Coach: The Pat Burns Story (2 page)

Before that Avalanche game in Denver—with key player Mats Sundin out of the lineup—Burns told his players that they had a ready-made excuse for yet another loss. Don’t accept that alibi, he pleaded. “I stood in the middle of the dressing room for a long time. I looked in their faces. Only about five of them could look me in the eye. I knew it was over.”

Peppered with questions afterwards, Fletcher told the travelling media that Burns would definitely be standing on the riser behind the Leaf bench—designed to give the home coach a subtle height advantage over his opposing number—for Toronto’s next game on Wednesday, back at the Gardens, against the Stanley Cup champion New Jersey Devils. Unusually, the team didn’t leave immediately following the Denver game, remaining overnight at their Mile High hotel.

Early Monday morning, Fletcher summoned Burns to his room. The two men conferred briefly. It was a painful meeting, with Burns actually consoling the older man, his friend and benefactor, in a puddle of tears now as he took away the job he’d bestowed with such hopefulness at the start of their adventure together. Fletcher had been weighing the decision for two days, praying the team would pick up at least one victory on the road trip, something positive to go home with. “We can’t go back to Toronto without a win,” he’d warned. Didn’t happen, and that forced Fletcher’s hand, which trembled. “I told Cliff I won’t quit. But I understood that this is what he had to do. I said, ‘Cliff, I know you’ve never fired a coach in midseason and I know this isn’t easy for you. Don’t worry. I understand. You’ve been great to me.’ ”

Burns professed to be most concerned about who would be taking up the reins and approved the choice of Beverley, who’d never coached a day in the NHL, as interim. He’d been Toronto’s director of player personnel. “I was happy to hear it was Nick. He’s a good man.” Eventually, the position went to Mike Murphy, who’d been through three campaigns as an assistant coach with Burns over the years. Burns had never trusted him. “He wants my job,” he’d confided to a friend, and he was right. Burns was not offered a lateral movement within the Leaf franchise and wouldn’t have accepted one anyway. And he did not offer to resign. He was axed. But he did stretch out his neck, inviting the blow.

In truth, with the deed done, Burns could exhale. “It was like, ‘Whew, take the gun away from me, don’t point that thing this way no more,’ ” recalls his confidant, Dixon. “He said, ‘They’ve all had that gun out for me—“Shoot him!” ’ Oh yeah, he was relieved.”

Each swearing to keep his lips sealed, Burns and Fletcher shook hands, embraced in an awkward hug, then proceeded to the airport and boarded their flight, poker-faced. The con was on.

It might seem atypical for Burns to, essentially, skulk out of town. He’d claimed to have never run away from a fight. Actually, he’d been a runner all his life—from a bad marriage and crumbling relationships, from parental responsibilities, from commitment, from jobs that no longer inspired or suited, from the risk of failure, from wreckage. None of this made him a bad man—far from it. But, like many complicated people, he was so much not what he often appeared—not tough and hardened to his marrow, but sensitive and easily wounded; not forthright, but secretive; not brimming with self-confidence, but frequently insecure; not honest, but … deceptive. He was, in fact, his own greatest invention: a persona crafted over the years to hide what really lay beneath—all the doubts and vulnerabilities and hurts, the fatherless boy who learned by his wits to become a man of substance and was still learning on the day he died.

In his motel room that icy March night in 1996, these were the demons pressing in on Burns, relieved as he genuinely was about being released from the horror that coaching the Leafs had become through a fifty-three-day ordeal of compounding disasters, withering behind the bench, perspiring in front of the media glare. He was too stricken to show his face to the media, and that’s why he’d fled, why Fletcher had consented to the all-is-fine ruse.

Burns told only a handful of intimates, calling Gilmour to thank him “because that guy gave his heart and soul to this team and I’ll always remember that,” informing his cousin and agent, Robin Burns, and breaking the news to his two kids, daughter Maureen inconsolable.

By mid-morning the following day, word had begun to leak, however, and the Leafs called a press conference, Fletcher visibly shaken as he addressed the media. Reporters were bitter at having been duped. They wanted a carcass to pick over and accused Fletcher of duplicity. The absent ex-coach was unapologetic for leaving his media scrutineers, some of whom had believed themselves close to Burns, in the lurch.

“I spoke to everybody I wanted to speak to,” he would say later. “Isn’t it my choice now? They had the chance to say I was a no good, rotten son of a bitch for four years and I never objected to talking to anyone on the job. But now it’s my time. I walked away. I shut my mouth. I took my pill and I went home. I never said anything to hurt a player’s career. I didn’t throw darts. I still have great respect for Cliff, and I don’t blame him for what happened because he was always fair with me. They made the change and that was it. But was it better after I left? How far did they go in the playoffs? Is that my fault, too? I gave four years of my life to the Toronto Maple Leafs. I emptied my guts. And we proved something. Maybe we didn’t prove the whole thing, because we didn’t win a Stanley Cup. But we proved something.”

On the road home that morning, the weather had cleared, the sky was blue and Burns’s spirits lifted somewhat. Like a wounded bear, he was going to a place where he felt safe—“I’ll hide in the woods for a while”—though never anticipating his hibernation would last quite so long, a full season to come out of the game that was his only real passion. In Magog, because his own lakeside retreat was rented out until the end of the month, he took refuge in a friend’s cedar-shingled house across the frozen pond, a twenty-five-acre property with all the conveniences of city life, a soapstone fireplace and a fat tabby called Li’l Bastard. Looking out the window, he could occasionally spot deer emerging timidly from the bush. “I’m just going to relax and let things go by. I certainly don’t plan on leaving the game. I still think I’m a good coach. I think I’ve proven that. I don’t think I’m a bum now because I’ve been fired. I’ll be back somewhere.”

He’d been down this road before and would travel there again. Seven years further on, he’d reach his ultimate destination—holding aloft that ungainly silver trophy bequeathed by Lord Stanley—the boy from St. Henri who’d willed himself to triumph, from cop to NHL coach to championship parade in a dreary New Jersey parking lot, not quite as he’d imagined it. Still, fate had smiled on Pat Burns. And then it delivered a death rattle.

P
ATRICK
J
OHN
J
OSEPH
B
URNS
was born April 4, 1952, in St. Henri, Montreal, the lively working-class francophone and Irish-immigrant neighbourhood immortalized by Gabrielle Roy in
The Tin Flute
. But this was St. Henri in its pre-gentrified era, grungy and grasping and insular.

So proud was Alfred Burns, Sr. of this new addition to the family, a second son who would be the last of six children, that he immediately set about planning a future immersed in hockey, as did thousands of other fathers in Quebec, dreaming about the National Hockey League for their squealing boy infants. Alfred Burns was such an ardent Montreal Canadiens fanatic that, upon returning home from the hospital to the family’s upstairs flat at 819 Laporte Avenue, he bought two hockey sticks and nailed them, in an X-shaped cross, above the baby’s crib. The family may not have been able to afford fancy layettes and mobiles to amuse their newborn, but from the first days of his life, Baby Patrick’s hazel eyes would open on a sacred hockey montage.

Paternally, the Burnses were Catholics who hailed originally from Scotland, tracing their history to a town called Burnshead in the county of Cumberland, during the reign of Edward I. The Burnses had their own coat of arms: a hand holding a hunting horn—symbolizing power—surrounded
by three white fleur-de-lis, signifying peace. The clan’s motto: “Ever ready.”

From genealogical research undertaken by Patrick’s sister Diane, the family’s ancestors abandoned Scotland for Ireland around the time of the Great Potato Famine that began in 1845, an inauspicious move, since destitute Irish families were fleeing starvation by the boatloads for America. Plenty of Burnses joined the mass emigration, but this branch of the family hung on. It was Alfred Burns’s grandfather who sailed to Canada from County Cork.

His progeny fared adequately; a hard-working lot from which eventually sprang Pat Burns, one of the NHL’s most respected coaches, three times winner of the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year, and among the highest paid in his profession. None of that, of course, could have been envisioned when Louise Geraldeau Burns brought her baby home to a cramped apartment. Of Louise’s heritage, little is known except that her forebears had lived in the region of rural Calumet, Quebec, for as far back as could be traced.

Alfred Burns was a strapping fellow, baldish, with a gift for the gab and a rollicking sense of humour, traits his son would inherit. “My father was Irish right to the bone,” Pat would say. His hefty dimensions came from Alfred, too, but otherwise Pat physically resembled Louise. Diane, next youngest to Pat and seven years his senior, idolized her dad. “He was a very good father. Taught me how to put a worm on a hook. He called Patrick his chum. He was so pleased to have another son. Dad was a great fisherman; he loved boats. Pat took that up quite a bit from him.”

When Louise met Alfred, they were both working at Imperial Tobacco in Montreal. She was living in a boarding house, drawn to the big city from Calumet in pursuit of gainful employment, first as a cleaning lady, then babysitting for a “high-class” family, before moving on to the tobacco company. Her given name was Giralda, but Alfred couldn’t even pronounce that, and everybody called her Louise. Alfred was a master electrician and Louise was on the assembly line, churning out cigarettes. She spoke no English; he spoke no French. The women at the plant all wore trousers, not for fashion but for comfort and utilitarian purpose. One hot afternoon, she
was sitting in the park across the street from the sprawling factory and rolled up her pant legs. Alfred spotted the young lady’s shapely calves and thought, appreciatively, “Hmm.” They were married within a year, and the babies starting coming.

The flat on Laporte Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk from Imperial Tobacco, was long and narrow. A hallway led to a living room, dining room, the couple’s bedroom, a bedroom for the older children, and another, in the back, with bunk beds, to be shared years later by Pat and Diane. First born was Violet, now in her late seventies, then Alfred Jr.—called Sonny—then Lillian and Phyllis and Diane, and then no pregnancy for seven years. “Pat came along really late,” recalls Diane. “He wasn’t a planned baby. I don’t know whether it was a fluke or not. Mom says she would have had more had my father not passed away.”

In St. Henri, the children—though not Pat, still a toddler—attended St. Thomas Aquinas School and worshipped at the attached St. Thomas Aquinas Church every Sunday. But the family left Montreal and moved to Châteauguay before Pat’s third birthday. A lovely profile written by then Montreal
Gazette
columnist Michael Farber in 1988, just as Burns was beginning his NHL career, would become the biographical template, resurrected as a requiem and widely reproduced twenty-two years later. Farber, trailing the coach through his old neighbourhood, could not possibly have grasped that even then Burns was burnishing an invented childhood, making up chunks of a sweet past as he undoubtedly wished it had been.

Burns recounted how his father had taken him to Canadiens games every few weeks, the two sitting in the whites at the Forum, peering around posts that blocked their view, the boy in his number 9 Maurice “Rocket” Richard sweater. “One of those big woollen ones, eh? With the turtleneck. During the fall and spring, they’d start scratching you, eh? Somebody in my family bought me a Blackhawks shirt. I don’t know who—an aunt, I guess. I cried my eyes out. I couldn’t wear it here. I couldn’t wear it here.”

Though not yet three years old at the time, Burns claimed to remember his father and brother, Sonny, listening to reports on the radio one evening
about a commotion developing outside the Forum. It was March 17, 1955, St. Patrick’s Day, and this would become the politically and culturally defining Richard Riot in Quebec. NHL president Clarence Campbell, long at disciplinary odds with hockey icon Rocket Richard, had suspended the fiery superstar for, in his view, deliberately injuring an opponent during a game against Boston and then punching a linesman. Richard was suspended for the remainder of the season and the playoffs. With Richard’s chance at a scoring title and the team’s first-place standing in jeopardy, to say nothing of their postseason fortunes, Quebecers were incandescent with rage. Foolishly, after imposing the suspension, Campbell decided to attend Montreal’s very next home game. Spectators at the Forum could not restrain themselves, pummelling their Public Enemy No. 1 with food and garbage. The game was suspended and the arena evacuated, which dumped thousands of fuming fans onto the street. In the ensuing melee, windows were smashed and somebody set off a tear gas bomb. The riot marked a seminal moment in the evolution of Quebec’s modern nationalist movement.

Teased out of a memory likely formed from the retelling rather than the actual event witnessed, Burns recalled father and brother walking up Atwater Avenue to investigate the scene. “There was a story going around the neighbourhood that Dad was up there breaking windows, that the old man had gone up there to cause trouble. That was ridiculous. Years later, he would talk about it and say, ‘I remember back in 1955, they were throwing stuff at Mr. Campbell and …’ ”