I first spoke with Chris Drury in April 1998, when he was a senior at Boston University and the Avalanche traveled to Boston to meet the Bruins. He had just finished his college career with a loss to New Hampshire in the NCAA quarterfinals, and it was a week before he was named the winner of the Hobey Baker Memorial Award as NCAA hockey’s top player.
 
I was surprised that the team hadn’t tried to set up a meeting when the Avalanche was in Boston, and that was a foreshadowing of how they would take him for granted down the road. The Nordiques drafted him in 1994, after he graduated at Fairfield Prep in Connecticut, shortly after Lacroix took over as general manager, and the organization watched and waited through his career at BU.
 
“I’ve followed them a lot,” Drury told me in Boston. “But it’s got more to do with them being such a great team than the fact that they drafted me.”
 
At the time, despite his accomplishments in college hockey, Drury was best known for helping lead the team from Trumbull, Connecticut, to the Little League World Series championship in August 1989. His team’s starting catcher, Drury doubled as a pitcher and was on the mound as Trumbull shocked the heavily favored team from Taiwan—which we all suspected had players old enough to legally drink beer in the Williamsport bars—in the championship game. In the ensuing years, ESPN and other networks carrying Avalanche games showed the clip of a chunky Drury pitching, spitting, and jumping in the air after the final out roughly as many times as the stock footage of Red Wings–Avalanche mayhem at the height of the rivalry.
 
“We knew we weren’t supposed to win,” Drury told me. “I mean, we knew the combined scores of the past few championship games before that was 100–3 or something like that. Then you just looked at them physically, and there was no comparison between them and us. None. Nobody gave us a shot. I think we had looked at the other Americans and we were hoping, ‘Gee, we hope we don’t lose that bad.’”

Drury, then five feet one and 126 pounds, knew a worldwide television audience was watching. In the United States, Al Trautwig and former Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer were the announcers for the game broadcast on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
 
“I was pretty excited when I went out to the mound,” Drury said. “We had one other pitcher and we each pitched eight of our sixteen games, but he had started the fi rst one, so I guess you could say I was our number two pitcher. Th ere were 40,000 people there, and most of them and most of the country wanted us to win, and that really got the adrenaline going.”
 
Taiwan led 1–0 after the first inning, but a two-run bottom of the third gave the Americans a 2–1 lead halfway through the scheduled six-inning game.
 
“That seemed like a miracle in its own right,” Drury said. “People were happy that they didn’t have to leave early because we were getting killed.”
 
Ken Martin, Drury’s best friend both then and now, drove in a run with a single and later hit a home run. Drury also drove in a run and ended up jumping up and down when he got the final out. He had thrown a five-hitter.
 
“I think part of it was that in the years before, the U.S. teams had worked it so they’d have their big, hard-throwing kid ready for the championship game,” Drury said. “I didn’t even have a fastball. I threw curveballs and changeups and I think that threw them off. Plus, they had been so dominating, I don’t think they were ready for us.”
 
After the upset in the championship game, the Trumbull boys were invited to the 1989 World Series, and Drury threw out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 2 in Oakland—two days before the earthquake struck at Game 3 in San Francisco.
 
(I was at Candlestick Park when the earthquake struck, and here's my account from the stadium and the next few days, in the aftermath.)
 
They also appeared on Good Morning America and at the White House, where President Bush honored them.
 
So what happened to Drury’s baseball career?
 
“After that, I was playing both baseball, mostly as a catcher, and hockey,” Drury said. “Actually, I got hurt playing hockey my junior year of high school and wasn’t able to play baseball for a year, so it worked out that the decision was kind of made for me. I got checked in a hockey game and broke my wrist. I was able to play hockey with my hand in a cast, but not baseball.”
 
At one point after I was established as an author, I considered writing a book about Drury and the Boys From Trumbull. I talked with Drury and Martin about it, and even wrote a proposal, but never carried through on it and took on other projects.
 
Given the luxury of hindsight, that was one of the two books I wish I had written instead of settling on other ideas. The other was on the 1970 Spokane Indians, the best post-expansion minor-league team ever. (Lasorda, Garvey, Valentine, Buckner, Hutton ...) I saw them close-up and that's explained here.