"I stopped focusing on the things I needed to focus on, as far as taking care of myself and staying in one day at a time," says Strawberry. "I wanted everything now and I know as a recovering person you can't do that."

Strawberry also spoke about the strength he draws from his teammates, his manager Joe Torre, and most importantly, his wife Charisse.

The following is an edited transcript of Strawberry's interview.

Miller: How do you feel today right now as you sit here?

Strawberry: Right now I feel good. I feel tremendously blessed that I am healthy and things are going well. Just a new lease on life for me, to move forward, to kind of turn the pages. I think that's what Recovering Life, the book talks about, really trying to turn the page on my life and trying to move forward.

Miller: When you got up on the podium to talk to the crowd, at the end of the season in the victory parade after winning the World Series, you talked about Joe Torre. Take us through the emotions of that day.

	Darryl Strawberry is hugged by Coach Joe Torre during the Yankee's World Series Victory Parade.

Strawberry: It was very difficult because I had experienced so much with the deal of cancer and the deal of alcoholism and my relapse. Just to be back and be a part of what that group meant to me. It's a very special group of people, not just as far as performing on the field, but off the field the kind of team we have and the care that we have for each other and just the respect that I have for Joe Torre. Joe Torre is a tremendous person. He suffered through cancer and had to stay away from the team from the beginning of the season. Just being a part of what he is all about makes me feel good as a person because of the kind of person that Joe Torre is. I think we all have that respect for him. I think that's why we have been able to be so successful as a team.

Miller: How much have you shared the cancer experience with him?

Strawberry: I really haven't shared the cancer experience with too many people. It was more of a hidden agenda for me, everyone knew I had cancer and I was battling cancer, but my whole thing was that I'm okay that I'll get through this trying to be a very strong person and not really trying to lay any sorrow for myself on anyone else. I've just always been like that, I don't why. It caused me a lot of pain.

Miller: So you look at it differently now?

Strawberry: As I look back on it, I wish I had probably done it a little bit different. Maybe I should have thought about my health more than being concerned about getting back on the field. I think I put a tremendous amount of pressure on myself to overcome cancer and get back for Opening Day and I think that caused me a lot of problems.

Miller: During spring training, you wanted to be with the Yankees so badly that you stopped telling them that you were still taking chemotherapy?

Strawberry: I wanted to start the season ... I wanted to prove to myself more than anything that I wasn't going to let cancer dictate where I would be at the start of the season. Unfortunately, cancer is a deadly disease, and I think I should have focused more on the seriousness of this type of disease and the chemotherapy and the type of effects that the chemo was having on me. I was trying to do everything in spring training, out in the sun, and trying to participate in spring training. There are some things I shouldn't have been doing on certain days. (Yankees broadcaster) Suzyn Waldman (who had breast cancer) used to always tell me, "It's okay to feel bad. You don't need to go out there and try to prove anything. You're taking chemotherapy. You just have to understand how serious this is." Sometimes I wished I would have listened to her. I was as stubborn as I was and hardheaded, I wanted to do it my way. My way caused me more pain.

Miller: How much of a barrier has it been since some people think you're this big guy, 6'6" and you're a big towering guy hitting home runs, and it is a weakness if you can't conquer something?

Strawberry: I think it teaches you about life situations and especially when we deal with the disease of cancer. It's not a physical injury that may happen to you as far as playing-wise. It's a more serious issue that you have to deal with and you have to be able to talk to people about it. I think my doctors in New York told me that a long time ago. They said, "One day there is going to come a point when you are going to hit a wall." You know, I didn't really think about that and I had no concept about what wall he was talking about. He said, "Every cancer patient goes through it, and you really just have to try to be prepared for it." When I hit my wall, I wasn't prepared for it. He gave me some advice about it that I would have to be able to deal with it and come out and talk about it because of the feelings and how a person feels through the whole process of going through recovering from cancer.

Miller: How much of that wall was a factor in your relapse from alcohol and drug addiction?

Strawberry: I think it played a major factor in my thinking, psychologically, you know, my thinking started to drift. I stopped focusing on the things I needed to focus on, as far as taking care of myself and staying in one day at a time. I wanted everything now and I know as a recovering person you can't do that. It just doesn't work that way. Everything just doesn't come down. I have to stay into the simple mind of what today can bring me. I got so far away from that and I think that caused me to drift into another place in my mind and that place is a very sick place, for anyone who has to suffer through alcoholism. I am no different. Once I suffered through it and don't deal with it, I am bound to relapse. There is no question about it.

Miller: What goes through your mind when you take that first drink? What conditions or surroundings ... are you alone or do you go out somewhere?

Strawberry: Basically you go out or be alone. I just basically lost sight of myself and who I was. Like I said, of being a recovery person and suffering from alcoholism, if you are not around the people that you need to be around, you are definitely going to lose sight of who you are and picking up a drink is deadly to me. There is no question about it. I think sometimes people look at a person like myself, a high profile person, a little differently because I am in the public eye. I am a person that is suffering from alcoholism, too, and who is trying to recover and live one day at a time. It gets very difficult for me too at times, and I just have to remember to stay in close connection with the people who really care about me, like my sponsor and my agent, Eric (Grossman). These are the people and the people in the program, those are the people that I have to really stay close to when things do get tough.

Miller: Tell us what happened that night in April, in Tampa?

Strawberry: It was just unfortunate. I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and my sickness, it caused me a lot of pain. I really don't like to go into details about it, but I think, for me, it was probably the best thing that ever happened for me. It was a blessing in disguise because it made me realize that getting back into the sickness of alcoholism, I needed to get back on the right track and get back sober again.

Miller: Do you ever think about, if that (the arrest) had not happened, what the progression would have been?

Strawberry: Oh yeah! I always think about that if that had not happened down in Tampa, there was a great possibility I would have probably ended up in a very ugly place as far as my sickness and my alcoholism, drinking and using drugs again, because that is just the way it works. It is an illness. I think sometimes people don't realize how a person suffers in their illness and if you don't get back on track right away, you have a great chance of falling in a very deep hole and maybe never getting out. I was able to get out of that hole because of my sponsor, Josh, who lives here in California, with 10 years in sobriety, actually came down to Florida to help me walk right through it and get myself back on the right track.

Miller: Take us through a little bit about what happened last October, when you learned you had colon cancer?

Strawberry: Well, I think it was going on for a couple of months. I just felt like, "I'll get through this process." I was feeling bad day after day, and every time I went to use the restroom, I had blood in the stool. My wife was very concerned about it and she had talked about it and said, "You need to go get yourself checked" and I said, "No, I'm okay its just probably ulcers, stress, pressure of playing, I want to get out there and I want to do well, be competitive." I think those things were playing a big part of getting me through that whole process. I used to go to the trainer sometimes and I would say, "I'm having these real stomach problems, I need something to take." So I would take Maalox and I drank Maalox and that would kind of make me feel a little bit better throughout the period of going to play. And after the game I would go back to my room late at night and I would feel these stomach cramps where it would keep me up throughout the middle of the night. I just really never got to the point of saying anything and finally it came, I said one day in my mind, I said one day when the season is over, September is over, when I get a chance, I'm going to go see a doctor and find out what is going on with me, and I took that chance.

Miller: What are the effects today, what do you have to do today a year after the colon cancer surgery?

Strawberry: All I have to do is try to keep my faith and think on a positive note that I'm doing well, because physically I feel well now and that is something I hadn't felt for a long time. Because after I had cancer surgery, I went through the process of going through chemo and then, in January of last year, I ended up in the same situation again of being back in the hospital and being re-operated on for scar tissue. I just thought at that point I just really couldn't take this anymore, laying up in the hospital for another five days in the same position, back on my back with needles all up in me, and all these different things that you have to go through. It is the most painful situation for anyone to have to face, going through that whole procedure again. I just felt like I needed to get past that point and get past the chemotherapy and get myself where I started to feel good. Today I feel pretty good about where I'm at and where I'm going.

Miller: You talk in your book about how the disease affected your life in your family and how your mother kind of denied her disease when she was dying and really didn't tell anybody when it started to get bad.

Strawberry: Yeah, that my mom did, and I think that is where I get it from, my mom. She didn't want the kids, my sisters and my brothers to suffer from the fact that we knew she was terminally ill and she was dying. It was very hard for us to accept that, my mom was very young, she was in her early fifties and here it is, we are looking at her and she is dying. It just got to the point where she just kept us in prayers, she was a very strong Christian, she kept us in prayers and she turned us all over to God and she made her peace. It was the greatest thing that I have ever seen in my life, to see my mom pass on that Sunday where she was very peaceful about it. She just wanted to know that the kids were going to be okay. She died from terminal breast cancer, and here it is, years later, I'm suffering from the same disease, so it was very tough for me to be able to tell anyone because I'm so much like my mom. I'm very private about what I am inside and my body condition and I think that is where I got it from.

Miller: The other thing you talk about in your book is the lack of a relationship with your father and how it has been repaired a bit over the years.

Strawberry: Yeah, it has been repaired a bit and I would like for it to get repaired more. There are a lot of things that happened with my father. But I've come to realize that he is not at fault, the alcoholism that I received probably came from him in genetics, and he probably received it from his dad, so there are a lot of things that I have to really mend together there. That is what its all about in recovering, you need to recover in life to make those amends and try to make things as good as possible, because I realized one thing: life is going to come to an end one day and I don't want to have anything on my heart, I want to be able to walk away when my time comes where my heart is clean about family and everybody else.

Miller: We are talking about your book Recovering Life, which you wrote with your wife Charisse, tell me about doing that.

Strawberry: I think it wasn't that difficult because we know our lives, and we know what we have been through and she has been right there with me, everything that I've suffered through, but she has been the strength of the family with our two children and another one on the way, so she is just wonderful. We sat down and they had actually wanted to do the book with me and I thought it would be a great idea to involve my wife in it because I wasn't just recovering life by myself, we were recovering our life together after all the things that we suffered through, through the cancer and the alcoholism which she has suffered through.

Miller: This spring, how were you able to keep the fact that you had started to drink again from her, since you were so close?

Strawberry: At first I was pretty good at it, being an alcoholic, you have that mind of knowing how to not let your other half know what is going. But she caught onto it, she caught on to the whole situation of how sick I was and she constantly stayed on me about getting help and staying with my sponsor and doing the things that I needed to do. But when you are in the middle of that addiction, it is very hard to even listen to someone like that because you don't want to hear it, you have to listen to someone that probably knows what it is...talking about more as recovery and everything, but she fought through it with me and the thing about it is she never gave up on me. That is the most important thing I can say about my wife, we have been through a lot and a lot of things have happened but she has always been there and that is how special she is.