When Chris Drury announced his retirement from the N.H.L. on Friday, of course it was in the most low-profile way possible. There were no news conferences, no television appearances, no teary-eyed remembrances of a 12-year career. He had the players union release a statement and that was it. It did not even contain a quotation from Drury.
And you can be almost certain you won’t hear from Drury again.
That is because retirement will finally allow him to slide out of a spotlight that he never wanted but that he could never shake — one that found him when he was 12 years old.
That was when he led his Trumbull, Conn., team to the Little League World Series championship. He was the winning pitcher and drove in two runs. Later, he won a national amateur hockey championship and, while at Boston University, the national championship and the Hobey Baker award as the best player in college hockey. His rookie season in the N.H.L. with the Colorado Avalanche brought the 1998 Calder Trophy as the rookie of the year. In 2001, he and the Avalanche won the Stanley Cup.
He had his best offensive years with the Buffalo Sabres and less successful stints with Calgary and the Rangers, but he never won another title.
And he never called attention to himself.
Drury, 35, once told me he learned his aversion to the spotlight when his Little League team returned home from Williamsport as champions. He was singled out as the star, but to him, he was just one of 15 boys who loved to play baseball. He learned to skirt attention by clamming up. Over the years, he developed a public personality resembling a brick wall. As electrifying as he could be on the ice, his charisma disappeared when it came time to talk about his achievements.
We were talking once about his Little League teammates, and Drury was going on about how much fun their magical summer had been. Suddenly, he stopped and said: “You can tell how much I loved it. This is the longest conversation we’ve ever had, isn’t it?”
The answer was yes, by a factor of 10.
For reporters, Drury’s reticence was maddening, because Drury was the ultimate clutch player. Of his 47 career playoff goals, 17 were game-winners. And he followed every one of them with at least one shrug and by foisting credit off on whoever passed him the puck. In the Avalanche years, he played wing with Peter Forsberg at center, and he could have been considered the president of Forsberg’s fan club.
I first met Drury at Boston University, when I was writing about his teammate, Travis Roy, who had been paralyzed after crashing into the boards in his first college hockey game. Drury had been thrust into a role beyond his years, dealing publicly with a calamity that struck close to him, literally. He said he was 10 feet away when Roy crumpled to the ice after a hit.
Drury rushed to his side and has stayed there, metaphorically, ever since. He stages a golf tournament every summer to benefit the Travis Roy Foundation. The two remain close friends. Drury once said that not a day goes by without his thinking of Roy.
As chance would have it, I was working as a columnist in Colorado when Drury arrived as an Avalanche rookie. When his roommate on the road, Milan Hejduk, told a group of us one day that Drury had helped him learn English, we laughed. I told Hejduk that Drury spoke to us so little it was hard to tell if Drury himself spoke English.
The Avalanche won a Stanley Cup in 2001 after Drury scored 11 goals in the playoffs, two of them game-winners. But the story lines circled around
Ray Bourque’s winning his first Cup in a long and venerable career, about Forsberg’s having emergency surgery to remove his spleen after a playoff game, about the lasting brilliance of goalie Patrick Roy. And Drury could not have been happier.
When Drury came to the Rangers in 2007, our paths crossed again. He seemed thrilled that his career had brought him back so close to home, playing for the team he loved as a child. He never got the fairy-tale ending he wanted — the Rangers never got past the second round of the playoffs in his tenure — and he never won the Olympic gold medal he dreamed of, coming so painfully close in gold medal games in 2002 and 2010.
But the rest of his career had a mythical quality.
“Chris is always in the right place at the right time, and that’s not a luck thing,” Dave Galla, one of Drury’s Trumbull teammates, told me when I wrote an article about them. “But what he’s done is nothing short of amazing. The greatest thing about him is his ability to remain a real person. He never lost touch with reality.”
And now, Drury returns to reality as a former star. He can finally fade into the background, the way he always wanted. And fittingly, on the day he retired, another Little League World Series was under way.
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