Darryl Strawberry holds inaugural fundraising event in Glen Head to help youth fight addiction

Darryl Strawberry drove his golf cart up by the second tee for the start of his round under a cloud-filled sky hovering above Glen Head Country Club on Monday, joining the foursome who had paid to play with a baseball celebrity.

This one is now 61.

But Strawberry still showed a strong lefty swing, this time with a smaller ball than the kind he used to hit very far — far enough for 335 career home runs.

He took a 5-wood out of his bag and drilled a shot down the right side of the fairway. However, there was an even better ball struck by one of his playing partners, so Strawberry hit his second shot from that spot and the ball landed about 10 feet to the right of the hole.

“I get lucky every now and then,” Strawberry quipped.

The former 17-year major-leaguer, who played his first eight seasons with the Mets and final five with the Yankees, went through a well-documented and lengthy history of substance abuse before turning his life right side up. Strawberry knows he is very lucky.

“I’m still here. I’m alive,” Strawberry said while away from the crowd during a brunch before the round. “These kids today, they’re not making it.”

Strawberry, now a minister who lives in St. Louis and preaches around the country, arrived at Glen Head to try to make a difference for those kids with the inaugural Darryl Strawberry Celebrity Golf Classic. It was a fundraiser for Strawberry Ministries and was in honor of the 1986 Mets.

There was the chance to play golf with members of that championship team, plus other former Mets, Yankees and professional athletes. There was a brunch, dinner after the round and a live auction of sports memorabilia, too.

Strawberry was grateful to the sponsors, everyone else who put their cash toward the event and the ex-players who attended.

“I take the funds, and if a kid needs to get into treatment and he doesn’t have money to get into treatment, I’ll send him to get into a treatment program that I know,” Strawberry said. “I’ll send the treatment program $3,500 to keep the kid in there 90 days to six months.”

Strawberry spoke about “the epidemic that we have with fentanyl and the opioid crisis, [and] the heroin addiction that’s killing basically white suburban kids.”

“You just hope that a generation of young people won’t get addicted to drugs,” Strawberry said. “But they are addicted. So what do you do? You don’t sit around, because you know the addiction is there. The reality is we need to try to help.”

Strawberry has been married to his wife, Tracy, for 17 years. Meeting her was a turning point.

“My wife has got over about 24 years of recovery and I’m probably at about 20,” Strawberry said. “She was the one that helped me. She was the one that taught me the importance of getting well to help somebody else.”

His old teammates wanted to be by his side to support the cause.

“Hopefully Straw, his ministries, bring awareness to it, which they have,” Howard Johnson said.

The Mets Hall of Famer was one of about 15 from the 1986 team on a putting green, reunited, posing for pictures.

“I only came for Darryl,” Kevin Mitchell said. “He changed his life. What he’s doing, it’s a good cause.”

Like Mitchell, Jesse Orosco came from California to support Strawberry.

“Darryl, in the early days, had a couple of hiccups at the time, but he overcame it,” the former closer said. “He’s just a good man.”

Mookie Wilson said the turnout just showed that these ’86 guys were close then and are close now.

The man who hit the ball through Bill Buckner’s legs to win Game 6 of the 1986 World Series against Boston said Strawberry summed it up this way at their dinner in a Roslyn hotel Sunday: “We were brothers 30 years ago and we’ll be brothers 30 years from now.”

“He’s just like most of us — we grow up,” Wilson said. “We change .  .  . He’s always been a good person. That’s something that never changed. But his focus is on helping others more now. He’s not worried about himself anymore.”