Coach: The Pat Burns Story (42 page)

In July, a Montreal radio station reported that Burns had been diagnosed with cancer for a second time, news shortly thereafter confirmed by the Devils. “He will not coach next year,” a solemn Lamoriello announced. Larry Robinson would return to the job he’d left after leading Jersey to a Stanley Cup championship in 2000. Burns was shattered. “I was feeling great. I was in top shape with great expectations. Then it showed up again in a CAT scan. That was devastating.”

This time, the cancer was in Burns’s liver. “I’d been feeling so much better, was going to the gym, looking forward to coaching again and then—
BAM
,” he told a friend. “That was the worst part, the worst day, when they gave me that news. I asked the doctor, ‘So, what do we do now?’ He said, ‘An operation and another six months of chemo.’ I thought, ‘Jesus.’ ”

He underwent surgery in August, doctors removing a third of the organ. But the liver can regenerate itself, so Burns and his family clung to the best-case scenario. “Fortunately, we got everything. It wasn’t a massive attack on the liver,” he said. His pal Chris Wood—a pilot who at that time
had his own plane—collected Burns in New Jersey, and flew him home to New Hampshire. Lamoriello had picked up Burns at the hospital and brought him to the Teterboro Airport. The patient boarded the aircraft unassisted.

Burns began another agonizing cycle of chemo and radiation. And he adamantly refused to rule out a reboot of his coaching career, at some future date, preferably with the Devils. “It’s motivation,” he said. “To overcome this sickness, you have to believe. It’s hard at times, but I’m going to try to beat this thing.” He even managed to find some humour in his situation. “He joked about his colostomy bag,” recalls sister Diane. “He said, ‘When I fart, I make bubbles.’ He was able to laugh about something like that.”

Weakened from his treatments, there were some good days, many more bad days back in Punta Gora. A doctor friend who was a hockey fan occasionally drove Burns into Tampa to watch Lightning games. In November, he was in attendance when the Devils pounded the Bolts 8–2 and he visited with the players afterwards. Slowly, his strength—and sprouts of new hair growth on a scalp gone bald from chemo—returned, testament to Burns’s tremendous physical resilience and formidably defiant state of mind. As his health improved, he resumed his scouting trips for the Devils, often in the company of Scotty Bowman, who was doing the same as a senior consultant for Detroit. “He lived pretty close to me, so we went to a lot of games together in Tampa and to the other coast,” recalls Bowman. This was the coach Burns had most idolized, and now here they were, a couple of semi-retired snowbirds, enjoying their excellent road tour adventures.

Bowman’s son, Stan, had been through two bouts of Hodgkin’s disease, so Scotty had seen up close the physical trials of treatment. They rarely discussed Burns’s illness, though. “I’d ask and he’d say, ‘Oh, I’m doing fine.’ Then I’d hear he was really having trouble, but he never let on. We’d watch these games together and commiserate when we saw things we didn’t like, whether it was the referee’s calls or because we couldn’t believe what some of the players were doing.” They established a close friendship. “He was sort of like me, I guess, because we’d both moved around
among teams. And we had the same ideas about player accountability.”

The two men gabbed about how damn hard it was to win a Cup—though Bowman had done it a record nine times, which seems inconceivable today. “It’s so elusive, winning a Cup,” says Bowman. “When you push players—and I did a lot of that, as did Pat—sometimes they end up, not tuning you out, but your voice doesn’t sound the same to them after a while. It’s probably easier to be a coach and last longer if you’re not so demanding. Pat was demanding. His overall record was outstanding, but eventually you’re judged on the performance of your team. It’s tragic he couldn’t enjoy his success longer when it finally came.”

Before completing a final cycle of chemotherapy late that year, Burns saddled up his Harley for another trip, dreading the treatment to come. “The stuff’s poison, right?” he told a Toronto friend about the chemo. “After the past year, my body’s full of poison. It knocks the shit out of me.” But it hadn’t knocked the fight out of him. “I’m going to beat this thing. We thought we had it beaten once …” He was without a shred of self-pity, didn’t rail at fate or God about his misfortunes. “I never blamed God, never said, ‘Why me?’ But this is such an up-and-down disease, mentally. There are days when you’re sure you’ll beat it, when you feel strong in your head and in your body. Then there are other days when you’re nauseous and throwing up, when your stomach hurts so bad, when you’re dizzy, when you’re so weak you can hardly walk.”

He forced himself to get up and out, walking Roxie, smelling the flowers, feeling the warm sun on his face. “Can’t just stay in the house and give in.” Frequently, he chatted with Lamoriello, loath to speak about his condition but always eager to talk hockey. Burns was profoundly thankful for the organization’s continuing support, financially and otherwise. The Devils had his back on a contract—vaguely described as a consultant gig—that extended insurance to cover steep medical bills: $30,000 per chemo treatment, white cell booster shots at $14,000 a pop. “I owe my life to the New Jersey Devils and Lou Lamoriello,” Burns stressed. “If it wouldn’t have been for my medical insurance, my operations, my chemo, everything, is over $1.5 million.”

On December 18, 2005, citing stress and poor health, Larry Robinson resigned as Devils coach. Lamoriello went behind the bench on an “interim” basis—and stayed there for the rest of the season. Within a few weeks of that development, Burns finished off his chemotherapy. When he and Robinson later attended a Devils game in Tampa together—Burns looking hale, with good colour—rumours flared that he was sufficiently fit to take back his old job, possibly at the beginning of the 2006–07 campaign. He didn’t squelch the reports, but maintained a cautious posture about his physical recovery. “I don’t want to get my hopes up.” To a friend, he revealed a troubling detail: “There’s still some stuff in there. Doctors said to come back every few months to see what’s happening.”

When the season began, the coach behind the Jersey bench was Claude Julien.

The next public spotting of Burns was in Toronto, where Wendel Clark had organized a reunion of the ’92–93 squad, their old coach the guest of honour, seventeen players crowding into Mats Sundin’s private box for a Leaf game, swapping stories. This was the team that Burns remembered most fondly, their framed photograph holding pride of place above the mantel at his New Hampshire home. “I look back on those years in Toronto and, you know, they really were the best. That team, they loved each other, everybody was a family.” Burns told reporters he was feeling dandy. “The best I’ve ever felt. You wouldn’t call it full remission because they’re always watching. There’s never full remission when you have this. It’s something they have to watch and watch and watch.”

Itching for a return to hockey, Burns stuck a toe back into the coaching waters, at least symbolically, tickled when named as one of four ceremonial skippers—along with Bowman, Jacques Demers and Michel Bergeron—for the annual Canadian junior prospects’ game on January 17, 2007. His “Team Red” won the match 5–3 in Quebec City. Buzzed by reporters for an update on his health, Burns said: “Nobody can guarantee it. You live every day with that—that it can come back, and then you face it and punch
at it again. You keep your left up and swing with your right. That’s all you can do.”

Burns was making more public appearances, as if striving to show the hockey world that he was robust and sturdy, even suitable for employment. Primarily, he was intent on living the life he had, which seemingly had been restored to him, without fear of what might happen tomorrow and tomorrow. “If you start thinking like that, you’re in trouble. If you get up and think you’re going to get sick again, you can’t live your life.” Together with Luc Robitaille, he was inducted into the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League Hall of Fame in April, arriving in Montreal to enjoy the festivities. He led a fundraising march there to raise awareness of prostate cancer. In Toronto, he was a head-table guest at the annual Conn Smythe dinner to benefit Easter Seals, sharing his insights into the nature of serious illness. “We all say to ourselves, ‘It can’t happen to me.’ I said that for a long time, too, until it creeps up and kicks you right in the ass. I didn’t expect it. I felt great. I’d never been sick in my life. I just tell people to make sure they get screened and checked, and don’t lose faith. There are some days when, after a round of radiation and chemo, you definitely feel like, ‘Is this ever going to end?’ or ‘Is this the end?’ But you have to stand up, and the next day, you feel better, and the day after, you feel better, and then you get it again and you get another treatment and it puts you down. But that’s the way it is. It’s very stressful, not only physically, but psychologically.”

In Jersey, Lamoriello dumped Julien after just one season and, predictably, Burns’s name was bandied about as possible replacement, mostly wishful thinking. Burns kept himself hockey-busy, though. In Montreal, he appeared for the relaunch of CKAC as a French-language all-sports radio station. He’d signed on for a morning gig. Repeatedly, Burns was asked, “Are you okay now?” It wasn’t a question he could ever answer with 100 per cent assuredness. “It’s a cruel sickness. It can harbour and pop out at any time. But I feel strong. If you ask me if I could coach tomorrow, yes I could. I don’t want people to assume, ‘He’s sick, he can’t do it.’ ” Indeed, Burns added, he was fit enough to come back in the fall, if anyone wanted him. Just negotiate with Lamoriello, he advised, because
Burns had two years remaining on his scouting/consultant contract with the Devils. There was even a brief rumour that the Leafs were considering bringing Burns back to Toronto. His response when reached on a golf course in Florida: “Ha. Ha. Ha.” How dearly he would have loved that, though. Not that he was dissatisfied with his Devils duties. “Lou handed me the whole southeast to scout. And I get to hit a lot of golf balls while I’m doing it. It’s not a bad life.”

Apparently spry and chipper, Burns was delighted when named an associate coach on Ken Hitchcock’s staff for the 2008 world championships, held for the first time in Canada. The tournament would be a test case for his overall physical and mental stamina. “This is like taking baby steps back into it, and I sure am excited,” Burns enthused. It was real hockey, patrolling the narrow space behind a real bench. There was nothing tokenistic about the assignment. When Canada opened the tournament in Halifax on May 2, it was Burns’s first stint behind a bench since the Devils had been eliminated from the playoffs in April of 2004. Canada earned silver, defeated 2–1 in the gold medal game by Russia.

Was Burns really and truly back? Was that what this signified? Burns thought so. “Coaching is in your blood,” he said. “You miss it when you’re not there, and when you are there you say, ‘Geez, this is tough.’ I’ve been on both ends, so when the fall comes around, we’ll have to see, we’ll have to check everything out and make sure that’s what I want to do.”

The scuttlebutt went into overdrive. Burns was headed to the Senators, to the Sharks, to the Avalanche. Burns believed he was headed for the coaching job in San Jose and was quietly rejoicing over a tentative deal that would bring him a $2 million contract. Privately, however, doctors gently tempered his ambitions. “Don’t even think about it,” Burns’s doc-pal in Florida warned. “You won’t pass the physical.”

All his aroused optimism, his soaring hopefulness, was crushed in December when the cancer reappeared.

It was in his lungs, both sides.

It was incurable.

Jason Burns has only a few distinct childhood memories of his father. There was the time when, as a little boy, he got into a shed behind their home and disturbed a wasps’ nest. His father rescued him from the maddened swarm, absorbing a whole lot of stings in the process. He recalls, as well, the old dirt bike on which his dad occasionally propped him, steering his son for a gingerly ride in the woods.

More often, though, Jason has to study all the photographs taken by his mom, Danielle, to convince himself that his dad was really present, part of his life in those early years. “I remember him coming home and tossing his hockey gear down the stairs into the basement. But that’s pretty much it. There aren’t many memory souvenirs. I can’t remember sitting at the table with my mom and dad. I can’t remember being with him at Christmas. When I was little, he was working as a detective and he was coaching Midget AAA and he was scouting. So he was never there.”

As an adult, Jason is the spitting image of his father, a strapping, barrel-chested fellow with the same hazel eyes, the same Burns monobrow and a similar passion for hockey. He apprenticed as a welder, and for a time ran his own company, but didn’t like the business management part of it. Now he’s a firefighter in Gatineau, has coached a Junior C team, works on-ice with youth in a high school hockey program and does hockey commentary for a local radio station. Married to a schoolteacher, he became a father in late 2011. As Jason candidly admits, what he learned from his own dad about fathering is how
not
to do it. He loved his father fiercely, but is wistful about a relationship that was sporadic in its bonding moments, the son always yearning for an intimacy that the father was incapable of allowing. Jason didn’t even meet half-sister Maureen until he was about twelve years old, though they would become and still remain close. Hockey always came first in Pat’s life. As he was the first to acknowledge, parenting was not his forte. “My dad was so hard to seize, to figure out what he was thinking. We did click a little more when I got older. We tried to catch up a bit. But it’s never the same. You can’t bring your childhood back.”