Coach: The Pat Burns Story (5 page)

Burns drew approval from the senior management ranks by his willingness to learn French after someone pointed out the fleur-de-lis on his uniform shoulder. It was a language he’d always understood growing up but had never learned to speak properly, mastering only snatches of the slangy
joual
version—eloquent Québécois street French. The issue would take on political significance when Burns got the coaching job in Montreal
and had to deal daily with an aggressive francophone media that sneered at his pronunciation and accent. But as a newbie cop, he strove to improve his communication skills by taking French courses and submitting reports in both languages. “He didn’t speak the best French, but it was colourful,” smiles Janusz.

Burns went from traffic patrolman with a radar gun—though Gatineau did finally get those falsely advertised motorcycles—to walking a beat, to his own scout car, to unmarked vehicles, huge black Chevrolets immediately clocked by the bad guys. With the amalgamation of five regional police forces, management broke the Gatineau detachment down into three investigative teams. “We wore civilian clothes, drove unmarked vehicles,” says Janusz. “We’d patrol and do surveillance, try to get information or find people for the sergeants that were in that criminal investigation branch. Pat and I were constables, but we ended up in criminal investigations together. They gave us the title
agent enquêteur
, which was basically a fancy way of saying an investigator or detective.”

From the start, Burns had a knack for eliciting dope from contacts and snitches, slipping smoothly into the riffraff strata, the underbelly of urban crime. It was a peculiar talent, an intuitive instinct, but tailor-made for an ambitious cop. “He could talk to anybody,” says Janusz. “To get information, you’ve got to have an approach, be able to speak to people in their milieu. He worked that. He could adapt. If he needed to be hard-nosed, he would be hard-nosed. And if he needed to be cool, he was cool.”

Working undercover was the coolest cool of all. Burns tackled that challenge enthusiastically, growing his hair long—for a while, he actually sported a salon-perm Afro—cultivating goatee, sideburns and moustache, outlaw biker–style. He was fascinated by the desperado creed, felt at ease within that anti-establishment ethos. On many occasions later in life, Burns would admit that, had he not become a police officer, he might very well have gone the other way, seduced into vice. To a large extent, as a civilian, he would reproduce a quasi biker gang among friends similarly piggish about hogs, choppers, Harleys—the “Red Dogs,” they’d call themselves—setting off on long
vroom-vroom
rides across Canada and the
U.S., rarely missing the annual motorcycle rally in Laconia, New Hampshire. His fondness for that culture—and some of the genuine biker gang kingpins held him in affection, too, probably too close an arm-around—would land him in hot water two decades later, when Burns’s name came up in intercepts captured during a police investigation of Montreal’s motorcycle mob.

“There was a pool room on the main drag in Gatineau, and all the bikers hung out there,” remembers Janusz. “They had their patches and their shaved heads. They were called the Popeyes, out of Quebec, and then they became the Hells. They were involved with drugs, fencing stolen goods. Pat would go there and talk to them. He used to call them scumbags. But he could talk to them and feel comfortable with them, go the whole nine yards. He didn’t fear them. Was he respected by the scumbags? Yeah, I really think he was.”

In one of his own versions of those undercover days, the exaggerating Burns would claim to have actually
joined
the Outlaws, at a time when that gang was in full-out war with the rival Hells Angels, Hull affiliate. “Had my hair in a ponytail, drove a big Harley-Davidson. That wasn’t a bad assignment. Drink beer all day and watch the girls dance in the topless bars.”

Burns would never shake off the street-savvy cop reputation in his reincarnation as a coach—indeed, his law-enforcement background is precisely what captivated prospective GMs—but sixteen years on the force, deeply immersed in the funk of criminality, tainted him forever as well, skewed his view of the world and fostered a deep-rooted distrust of humanity. “Once a cop, always a cop,” says Janusz. “People who are in our business, you get to see everything that’s wrong in the world because nobody calls police when things are going great, only when something is wrong. You see that stuff and you learn; it stays with you always. It’s hard for us to trust anybody. We might come to trust you, but it ain’t gonna be on the first date.”

It’s easy to forget how much time Burns put in as a cop. But all the while, he kept up his interest in, and participation with, sports. He continued playing on a Junior B team in Hull, then a senior team, despite bad knees. “It was all fights, rough
Slap Shot
hockey, with people throwing rocks at the bus when we left town,” he recalled. He joined the police force’s softball team and immersed himself in coaching kids, from mosquitos through peewee, bantam and midget. One of his midget teams, the Hull Kiwanis, featured a shy kid from a rural Quebec town by the name of Stéphane Richer. A midget team he took over lost a tournament to the Ville-Émard Hurricanes when an elegant fourteen-year-old named Mario Lemieux scored an overtime goal. As time allowed, Burns attended local coaching clinics, thirsty for Xs-and-Os insight.

“He played a lot of sports, and was damn good at them, but he loved hockey,” says Janusz. “At that time, when we were in criminal investigations, on Friday, towards the end of the afternoon when things were slowing down, everybody getting ready for the weekend, we’d all be sitting there and Pat would be talking about hockey. Like, if there were any big games coming up on the weekend, Pat would preview the game. And when we came back on Monday morning, sitting around drinking coffee and getting our files together, Pat would review the game. He’d give us his opinions as to the players, the coach, nah-nah-nah-nah-nah. He’d say, ‘That idiot coach did this or did that, I would have done this and that.’ He was essentially analyzing the game and telling us what he would have done as coach, the decisions he would have made. Where did that hockey smarts come from? You’ve got me. It’s not like he’d had anybody mentoring him.

“I always said, ‘Pat, one day we’re going to see you on the screen analyzing hockey.’ I’d joke, ‘Pat, you’re going to be the next Don Cherry.’ Because he had … not necessarily the same attitude as Cherry, but Pat could be funny and also get to the point. Programs you see now on TV where they’re talking about hockey, guys on a panel, we had that with Pat then. He was doing this long before he became an NHL coach, analyzing and assessing. He saw things the rest of us couldn’t see. We were fans, but it was as if he was
investigating
the games.”

Burns was coaching a Midget AAA team, roped into the gig by an ailing friend and taking it all the way to a championship, the Daoust Cup. At the buzzer, he looked up and motioned to Janusz to come and celebrate with them on the ice at the Robert Guertin Arena in Hull. “So I go down there, never imagining what he’d become one day. There’s Pat with this trophy. It was a small trophy, but it meant so much. After that, things kind of started opening up for him in hockey. He got his opportunities.”

Balancing those midgets and his day job was a time-juggling strain. The manager of the midget team was himself a Gatineau police inspector who cut Burns some slack on the roll call. More often, it was Janusz covering for him. “The scheduling was, we worked two weeks of days and one week of nights, Monday to Friday. There were weeks where we worked nights, starting at three in the afternoon and going to midnight. Plenty of nights, Pat had hockey games to coach. He’d say, ‘Fuck, John, I have to go, gotta go, gotta go, you’re going to cover for me, right?’ I’d say, ‘Okay, but if the shit hits the fan, a homicide or something else really big, you’re gonna have to get your butt out of the arena and back over here.’ To be honest, I was kind of nervous about it. I mean, he’s kind of cheating the company a bit. But it’s hockey, right? So I did it and I’m comfortable admitting that today. That was my little contribution to his career. But did I ever think this would all lead to him becoming an NHL coach? Nope. At most, I thought maybe he might coach in juniors or the minor leagues, maybe as an assistant coach in the NHL. But head coach? Coaching three of the Original Six clubs? Coach of the year three times? The Stanley Cup? Noooo, I would never have bet any money on that.”

While with the midget team, Burns did a bit of scouting on the side for the Hull Olympiques (now the Gatineau Olympiques) of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Meanwhile, they’d been scouting
him
. He was offered, and eagerly seized, the job as Hull’s assistant coach in 1983, while continuing full-time employment as a police officer. “It was crazy, eh,” he recalled. “I was a detective-sergeant by then, working days with the fraud unit, seven to three, mostly writing reports. I’d go straight from the station to the rink. Practice was from four to six. Games. Road trips. I worked a
deal where I took my vacation time in hours instead of days. I’d work until noon and then get on the bus and go to the game. Crazy.”

The next season, after finishing second-last and missing the playoffs for the fourth time in eleven years, head coach Michel Morin returned to teaching and the gig went to Burns. But mountains had to be moved to make it so.

Sniffing around the team at that time was a veteran hockey hand by the name of Charlie Henry, with his quarter-century of experience in the minors and junior ranks. Henry was, and remains, an avuncular aide-decamp to none other than Wayne Gretzky. “I was working for Wayne then. I still work for Wayne now.” The Great One had just sold his 46.5 per cent ownership stake in the Belleville Bulls of the Ontario Hockey League. “He said, ‘Why don’t we buy another team?’ and I said fine. Lo and behold, the Hull team looked available.” In fact, the sad-sack Olympiques, then owned by the city, had just declared bankruptcy. “Once they found out that Wayne was looking to buy the team, they were on their knees to sell, right?”

Burns, as assistant coach, would have been part of the package, but Gretzky and Henry, who became general manager, knew they wanted him as top boss behind the bench. “We were looking to change the attitude of the team,” says Henry, who’d clandestinely observed some of the practices that Burns ran. “And we didn’t have to look very far. I’d investigated other possibilities when we were buying the team. I looked all over, change this and change that, but we had the coach we wanted right there. It was a matter of ‘This is who we want.’ I talked to Pat and he jumped right in.”

It was Gretzky who made the come-hither call. Burns was at home when the phone rang. “Pat, it’s for you,” said his girlfriend. Yeah, who is it? “They say it’s from Edmonton, person-to-person,” she said. “They say it’s Wayne Gretzky.” Burns thought it was a prank, but took the phone. The voice on the other end said, “Hi Pat, this is Wayne Gretzky.” Burns, still convinced his cop pals at the station were having fun at his expense, growled: “Yeah, quit [bleeping] around.” Caller: “No, really, it’s me.” Finally, Gretzky was able to convince the suspicious Burns that he was legitimate. He wanted Burns to stay on the job as Hull head coach. “Look,
I appreciate it,” said Burns. “But I’m a police officer, not a hockey coach. I’ve had no time off and you don’t understand, I’ve gone through hell the last year.”

But the next day he was on a plane to Edmonton, at Gretzky’s expense, and a deal was struck. Obvious logistical issues remained. “He still had a full-time job with the police department at that time,” recalls Gretzky. “But we really believed he was going to be an NHL coach one day and that, if we got him, his tenure with the Olympiques probably wouldn’t last that long. I said to Charlie, if we’re going to pursue him, we’d have to catch him when we could, dive right in. There was a potential of us losing him rapidly. We thought we might be able to keep him for a year before an NHL team came calling.”

No way though that Burns could maintain the manic pace of two jobs, each requiring his full attention. Gretzky personally made a call to the Gatineau chief. Henry followed up. “I went to see the mayor,” says Henry. “I said, if we want to make a coach out of this young man, because he’s got the capability, I need a [year’s leave] of absence for him. That had never been done before. But I knew the mayor and he agreed. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you a year, but that’s it.’ ” As Gretzky remembers it, denying with typical modesty that his participation in the plot carried any significant persuasive effect on Hizzoner: “They were very obliging. They knew that this was somebody who was going to be an NHL coach someday. I’m not sure anything I did was responsible for pushing it over the edge. Maybe I nudged them a bit. The people up there understood this was Pat’s destiny and the NHL wasn’t going to be very far down the road. Pat had such a good hockey mind, a strong presence, and he was a very hard worker.”

Convinced that having a cop on staff who simultaneously coached for a Gretzky-owned team was an ambassadorial coup for the community, the police chief made the necessary arrangements, granting the leave of absence. Burns was doubly delighted because he received a good salary to coach the Olympiques while keeping his accumulated police force seniority and benefits. At that point, he and partner Janusz essentially parted professional
company, though they remained friends till the end of Burns’s life. Eventually, Janusz would become chief of police in Gatineau. Today, he’s Director General, Security Services—deputy sergeant-at-arms—for the House of Commons. For a couple of scruffs from Montreal, each made good.

What Gretzky and Henry most liked about Burns were the obvious assets he brought: his hockey savvy—self-taught—and the hard-nosed cop reputation that preceded him. “He was disciplined, no-nonsense and firm in his decisions,” says Henry. “When you talked to the players, they liked him, but they were scared of him. Oh yeah, he was tough. He could be a real P-R-I-C-K. I don’t know if he could coach today, to be honest, because the type of discipline that he brought … a lot of times there was a lot of fear. Players were scared of Pat, and that was true when he got to the NHL, too.” Adds Gretzky: “These were young guys he was coaching, sixteen to twenty years of age. He would be sharp with them, whether they liked it or not. He was always extremely honest with all of his players, sometimes even if they didn’t want to hear it.”