He bounced around globe.

Byline: Jennifer Toland

N.E. BASKETBALL HALL OF FAME

The green leather cover on Lee Drury's pocket-size diary is cracked, the binding is gone and the inside pages are faded. He turns to the first of 62 entries - penned July 11, 1965 while he and his equally excited Springfield College basketball teammates rode a bus to Bradley Field during the first leg of a life-changing journey - and really needs his glasses to read the youthful scrawl. But not really, because memory easily takes over.

Drury, a Fitchburg native who starred on the 1961-62 Fitchburg High hoops team, will never forget that summer before his senior year in college, 48 years ago now, when Pride players and their coach, the legendary Dr. Eddie Steitz, made a two-month "Around the World" goodwill tour from Paris to Tokyo, with stops in Rome, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, Bangkok and Hong Kong in between.

The U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs coordinated the excursion, which took place as the Vietnam War waged on, to foster international relationships and promote and teach the game of basketball. As the birthplace of basketball, Springfield College and its players were aptly chosen as emissaries.

"It was an unbelievable experience," Drury said during an interview in his office at the Cumberland Senior Center in Rhode Island, where he has been director for seven years. "Most of us had never flown before, let alone had a passport made up. We had to get all these shots. Once we were there, I think as individuals we all had our little dreams - are we really here?"

Springfield was a top team in the 1960s and competed for regional supremacy with Assumption, Northeastern, AIC and Bridgeport. Drury, a point guard, served as co-captain of the 1965-66 team along with Petersham's Larry Buell. In their final two seasons, the pair led Springfield to a record of 63-10, including victories over Holy Cross.

Drury, Buell and the rest of their teammates - Steitz passed away in 1990 - reunite every couple of years to reminisce about those good times and especially the "Around the World" tour.

"We get together and it's always, `Do you remember ...?'" Drury said, "and yeah, you do, but `What brought that on?' Everyone has vivid recollections."

This weekend's gathering in Worcester will be extra special for Drury and his friends - as a team, they are being inducted into the New England Basketball Hall of Fame. Festivities take place today at the DCU Center.

"It gives us a good reason to get together," Drury said. "And I'm sure we'll talk about what we're going to do in two years to mark the 50th anniversary of our trip around the world."

Drury, a member of the Fitchburg High Hall of Fame, coached for many years after graduating from Springfield, most notably at Bryant, where he was men's basketball coach and athletic director for 20 years. Drury was one of the founders of the Northeast-10 Conference.

He and his wife of 40 years, Eileen, who is also from Fitchburg, live in Smithfield. They have three children and three grandchildren, whose photographs decorate the wall behind Drury's desk.

Also hanging there is an 8-by-10 black-and-white of Drury and his teammates and coaches standing in front of the Taj Mahal.

During the tour, Springfield played 26 competitive games, 20 exhibition games - some in scorching 113-degree heat - and put on 111 clinics. The events drew an estimated 250,000 fans, including 30,000 at a soccer stadium in India and thousands more at the Tokyo Olympic Stadium. Local newspapers covered the games - Drury has all the yellowed clippings taped in a scrapbook - and Drury was a guest on Radio Free Europe.

"We had these huge crowds and we said, `Are we really special?'" Drury said. "And we were. Nobody had ever done this before. They could have sent an all-star team and just beat people, but we were there to teach and spread the word of basketball and help countries get stronger in basketball, educate them in the sport."

Drury said the team was greeted by Springfield College alumni, ambassadors and other dignitaries at every stop and presented with gifts. The team toured the Colosseum in Rome and debated whether Mickey Mantle could hit one out of there. As the players visited in warmer climes and tried to adapt to spicier foods (they didn't), they got in a bit of trouble for drinking a month's supply of Coca-Cola in one weekend. In Batticaloa, as Drury wrote in his diary on July 21, they watched as a boy broke the world record for riding a bicycle backward (73 hours). They saw cobra and mongoose fights in Madras, and Drury remembers India's sprawling umbrella trees.

The summer of 1965 also marked the time of the Indo-Pakistani War. Armed guards were everywhere in airports in India and Pakistan. Tribal battalions lined the rugged route that the team took to a game in Kohat, Pakistan. A few days later, after a game and on the ride back to the hotel in Lahore, Pakistan, onlookers threw stones at the team bus. "Things aren't good between India and Pak," Drury noted in his diary on Sept. 4.

Near the end of the trip, the team was waiting for its connecting flight to Hong Kong. As they sat at the gate, players ate ice cream and entertained a group of kids by dribbling and spinning basketballs on their fingers. About 25 feet away, 300 American soldiers sat in their khaki uniforms.

"They must have been on R&R from Vietnam and they were waiting for their plane to go back," Drury said. "They looked at us, but they didn't see us. They were like dead people...