of drugs that typically accompany it, as well as his addiction itself, there is a third factor working against Strawberry.

As recently as 1999, he had 49 at-bats as a designated hitter for the Yankees. It is quite possible that, absent drug violations, the eight-time All-Star still might be playing baseball. But after three suspensions in the last five years, Strawberry's baseball career is, definitively, over. The sweet, sweeping swing with the pronounced uppercut, the one that produced 335 home runs for the Mets, Dodgers, Giants and Yankees, is gone.

So, too, is that singular skill that distinguished Darryl Eugene Strawberry, the Straw that stirred New York for so many seasons. In his autobiography, astronaut Buzz Aldrin said that after walking on the moon, everything else in life seemed insignificant. Athletes express a similar sentiment when they leave the arena. A number of them have struggled with life after athletics; some have even killed themselves.

When word of Strawberry's disappearance surfaced Friday, former teammate Dwight Gooden and two friends went looking for Strawberry. Gooden and Strawberry were inexorably linked in the mid-1980s when they starred for the Mets in New York. They both lived in the Tampa area and they both had scintillating ability -- and they both struggled with substance abuse.

Gooden, who faced his own mortality last week when he retired from baseball, searched with Yankees drug counselor Ronald Dock and Ray Negron, a Cleveland Indians employee who has served as a mentor to Gooden and Strawberry when they were reunited with the Yankees.

Gooden knew where to look, because he had been there, literally and figuratively.

Documentary photographer Tony Zumbado knew where to look, too. He was one of the first people to speak to Strawberry after he turned up on Monday. He was quoted in Tuesday's New York Post.

"Something just snapped, the monkey on his shoulder just told him to turn around and he took off," said Zumbado, who is filming a documentary on Strawberry for HBO. "He says his drug addiction ... is beating him up, that he needs a lot of help ... and that he hopes everyone can understand how awful it is to be a drug addict."

Zumbado confirmed that the combination of chemotherapy and drug rehabilitation have been difficult for Strawberry.

"The two of them are just beating him up," Zumbado said. "He said he was doing very well in rehab and was trying very hard, but the urge for the drug is too much for his willpower. His head snaps, his brain goes into that 'I want drugs' mode."

Taking another strike
After four days of intrigue and wild speculation, the end came quietly. Hillsborough County sheriff's deputies arrested Strawberry on Monday night at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa. He arrived there earlier in the afternoon with several unidentified friends.

"Darryl is OK," Negron said. "We've put him in a hospital to make sure he's taken care of."

The Florida criminal justice system was not as sympathetic. Perhaps it was the kidnapping story that aroused their suspicions. Strawberry told several friends during his four-day disappearance that three unknown men forced him at gunpoint to leave his treatment center and get into a car, according to police. Strawberry said he was driven to Orlando and that his abductors were demanding a $50,000 ransom. Police said they would look into it.

	In recent years, Darryl Strawberry has suffered the consequences -- both legally and career-wise -- during his battles with substance abuse.

This was Strawberry's third parole violation after pleading no contest to 1999 charges of drug possession and solicitation. On Sept. 11, 2000, he was arrested on charges of driving while impaired after taking prescription drugs. On Oct. 25 he was arrested again when he slipped out of an inpatient drug treatment center and went on a crack cocaine and Xanax binge with a friend before turning himself in the next day.

Prosecutors sought prison time after he previously violated parole and may do so again. Strawberry could face as much as five years in jail.

"He hasn't abided by the terms of his supervision," said Pam Bondi, of the Hillsborough state attorney's office.

The argument has been advanced repeatedly that Strawberry needed baseball to help cope with his demons. Is it possible that the game itself and the pedestal stars command -- experts call it enabling -- has worked against Strawberry's sobriety?

Before Strawberry, baseball's poster boy for cocaine abuse and second chances was left-handed pitcher Steve Howe. He failed seven drug tests and was suspended twice, first in 1983 as a member of the Dodgers and, for the last time, as a Yankee in 1992 when he entered a guilty plea of attempting to buy cocaine.

Last March, after Strawberry was suspended for the third and last time, New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica spoke with Howe by phone from his home on Whitefish Lake in Montana.

With baseball in his past, Howe said, he had not used cocaine for nearly a decade.

"There was a time in my life when I didn't believe I was worth a damn if I couldn't go out on a ballfield," Howe said. "And it pissed me off, for a long time. It was only at the end of my career when I was able to sit down and listen to people who could convince me that it didn't matter to them whether I played baseball or not. I don't think Darryl's there yet. I frankly don't think he's even close.

"I finally had to make a choice. Everybody does. Truth or dare. Live or die. I had these two babies, a boy and a girl. Did I want to see them grow up? Well, if I did, I had to knock that [stuff] off. So I finally did. Apparently, Darryl isn't there. He's still hurting everybody, the way I did."

When Strawberry was arrested last October, he said, "I'm not a danger to society," Strawberry said. "I've never harmed nobody; I never will."

Beyond himself, his family and friends, of course.

Baseball has offered Strawberry many opportunities and last month brought another one. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who has backed Strawberry repeatedly, offered him a job teaching minor-league players to avoid drug and alcohol abuse.

Henderson was one of those who winced when he read the news.

"If you don't have it," Henderson said of sobriety, "it's not yours to give."

Henderson has worked with a number of high-profile athletes, including Daly and former Washington Redskins lineman Dexter Manley. Like Howe, he doesn't see the ultimate commitment from Strawberry.

"The thing about staying sober, man, it has to be No. 1 -- before God, your children, your career," Henderson said. "It has to be first, because once you become an addict if you're not sober, you're not good with anything else.

"That one choice every day that I awake is the decision to stay sober. It helps me be a better father, a better son and a better neighbor. I don't know if Darryl's ever put it on top."

Greg Garber is a senior staff writer for ESPN.com