Coach: The Pat Burns Story (8 page)

Mayhem broke out early in the third period, a bloodying war that would have been unforgettable to anybody who saw it, except few actually could make out what was happening on the ice, including the combatants. Norwegian referee Hans Rønning and his two linesmen actually fled the scene, seeking shelter in the officials’ room.

“A big-mouthed yo-yo who can’t wait to agitate the opposition into yet another rumble,”
Toronto Star
columnist John Robertson wrote of Burns in the next day’s paper, from half a world away. It was a panic-stricken apparatchik from the International Ice Hockey Federation who gave the lights-out order in a vain attempt to douse the melee. Soviets and Canadians paired up, apparently intent on killing each other. It was the most wretched episode ever in international hockey, blackening the eye for country, coach and assistant coach, with heaps of I-told-you-so flung back home, Canadian hockey officials excoriated for putting a couple of known “hotheads”—Templeton and Burns—in charge of combustible youths. Yet future Montreal Canadiens captain Mike Keane, who’d gone
mano a mano
in an epic battle with future Olympic and NHL winger Valeri Zelepukin, insists nobody would have been capable of halting what ensued. “Pat and Bert were concerned with the five players on the ice. Something had to be done in a split second. As someone who was on the ice at that moment, I’m glad they did. The last time I looked, we were playing in a gold medal game, so the coaches must have done something right.”

The game was never finished. Both teams were tossed out of the tournament, and Canada was tossed out of the country, players surrounded by soldiers when they emerged from the dressing room and proceeded to their bus, a military escort accompanying the vehicle to the border. Within weeks, a report submitted to the IIHF disciplinary committee recommended that all coaches and players (except for one goalie from each country because they hadn’t participated in the donnybrook) be disqualified from
international hockey for terms of up to three years. (Those suspensions would be lifted for the players six months later.) Canada had to forfeit the bronze medal they had been assured of before the gold medal game began. The coaches’ suspensions held until December 31, 1989.

It was a scandal Burns rarely spoke about in later years, though he remained bitter. “What happened in Czechoslovakia was a spontaneous flare-up and it was blown out of proportion,” he insisted. “It was amazing how many people who hadn’t seen the game knew all about it and who was to blame.” And the players, for the most part, remained unrepentant. “Looking back, it hurts,” says Keane. “But it isn’t a significant part of my life, that somebody didn’t sacrifice a gold medal instead of their players. If we’d won the game, would it have been okay, then?”

Templeton would wear that disgrace until the day he died, but Burns’s reputation and blossoming career did not suffer. On June 8, he was introduced as new head coach of the Sherbrooke Canadiens of the American Hockey League, one step away from the NHL.

P
AT
B
URNS
could count on the fingers of one hand the people he trusted. His mother, Louise, was the thumb. In the summer of 1987, when he drove to Montreal to be interviewed by Serge Savard for the coaching job with the Sherbrooke Canadiens, Louise came along riding shotgun. Burns was thirty-five years old, a father, a divorced husband and already a veteran ex-cop, yet he still clung anxiously to maternal apron strings on matters of importance, fretful of his own galumphing gaucheness in the bigger world beyond hinterland Gatineau. “He needed her for emotional support,” says sister Diane.

Sherbrooke was just a small city in the Eastern Townships, perhaps a little more culturally polished than Hull. But as Montreal’s American League farm team, these Canadiens were umbilically tied to
those
Canadiens, although the affiliate had a hobo history, shunting around locales and shuffling place names: Montreal Voyageurs, Nova Scotia Voyageurs, later Fredericton Canadiens, Quebec Citadelles and currently reconstituted as the Hamilton Bulldogs. In 1985, they’d won the Calder Cup behind the goaltending of a young netminder named Patrick Roy.

Montreal GM Savard, hard-fisted Habs defenceman of an earlier era
and known as “The Senator,” his name engraved on no fewer than eight Stanley Cups, was the distant franchise field marshal. Burns wanted desperately to impress, a subaltern at the ready. This was the opportunity he’d longed for, the door into the NHL he intended to kick open, if he could make his bones in the AHL. Pierre Creamer had accepted the head coaching job with the Pittsburgh Penguins a week earlier, leaving Sherbrooke with a vacancy behind the bench.

Preoccupied with the parent club, Savard had little firsthand knowledge of the applicant. “Certainly, I’m not the one who followed him or knew much about him. I guess his background was fairly good as a coach in junior, where he’d had some success.” At yearly state-of-the-union sessions with his amateur scouting staff, led by redoubtable talent sniffer André Boudrias, Savard would pose the same question: Who’s the best coach around in the Quebec League? “For the last few years, André always came up with the name Pat Burns. So when it came time to hire a guy in Sherbrooke, it was a very easy decision for me. He was young, and when we hired a guy for the farm club, I was always thinking he might coach the big club as a backup.”

Boudrias, director of scouting for Montreal, had been tracking the ripening of Burns in junior hockey. “Not knowing him personally,” he says, “what brought Pat to my attention was watching him work behind the bench, his attitude, a guy that was always active and emotional, someone who reacted towards his players. If the game was not going his way, he showed it.” The Hull squad, Boudrias observed, was one of the most robust organizations in juniors, and he was convinced their coach had a lot to do with that. “It was obvious he had an ability to develop players. He always seemed to get a very good team spirit out of them. His teams could score goals, but they were also in his image, very aggressive out there, very much alive. That’s what first attracted me to him. He was a guy that you could fear. He didn’t waste any time to help his team, whatever was needed. If he didn’t like the calls a referee was making, he jumped at him. At the time, in those years, the teams that were winning in hockey were teams that were coached with emotion. It was still the time of
the wars, you know? The teams that seemed able to get through had to have that second life, that extra little bit. Pat was able to show me that he could reach down into the second level of his players.”

The opening was in Sherbrooke, but Boudrias was already looking ahead, making longer-term calculations. “There’s no doubt when you hire a guy to coach in your system, you always want that guy to be able to move up the ladder. Pat was in the prime of his life. And his background as an ex-cop also entered the equation. It was an addition.”

Boudrias talked to Burns first, then championed the cause with Savard. It was late May, and Burns was scheduled to go on vacation. Boudrias told Savard, “He’s leaving so, if you want to talk to him, we need to do it right away.” Burns was summoned for his audition with Savard. “Serge said to me after, ‘He looks okay. It’s your call, André. You want him, you decide.’ So we went ahead.”

In fact, Burns had just re-signed a contract with Charlie Henry in Hull. But when Savard called to ask for permission to speak with his coach, Henry said fine. “I told Serge that someday Pat would be coaching in the NHL, whether with Montreal or another club.” It was Henry who gave Burns the news that Montreal was interested for the Sherbrooke position and to get his ass up there for an interview. “Well, Pat calls me from Montreal one night, about two o’clock in the morning, and he says, ‘Guess what? They’ve offered me a contract!’ I said, ‘That’s terrific.’ Then he turns around and says, ‘What’s the matter? You don’t want me to stay and coach your team no more?’ He took it the wrong way.”

Burns wasn’t joking; typically, he would look through the wrong end of the telescope, searching for the negative, an implied criticism. “He said, ‘Jesus Christ, I just signed a contract with the junior team and you want to get rid of me?’ I said, ‘Pat, I don’t want to lose you, but this is your opportunity knocking.’ But he was nervous, very nervous. I’m sure if I’d said, ‘Don’t go, you’re working for Wayne here’ and all that, he wouldn’t have gone. I more or less kicked him out the door by saying, ‘You can’t refuse Montreal.’ And he called me back a few hours later, around 6 a.m. He said, ‘Okay, I’ve signed and I’m on my way home now. We having breakfast?’ ”

Burns had consulted with his ex-wife, Suzanne, on the offer because they’d remained friends. She thought he should go for it. That contract with Sherbrooke would pay Burns $35,000 for one year. A metamorphosing dandy, he immediately bought new suits.

The AHL was more than a feeder league for its NHL masters. It was barrelhousing hockey with a distinct identity, devoid of coddling of players—some of whom were on their way up, others on their way down, career paths that often transected and clashed. Elbows were sharp, noses frequently out of joint and grudges stoked. Coaches, with no on-ice canvas to paint a hockey portfolio, carved out personality niches to get noticed, because nobody wants to be stuck in the minors forever. Restraint was a rarity.

“I had no idea who Pat Burns was,” says Mike Milbury, recalling the salad days of a coaching rivalry that would later assume epic proportions in the NHL. A New Englander by birth, a former Bruins defenceman and future Boston skipper before turning GM on Long Island, Milbury entered the AHL coaching ranks the same year as Burns, making his debut with the Maine Mariners, Boston’s affiliate, and winning coach-of-the-year honours his first season. “All I knew was he was coaching a team in the organization that I had grown to hate. It was the American Hockey League, but it was still Montreal versus Boston on a minor scale. Pat was formerly a cop, and you didn’t really need to know him personally to get that he didn’t have a funny, smiley disposition. He was a very serious and very intense guy. In that first year, I had a very good team. He had a good team, but not good as mine. We had some serious battles. He was ready for it and I was ready for it.”

They came to their coaching labours from opposite ends of the spectrum. Says Milbury: “I’d been thirteen years playing in the NHL and now I’m back in the American League level and piling on a bus to go to Sherbrooke.” Milbury and Burns would never cultivate much of a relationship away from the rink; though the latter would eventually follow in the former’s footsteps, plying his coaching trade for Harry Sinden in Beantown, each seared by the experience. “It was a time when you didn’t really converse much with
the other coach,” says Milbury. “There weren’t a lot of coaches’ conventions. It was just, ‘How do I beat the crap out of this guy’s team?’ Both of us were vocal, but I think it resulted in some pretty good hockey.

“We yapped at each other plenty of times. The smallest slight on the ice could be reflected in the coach, and neither one of us would let it pass. It was a way to keep your team alert and awake—‘Look, this guy’s out of line and you’ve got to take care of him.’ We never got into it physically, but it set the stage for a couple of memorable Boston-Montreal playoffs in the late ’80s. I came to know Pat as a guy whose strengths really were in making sure his team was ready to play, which I think is the art form of coaching. You can get guys in shape and you can teach them how to be in position, but there was not much doubt that Pat was able to manage people in a way to get the most out of them on most nights. The games were
personal
almost, and I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

What Burns had in spades, even in those AHL days, says Milbury, was
presence
, a force of personality. “All good coaches need to have command of the room so that people will pay attention to what you say. It comes from commitment, from knowledge, from a lot of things. I’m sure in Pat’s case and in my case it came from different areas, but it was the ability, I think, to walk into a dressing room and grab the players’ attention, make them listen and make them aware of accountability issues. There was a single-mindedness of coaching and a real resentment, almost, at the possibility of a loss.”

Milbury waves off the broad perception that Burns then lacked, and perhaps would never hone, a technical hockey syllabus. “No coach worth his salt wants to be known as just a technician. What Pat had going for him, and what made him ultimately the terrific coach that he was, is that, yes, he scared the shit out of people. He walked into the room, and there’s this ex-cop who looked like somebody had burnt his toast, and he was pissed coming in. If you don’t have a little fear of that, then there’s something wrong with you. But on the other hand, as with all young coaches, as time goes by, the harshness of it and the familiarity with the experience of being a coach starts to soften the edges. Really, the bully tool of a coach is to steal
ice time, and that’s always an insult to a player. It’s communication that matters, and that takes different forms—whether it’s throwing a stick at somebody or explaining to him in a quiet moment. As coaches go through their careers, they find the ability to try different methods of reaching players, because there’s never just one type of player in the room and there’s never just one way to get at it.”

The gaining of coaching wisdom does indeed take time. But Burns, with no repository of NHL playing experience to draw upon, had to make it up as he went along in his AHL mad scientist’s lab, concocting a team ethos out of bluster.

Life in the minors could be a dead end for players—those rebuffed by the big league after the proverbial cup of coffee, now playing out the string and resentful of young teammates on the opposite trajectory, one ding-a-ling away from a call-up. Burns, providentially, inherited a squad with a dozen emerging players who would make that NHL leap, several of them known quantities as ex-Olympiques or members of the Canadian junior squad chased from Prague. The 1987–88 roster included Mike Keane, Sylvain Lefebvre, Stéphane Richer, Stéphane Lebeau, Brent Gilchrist, Éric Desjardins and, in time for playoffs, Mathieu Schneider. In short order, they would become an extension of their coach’s persona, each taking a piece of that into their NHL lives.