Coach: The Pat Burns Story (29 page)

The players, if unhappy about that penalty, were hardly panicked. “We’d come back and we thought we were going to win the game,” says Ellett. “We were going to kill that penalty, no big deal. No one was mad at the ref, saying, ‘We’re getting screwed.’ We [planned to] put it behind us, just kill the penalty and go on.”

To reporters, Burns had added a postscript. “They could have called one on Gretzky, too.” That was the real killer, on Killer.

What happened in overtime has assumed mythic proportions in the constant retelling. Just before he stuck a knife in the Leafs, Gretzky had clipped Gilmour under the chin with a high stick. Every on-ice official allegedly missed it, though Gilmour was visibly bleeding. In his memoir,
The Final Call
, Fraser writes: “As a referee, the biggest fear I’ve always had is that when I blink, something could occur in that fraction of a second that I will miss. It’s also uncomfortable when a player simply passes in front of your line of vision—you worry something fateful might occur. Was this such a moment?” First off, he approached Gilmour. There was
blood on his chin, “although it wasn’t oozing. My initial thought was that some old scar tissue had been scraped off.” He claimed Gilmour told him that “Wayne took a shot and the follow-through struck me on the chin.” If that was the case, Fraser says he responded, then no penalty was warranted because inadvertent contact from follow-through on a shot exempts the culprit from a high-sticking citation. That was the rule then.

Gilmour disputes that recollection of their conversation. “I said it was
not
a follow-through. Gretz went to lift my stick and he missed. That didn’t make it a shot follow-through. So, okay, Fraser didn’t see it. But the linesman wanted to call it. In those days, according to the rules, Gretzky would have been gone from the game. There would have been a riot. That’s why it wasn’t called. It would have been four on four, and who knows …”

Gilmour was in the dressing room, getting eight stitches to close the cut on his chin, when Gretzky scored in OT, the puck deflecting right onto the blade of his stick off a wayward pass. The roar and rumble overhead told Gilmour what had happened, though he didn’t know which King was the hero. Discovering it had been Gretzky, Gilmour’s heart sank. “I was afraid we’d woken up a sleeping giant. I was like, ‘Oh crap, that’s the last thing you want to do.’ ”

The Leafs were dismayed—what a waste of Clark’s splendid outing—but not wracked. They remained in L.A. overnight, had a late team meal and a few beers at their hotel. “The flight home was pretty quiet,” says Ellett. “Pat hadn’t really said much to us after the game. But no one was down. It was going to be our third time in a game seven, and we’d won two of them, so everyone was feeling pretty confident.”

Nevertheless, some in the media did speculate that maybe the Leafs had tempted fate once too often. Meanwhile, the Kings were buoyant. “More than that game six loss knocked us down, it gave the Kings momentum,” says Foligno. “It gave L.A. the confidence that, Jesus, now it’s down to one game. It’s in their building but we’ve won there before.” Melrose blurted: “It’s not a seventh game. It’s a best of one now.” He then advised his players and the L.A. media: “Pack extra underwear. We’re going to Montreal.”

To the media, Gretzky conceded no felonious assault on Gilmour. But he did take palpable glee from scoring his 105th career playoff goal and forcing a game seven. He teased: “I’m not superhuman. I’m not gonna get four points a night. It’s impossible. But I have to make sure that when I do something, it’s big.” It was indeed BIG and gave Gretzky twenty-nine points in the playoffs, three fewer than scoring leader Gilmour.

With game seven set to fall on the exact one-year anniversary of his hiring in Toronto, Burns was on the same wavelength as Gilmour, fearing that Gretzky had been aroused and now threatened to do something spectacular. He was also concerned about the stamina of his tireless heart-and-soul team leader, leery that the fuel in his tank would suddenly dip fatally low. “He’s held together with thread right now. We’ll call that planet he’s from and get some more.”

You know how it ended.

“Gretzky was just Gretzky,” says Clark.

“Wayne just came in and took over,” says Potvin. “He did what he’d done all his career: carried the team on his back,” says Gill. “That’s why he’s the best player that ever lived.”

Ellett: “Gretzky magic. He lit it up.”

The Great One pronounced it the “greatest game” he ever played. “We’d watched Wayne’s career, all the broken records, the Stanley Cups in Edmonton,” says Mark Osborne, the checking hound whose line, with Zezel and Berg, had shadowed Number 99 in the series—though Osborne missed game five to be with his wife as she gave birth to their daughter. “So he says that was his best game. Well, isn’t that just nice for us. His greatest game and we don’t get a chance at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play the Habs for the Stanley Cup. Thanks, Gretz.”

Let the post-mortem be mercifully brief. Gretzky rose magnificently to the occasion. His eighth postseason hat trick lifted the Kings into their first Cup final on a 5–4 victory. The Kings were up 4–3 when Dave Ellett’s skate inadvertently directed Gretzky’s shot—his third goal—past Potvin. “Of course, I’ve seen it a million times,” Ellett sighs. “Everyone has to bring it up. It was just one of those things. I felt something hit my foot.
I knew right away when the crowd went silent that it wasn’t good. I turned around and saw the puck in the net.”

It wasn’t quite over yet. Ellett, the unwarranted goat, got one right back for the Leafs. “People forget because they show that Gretzky goal highlight all the time. But I did score one a minute later. There were two minutes left to play, we still had a chance.” With Potvin pulled, Toronto just couldn’t get that equalizer. L.A. won 5–4. The magic had run out. In the dressing room several players wept openly. “Absolutely devastated,” says Gill. “To this day, I’m devastated. When people bring it up, I still get a lump in my throat. It was
so
close. It was right there.”

Then it was gone.

Burns went around the room, giving every disconsolate player a hug, saying thank you, thank you, thank you. “He was very emotional, you could tell,” says Gilmour. “But he was also very proud.”

At the end of the game, when shaking hands, Gretzky said to Burns: “I couldn’t let it happen. I couldn’t let you win.”

“This team went far beyond my expectations,” a raspy-voiced Burns said at the solemn press conference afterwards. “I just kept on telling them, ‘You’ve got to kick at the darkness until the daylight shows.’ ” The poignant quote sounded like a line he’d worked on, tucked it in his pocket, in case. Or maybe he stole it from Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.”

“This was a great learning process for this organization, a great stepping stone. From now on, you know if you’re going to put this sweater on and wear these colours, you’ve got to be ready to play. I’ve never been more proud of a team, and I said that to them. I would have said it before but I didn’t want them to think it was over.”

It was over.

W
ITH HEAVY BAGS
under their eyes, dressed variously in jeans and summer shorts, arriving in ones and twos, the Leafs of ’92–93 convened for a last time at a midtown Toronto restaurant. In their heads, they were still playing hockey, still vying for the Cup, still ice warriors. In reality, as surreal as it felt, and raw, they were just one among fourteen playoff teams that had lost their last game of the year and been sidelined.

The wake had been organized by Wendel Clark. Bob Rouse cruised in on his brand-spanking-new Harley. Mark Osborne came bearing cigars—some chocolate, some Cuban—to belatedly celebrate the birth of his daughter. All had shaved off their playoff beards. Most swore they wouldn’t watch the final between Montreal and Los Angeles—couldn’t bear it.

The season had been an unqualified, monster success, a grand achievement. But it was too soon for reflection and too late for fantasizing. Exhausted now that adrenaline had ceased pumping, feeling all their physical hurts, few were in the mood to look ahead—and training camp was less than a hundred days away. “I want to get on my bike and feel the wind in my hair, find some sand and sun,” said Pat Burns. He’d been
courted to participate as TV colour commentator for the Cup final, but declined. “I’m tired of talking about hockey.”

Yet they were reluctant to let go of one another for the summer. From the restaurant, players piled into a fleet of cabs and headed for a strip club, the House of Lancaster. “Then Pat and I went to another bar, the Left Bank,” says Doug Gilmour. “Dan Aykroyd was there with his entourage, so we joined them for a while. After that, we just went home. I wouldn’t say that Pat was heartbroken, just drained, like me.”

The coach packed his suitcase for a short vacation in Antigua, but was back by June 1, when the team was feted by the city at Nathan Phillips Square. The fact they hadn’t actually won anything didn’t dampen the enthusiasm as ten thousand well-wishers descended on the civic plaza. Fans crowded around the temporary stage and ringed the ramps. It was the largest gathering at City Hall since the Pope’s visit in 1984. Burns was as flabbergasted on that afternoon as he’d been during the postseason, when hundreds of boosters welcomed the squad at the airport after they’d
lost
a game on the road. In Montreal, he joked, they would have sent up fighter jets to shoot down the team plane. “I’ve been fortunate to be part of two great traditions, the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs, but I’ve never seen fans like this in my life. You guys are the greatest.”

On the stage, players shuffled their feet, hands thrust in their pockets, suddenly bashful in front of all this adulation in the wake of what was, ultimately, a losing cause. “We’ve waited a long time,” said Wendel Clark, at the microphone. “I know you guys have waited a lot longer.” Clark had been a year old in 1967 when Toronto last sipped from the silver chalice. “We’re going a lot farther in the next few years,” he promised. The loudest ovation was saved for Doug Gilmour. He’d been almost hiding behind his teammates, running his hands through his hair, staring at his feet. “I know the guys back here are very proud of what happened this year. And we’ll get better as time goes on. I thank you. And these guys behind me, I thank them.” Inching through the throng, signing autographs, Gilmour caught the attention of a reporter. He folded his hands together, laid them against his cheek, briefly closing his eyes. “Long nights,” he whispered.

At a levee held later by the city, Burns said he was overwhelmed by the heartfelt reception. “We didn’t win anything and they turn out like this. It’s great, but I feel almost embarrassed about it. The fans are excited today, but they may get impatient tomorrow. The expectations are much higher, so it’s going to be tougher.”

A few weeks on, after Montreal had disposed of the Kings in a five-game final, Burns won his second Jack Adams Award as coach of the year. In advance of awards night, he professed to be blasé about the nomination, which was actually his third. “It doesn’t really excite me anymore. It’s not a question of winning. It’s a question of getting up there on national television and thinking of something intelligent to say.” When his name was called, however, Burns was appropriately appreciative, dedicating the award to his players. “It’s a bigger honour this time. We accomplished a lot, and the club has built a foundation. I came in with my ideas and I stuck with them. I knew we didn’t have a lot of explosive scoring power, but I felt we could find a way for this team to win and gain respect.” Gilmour was nominated for the Hart Trophy—most valuable player—and the Frank Selke Trophy, as best defensive forward. The former he lost to superstar Mario Lemieux, who’d missed a month of the season receiving radiation treatment following the devastating news he had Hodgkin’s disease, a form of cancer—and still managed to cop the scoring title with an amazing 160 points in 60 games. The Selke was all Gilmour’s. He giggled when reporters pointed out the irony of winning top defensive honours when he was such an offensive force. There were guffaws as well for Gilmour’s Glitter Boy ’do, backcombed out to here and shellacked/hairsprayed. Burns, tanned and mellow from his holiday in the tropics, posed with Gilmour for endless photographs. The last Leaf to win an individual NHL award had been Brit Selby, top rookie in 1965. Burns injected a note of caution into the celebrations. “I think coaches can only last three or four years in one city unless they win the Stanley Cup every year. If, four years down the road, we haven’t won the Cup, there will be people looking for my head.” Addressing reporters, he added: “I’d love for Toronto to be my last coaching job. But you guys will decide that.”

Burns rented a cottage on Lake Simcoe that summer—the only off-season he would ever spend in the Toronto region, because he couldn’t avoid the constant back-slapping and attention of autograph hounds in southern Ontario. They’d find him out on the lake, in his boat. The Leafs remained wildly popular through those summer months. A recap video,
The Passion Returns
, flew off the shelves, as did the “Pat’s Garage” poster, with players and coach draped fetchingly across motorcycles and vintage pickup truck, studly and gritty.