Coach: The Pat Burns Story (21 page)

Fletcher was keen but needed to run the idea by his board of directors. Meehan urged him to do it quickly, because there was a press conference to
make the announcement of Burns’s termination scheduled for Montreal the next day. Coincidentally, Meehan had just been contacted by Jacques Demers, who wanted to get back into coaching, though he was making a mint as a TV commentator. So now Meehan had two new coach clients. He was frantically juggling balls in the air.

Meehan spoke again to Savard, who was seeing Burns that night. Then he got back to Fletcher. “Are you on?” Fletcher said yes, and they talked money. It was a done deal except for the signature on the contract. Burns was over the moon, if gobsmacked. On the blower with Meehan, he kept repeating, “Are you serious?” Meehan was clear: If you want this to happen, it will happen. “Coach the Toronto Maple Leafs? Oh yeah.”

In Montreal the next day, the announcement of Burns’s departure was made to a mostly shocked media horde. Burns, emotional, claimed reluctance to leave, insisted he wasn’t running away—anybody in the room care to dispute that?—but admitted feeling overwhelming pressure to resign. “When you’re criticized openly, in the way I have been, I don’t care who’s in the seat, it’s really hard to take.” The flower of Montreal journalism, caught napping, was thunderstruck. And they were still clueless as to what was about to unfold five hundred kilometres down Highway 401. Meehan had booked plane tickets for himself and Burns. They went directly from the Montreal presser to the airport. During the flight, Burns was bewildered. “I can’t believe all this happening.” Recalls Meehan: “He was in seventh heaven.”

Landing in Toronto, Meehan and Burns went straight to Maple Leaf Gardens for a first face-to-face meeting with Fletcher and their second press conference of the day. Welcome the new Toronto coach: Pat Burns.

It was a win-win dénouement, or actually win-win-win, because Meehan placed Demers with the Canadiens. The agent was justifiably pleased with himself. “Montreal was happy to move Burns out, both sides got their settlement, Pat could say he hadn’t been fired, and the Canadiens got a new coach who ended up taking them to the Stanley Cup. There was no bitterness. Everybody was happy.”

R
ULE NUMBER 1:
The Toronto Maple Leaf crest was never to touch the ground.

Symbols meant a lot to Pat Burns. His primary job in a city where the hapless hockey team was being mocked as the Maple Laughs was to regenerate respect—for the franchise, among the players, and definitely for the new coach. For starters, that meant no more tossing of the jersey on the grimy floor of the dressing room, like a used Kleenex. Veneration of club logos has since become a widespread practice across the NHL, where reporters can even be fined for stepping on the crest woven into carpeting. But in the fall of 1992, in a grungy Maple Leaf Gardens dressing room that had no broadloom underfoot, Burns was the first to initiate a statute against sacrilegious abuse of the trademark insignia.

“After a game, we used to just throw our sweaters into a laundry cart—it was really just a grocery cart—in the middle of the room,” recalls Mike Foligno, one of the returning Leafs who’d been part of the team that had finished out of the playoffs in the spring. “Pat wanted to make sure that we held ourselves accountable for the fact we were playing in a hockey-hungry city like Toronto. I remember him specifically saying he was so
proud to be able to coach one of the Original Six teams, and he wanted to impress upon us what that really meant. There was a hanger behind your stall. When you took off the sweater, you had to hang it up on the hanger and the trainer would pick it up later to do the laundry. You might not think those kinds of little things would make a difference, but they do when you’re talking about the attention to detail that makes the difference from one organization to another. Even something as small as that, never letting the jersey drop on the floor, never letting the logo touch the ground, was about bringing back pride in the club.”

Cliff Fletcher, president and general manager, had begun the process of rehabilitating the Leafs when he swung a blockbuster deal towards the end of the 1991–92 campaign, picking the pocket of his counterpart and former protégé in Calgary, Doug Risebrough. That ten-player swap remains the biggest trade ever in the NHL. Toronto gave up a fifty-goal scorer in Gary Leeman, with enforcer Craig Berube and other movable parts thrown into the package. But in return, the Leafs got Doug Gilmour—the club’s mainstay for several years to come—along with Jamie Macoun, Ric Nattress, Kent Manderville and backup goalie Rick Wamsley. Then, for the first and only time in his long career, Fletcher hired a coach over the phone.

Toronto had been without a coach since May 4, when Tom Watt moved into the front office as director of player development. Fletcher was looking for a bench boss who would command instant esteem, who would grow with the team. “I did not want to sit at home and twiddle my thumbs,” said Burns at his May 29 introductory press conference, explaining why he’d wasted not a minute jumping from Montreal to the Leafs. And Fletcher had made Burns an offer he couldn’t refuse: two years that matched the $750,000 remaining on his contract with Montreal, and two more years with a salary hike after that—$1.7 million overall. That made Burns, the twenty-second man entrusted with the whistle in Toronto’s history, one of the highest-paid coaches in the league. He became only the second man in the annals of the NHL to coach both storied franchises, Dick Irvin being the other. But Burns had switched from a perennial
contender, with whom he’d posted a .609 winning percentage in four seasons—the best mark in the NHL during that span—to a franchise that hadn’t finished over .500 since 1978–79. He had his hands full.

Asked what needed doing to transform a team that had missed the playoffs in three of the past four years, Burns said, “The players will have to learn what it takes to win, and I’ll be there every night to remind them.” Finally, after an absence of fifteen years and with the death of barmy owner Harold Ballard, there was a palpable sense of change in the air, something to fuel optimism. When a French-language reporter at the packed press conference asked Burns, “
Quelques mots en français?
” he retorted in faux exasperation: “I thought that was finished.” The forty-year-old coach pulled on a Leaf jacket for photographs. “It’s a funny feeling, but I like the feeling.”

The local media horde was excited, and so was Burns. “Coming to another hockey Mecca like Toronto makes you a better coach. I want to have fun again. I want to make it fun for everybody, and it’s fun when you win.” The fun, he said, had gone out of his job in Montreal. “When you won, they didn’t like the style you played. When you won, it was because the other team was no good. If you lost, it was because you had no system. If a player didn’t score on certain nights, it was because you were holding him back. If he did score, you didn’t play him enough. It was a no-win situation.”

Compared to Montreal, Toronto’s fans had modest expectations. Simply returning to postseason play would be grounds for hoopla. Burns tacitly let on that there had been interest in him from other organizations, though he didn’t specifically mention the Los Angeles overture, saying only: “I wasn’t interested in going to practice with sandals on. I want to wear some good boots and go to work. I wish we could start tomorrow.” He also committed a blooper when admitting unfamiliarity with the Toronto players: “I don’t know the players very well. There’s Darryl Gilmour, and I’ve always been a Wendel Clark fan.” Darryl Gilmour had been an obscure goaltender in the minors, and where Burns came up with that name is anybody’s guess. The other Gilmour, Doug, was at a fast-food restaurant with daughter Maddison when he heard that Burns had been hired, and he was dumbstruck. “At first I said, ‘Yeah, right, good one.’ It
came as a huge surprise, because nobody expected it.” He cracked up over the new coach getting his first name wrong. “Tell George no problem.” They met face to face shortly afterwards. “He took me to Filmores.” That’s one of Toronto’s oldest strip joints. “We were there for half an hour, and then all of a sudden it went crazy with people congratulating him and asking for autographs, so we went on to a little pub. Right away, he told me, ‘This is what I expect: you’re one of our best players, and every day in practice you better work hard. I’m going to give you time off, but make sure, games and practices, you’re the best player on the ice, and everybody will follow you.’ ” Burns added: “I just got here, you just got here. Let’s do this together.”

Burns talked seriously with Wendel Clark as well, delicately suggesting that improved conditioning might help keep the captain out of the medical room. Clark was unquestionably the most popular athlete in town—he and Todd Gill were the longest-tenured Leafs, survivors of the worst era in Toronto hockey history—but with only 187 games on his resumé over the previous five seasons, constantly felled by injuries, it was unclear where Clark fit into Burns’s plans. The coach settled that matter quickly. “I believe in Wendel Clark. We want Wendel to be a prime-time player.”

The addition of Burns, who kept Mike Murphy and Mike Kitchen as assistants, imbued the Leafs with instant cachet. He was the embodiment of Irish temper and Gallic pride, he was colourful after years of bland coaching in Toronto, and he was a proven winner even without a Stanley Cup ring. Not since Punch Imlach’s first tour of duty in the ’60s had Toronto boasted a coach with such presence. “I have never, ever missed the playoffs,” he stressed. “I don’t intend to start now.” No slouches in the kaching-kaching department, the club’s bean-counters immediately jacked up ticket prices to reflect the promise Burns represented. When the organization threw a party to reveal the team’s new jersey for the upcoming season—the current, straight-edged Maple Leaf logo on a retro striped sweater—more than 7,500 fans showed up, delivering an outpouring of affection: “We love you, Pat Burns!” As caught up as anybody in optimism, Burns nevertheless tried to calm anticipations. “They’re not a good team,
I don’t hide the fact. And I’m not a saviour. I’m coming in here with a lot of help from guys like Cliff. If we make the playoffs, we’ll be that much better. People talk Stanley Cup and I say, ‘Just relax.’ They haven’t seen it in a long time here. I think they just want a hard-working hockey club, and I can give them that every night.” Fletcher observed: “Pat Burns’s hockey teams are notorious for giving a consistent effort every shift of every game. He won’t tolerate anything less.” He confidently predicted Toronto would make the playoffs. “Pat’s teams have, in my opinion, always overachieved.” When Glenn Anderson, notable space cadet, enthused that the Leafs would undoubtedly make the playoffs, even “definitely contend for the Stanley Cup this year,” Burns called a timeout. “Let’s not block off Yonge Street for the parade just yet.”

Training camp in September opened with the proverbial clean slate, Burns warning his players he intended to run hard workouts, no goofing around. “I’ve been out in the work world myself with my lunch box, and I don’t see anything wrong with asking for an all-out effort. We will try a variety of things to make the workouts interesting but, yes, they will be tough.” He chose not to look at videotape of the team’s games from the year before. “I don’t want to hate some of the things I see before we get started.”

The elder statesman on the team was Foligno, at age thirty-two. He was also the resident jokester, spiritual focal point and social convener. Once, years earlier during a preseason game in Kitchener that was held up by lighting problems, Foligno soothed the restless fans by crooning Italian love songs over the PA system. But he checked into camp on September 11, 1992, after months and months of painstakingly rehabbing a leg that had been shattered in two places below the knee just before the previous Christmas, unsure whether the limb would hold up to the rigours of a fourteenth NHL season. “Pat pulled me aside and said, ‘Look, I want you to be part of this thing. You’ve worked your butt off to get back here. Just take whatever time you need and know that I want you on my team.’ So that was a real boost of confidence for me.”

Upwards of seventy players reported for day one of training camp, with only a few guaranteed jobs. “I remember the first meeting that we had,” says Foligno. “Sometimes that first meeting is the one that sets the tone for the relationship between coach and players. We were all wondering about Pat’s thought process, what his expectations were. So we had this meeting, the introductions made, and at the end he kicked everybody out except the guys who’d played on the team the year before. He told us we had jobs if we wanted them—that they were our jobs to earn, but also to lose. He said there were a lot of young players at camp, but he wasn’t going to give a kid a job just for the sake of making a change. If we came in with the right attitude, the right work ethic and dedication, and showed leadership qualities and also the sportsmanship qualities that he wanted, he would give us the opportunity. After that meeting, we all said, ‘You know what? This guy’s genuine.’ He wanted to move forward with a veteran team if he could, because that would be a more smooth transition for any coach.”

On the second day of camp, Burns blew a gasket. Partway through the morning session, the coach decided he’d seen enough, storming down from his perch high in the stands and ordering a halt. He gave the twenty-two players on the ice a thirty-second tongue-lashing before returning to his seat. Burns hadn’t liked the low tempo he’d just observed. “The attitude was, ‘Let’s get this over with and punch the clock.’ I wasn’t going to put up with that. I don’t want to whip players, but I’ll do it if I have to.”

Sylvain Lefebvre, who’d signed with Toronto as a free agent over the summer, chuckled. This was the Burns he knew and mostly loved from Montreal. “If you don’t work, it really ticks him off. He likes practices at a high tempo. You never stop. He doesn’t keep you out there for two hours every day, but you learn to come to practice and work full out, not just float.”