Coach: The Pat Burns Story (26 page)

Joseph was allegedly vulnerable high to the glove side, but he held the Leafs off the scoreboard in game one until there was under a minute left in the first period, John Cullen tucking in his own rebound. Philippe Bozon got that one back midway through the third. And there the score remained for what seemed an eternity. Back and forth the teams swung in what the advance billing had conjectured would be a dull, defensive goaltending duel. There was nothing boring about the battle between net men. Not until 3:16 of the second overtime, as the clock approached midnight, threatening to turn the TV broadcast into
Hockey Morning in Canada
, after Joseph had faced sixty-two shots and been clunked on the head by Foligno’s skate, did Gilmour, the former Blue—hero one more time, with gusts to legend-in-the-making—prick the cocoon of apparent invulnerability. Every other Leaf was tied up by frantic checkers when Gilmour darted out from behind the net with a swirling, spinning, dizzying wraparound goal that confounded Joseph. “It was the longest game I’ve ever played,” says Gilmour, who’d skated miles, logging Herculean ice time.

With the pounds still falling off, he looked emaciated, sometimes seeming no more than a black-and-blue smudge inside a jersey. “I should take that little runt home and force-feed him,” joked Burns.

The perspiration had barely dried off when the puck dropped on game two, the Gardens a sweat-soaked sauna. With no air conditioning, muggy air clashed with cold ice surface, creating a misty fug at ice level. Potvin knew he had to match Joseph save for save; there was clearly no margin for error in this showdown. “It was tough because I knew I couldn’t let anything get by me. But at the same time it was fun. Because Curtis was so good at the other end, I knew I had to be equally good. And honestly, I grew up a lot from the first series against Detroit. Now it was about taking care of business.”

Hull scored on the Blues’ third shot of the game, stunning the crowd. But Gilmour, quickly ascending to the ranks of the immortals, made it 1–1, scooting in from the corner to stuff the puck behind Joseph. Garth Butcher, St. Louis defenceman, immediately and sharply—almost quicker than the eye could see—scooped the disc out of the net. The episode went to video review, scrutinized from several angles, before referee Paul Stewart, after an interminable wait, signalled it was a good goal. In the next frame, Gilmour was clipped in the face with a high stick. He fell to the ice, writhing, and the partisan crowd held its breath. Finally, he stood up again, gave Stewart an earful for not calling a penalty, and the game proceeded.

Again there was no further scoring in regulation. Again, it went to overtime. Again, it went to a second overtime. Again, Joseph withstood a Leaf barrage. Again it would be a 2–1 verdict, but this time for the Blues. At 3:03 of the fifth period, St. Louis defenceman Jeff Brown pounced on a rebound and hit the open side of the net, Potvin down. Through six playoff games, including the opening round against the Blackhawks, Joseph had now stopped 252 of 261 shots. His jackknife splits and Venus-flytrap glove snaps were jaw-dropping. “He’s playing right now as if he was four hundred pounds and four feet wide,” said Burns. As the series switched to St. Louis, the coach had little advice to impart. “Put the puck in the net more, that’s all I can say.” Despite hammering Joseph with 121 shots, the Leafs left Toronto with no better than a split in the series.

Looking to change the dynamics, Burns decided to dress the sparsely used Mike Krushelnyski for only his third outing of the postseason. The veteran had enjoyed a splendid first half of the season, but then went frigidly cold. Still, he was the only Leaf to play in all eighty-four regular-season games that year, albeit with reduced ice time. “Fifty-two players had come and gone through the door that season,” Krushelnyski recalls. “That’s tremendously hard on a coach, juggling players and trying to fit in all the pieces.” What sticks out in his memory is one especially punishing practice. “We’d lost the night before, and Pat bag-skated us for forty
minutes. If he’d have gone even one more minute, there would probably have been a huge revolt. But Pat wasn’t there to be our best friend. At times you loved him, and at times you hated him.”

Wendel Clark scoffs at the notion of either/or. “The whole thing with a coach isn’t whether you love him or hate him. It’s whether you respect him. Pat had a lot of respect.”

Game three was mercifully shorter, but no sweeter for Toronto, a 2–0 lead vanishing into a 4–3 loss. Gilmour had a new track of stitches across the bridge of his nose, but a St. Louis columnist had more fun mocking Burns’s signature pompadour. “What’s the deal with coach Pat Burns? Why has this beefy, tough-guy former cop made himself over to look like oily lounge singer Wayne Newton?”

Alarm began to creep up the Leafs’ spines. “Fear is knocking on our door, and the way we have to answer it is with faith,” said Foligno. “We’ve got to believe in each other. I know we do.” Then he lightened up the mood. “As a team, our goal, our whole reason for being here, our very existence, is to try to put a smile on the face of Pat Burns. And we’ve actually done that a few times this season. But we want to do it some more.” Burns, grimacing, was simply sick of listening to encomiums for Curtis Joseph. “It’s been Joseph, Joseph and more Joseph. We finally got three goals against him, but the trouble was we gave up four.”

In the game four matinee, Toronto exposed Joseph as merely human. Leafs crashed his crease, threw him off balance, Foligno and Krushelnyski creating most of the traffic. “They’ve given us good hockey all year,” said Burns of his two inelegant but useful marauders. “They played the style we wanted: move your legs, take a punch in the face.” Joseph yowled to the referee about the liberties Toronto was taking with his turf. The ref had a word with Burns. “We’re just bringing the puck to the net,” he responded, angelically. “That’s our job.” Roused by a Burns pre-game speech, the players threw their bodies around with purpose in the 4–1 victory. A sizzling Potvin, who’d sweated off nine pounds of water in the game, outplayed his St. Louis counterpart.

As the series reverted to Toronto, the two teams had developed a
serious hate-on for each other. Except for tree-hugging Glenn Anderson. “Hatred isn’t in my vocabulary,” he sniffed.

In the fifth game, Toronto continued its domination, outchecking, outscoring and outsmarting the Blues, clobbering them 5–1. A win in the sixth game, at decrepit St. Louis Arena, would give the Leafs their first Norris Division title since moving from the Adams in 1981 and send them to the Campbell Conference final. Back in the Gateway City, the temperature was scorching. Foligno, warning that the Blues would not roll over, inverted a cliché with a spoonerism. “We’ve got to make sure we hold our heads, uh, our feet, on the ground.” Burns found time to tweak his opposite number, St. Louis coach Bob Berry, who’d been going through agonizing withdrawal as he tried to kick the smoking habit. The Toronto coach sent over the obligatory lineup sheet to the Blues dressing room with a cigarette taped to it.

Inside the muggy barn, Burns’s pompadour was wilting as he pounded his beat behind the bench. With Toronto leading 1–0, watching his players dilly-dally as if victory were assured, his hair practically stood on end. “I could feel it when we left Toronto. There was all this talk about Stanley Cup, Joe-Sieve [the moniker hung on Joseph by Leaf fans], stuff like that. You can’t talk like that in the playoffs.”

The Blues prevailed 2–1, and now the situation was reminiscent of Toronto’s previous series against Detroit, when the Leafs had failed to put the Wings away in six, inviting the excruciating tension of a deciding game seven. Afforded the chance between the smooth and bumpy road, the Leafs again opted for the latter. “We played with fire and we got burned,” the coach sighed. “We’ve really put gas on the fire now.”

Foligno admits the Leafs felt a sense of foreboding going into St. Louis. “They had so much pride, the Blues. They didn’t want to lose in front of their home fans. So that’s what we told ourselves after. But when we got back home, there was absolutely no way they were going to beat us in our own building. We were convinced we would raise our level in the next game to the point that all our passes were going to be on the tape, everything would be executed properly, and that’s exactly how it turned out. It was
unbelievable; we played the game that mentally we’d seen ourselves playing.”

Still, staring down another game seven, Burns was fretful. “There’s no doubt about it, the visiting team has the advantage. The pressure’s on us. I’ve told them to go find themselves a way to put on the jersey at 7:20 and say, ‘This might be the last time I put it on.’ Seventh games don’t come down to tactics. They come down to what you have within you. They’ve got to reach deep into their hearts and understand what this means.” Gilmour deadpanned: “Pressure? What pressure?”

Who could have foreseen what would befall the Blues that night at Maple Leaf Gardens? Curtis Joseph, like Icarus, must have flown too close to the sun. He melted. Wendel Clark scored two goals and ripped Joseph’s mask off on another bazooka slapshot that struck the goalie flush on the mug. Four goals in the first period took all the starch out of St. Louis in a 6–0 defeat. All Gilmour did was pick up a goal and two assists, to give him 22 points in the postseason, surpassing Darryl Sittler’s club record of 21. Game, set, match. “Pat had us so prepared for that game,” he says. “He didn’t do it with a lot of loud speeches, either. He just spoke to us quietly.”

Outside, the city went crazy, a good crazy. Foligno, who lived downtown near the Sutton Place Hotel, waded through the crowd as he walked home, weaving through the impromptu parade on Yonge Street. “I always tell people that I’ve been to a few victory parades in my life. There was one in Colorado, when we won the Stanley Cup. There was the one when the Blue Jays won the World Series. And there was the one after our series against St. Louis. I had a bunch of family in town and they joined the parade. I remember walking down the alleyways to get to my house because I could not walk down the street without being mobbed. It was amazing.”

A late arrival: baby Patrick with his parents Alfred and Louise and (clockwise from top left) siblings Lillian, Sonny (Alfred Jr.), Violet, Diane and Phyllis. (
photo credit 12.1
)

The former homicide cop joins the Montreal Canadiens: At the conclusion of the 1987–88 season, the scandalously carousing team was in need of a man like Pat Burns. (
photo credit 12.2
)

Renewing the Leafs, 1992: He told the players to hang up their jerseys carefully after each match. Mike Foligno recalls: “Even something as small as that, never letting … the logo touch the ground, was about bringing back pride in the club.” (
photo credit 12.3
)