Coach: The Pat Burns Story (12 page)

In late October, Montreal ground out a 1–1 tie in Boston and, while not pretty, Burns saw glimmers of the team he hoped was emerging from its early torpor. “We’ll get better,” he vowed at his postgame press conference. “We had to eat some crow for a while. Now it’s time for some turkey and chicken.” A fortnight later, Burns dispatched Guy Carbonneau to the press box and Montreal beat the Canucks 3–1 in Vancouver. That, most observers agree, was the turning point. Scratching Carbonneau from the lineup took
cojones
. The Frank Selke Trophy winner the year before as the league’s top defensive forward, Carbonneau had missed only seven games over the previous six seasons.

Upon Burns’s hiring, Carbonneau had applauded the move. “These days you need a disciplinarian to handle the younger players. Many of them come out of junior spoiled and they need someone to put them straight.” But he was no kid and certainly never anticipated falling victim to Burns’s evil eye. The coach, however, wanted Carbonneau to aspire to greater things than being a premier checker. Burns told the defensive stalwart he was playing
too
defensively. In dramatic fashion, he was challenging Carbonneau to contribute more on the attack, and that was unprecedented.
“I said, ‘Be on the puck more, and you’ll get goals,’ ” Burns explained. “He said, ‘No, I can’t do that, I’m a defensive player.’ I said, ‘Well, sit on the bench, then.’ ”

Confronting Carbonneau was a gamble for Burns, already criticized in some quarters for favouring anglophones over francophones in distributing ice time. But the benching and spurring conversation lit a flame under Carbonneau, triggering a remarkable transformation. Indeed, Carbonneau would go on a tear, potting 24 goals that season, 10 of them game winners, while putting up a plus-34 rating. “From that moment, everything started coming together,” he said.

The other event of metamorphosis was addition by subtraction—Burns ridding himself of brash, troublesome John Kordic in what would go down in hockey history as one of the most disastrous trades ever for Toronto. The twenty-three-year-old enforcer and Burns were, surprisingly, chalk and cheese—or, more accurately, tinder and match. Kordic, who pined to be more than a pair of fists on skates, had expected an increased workload when Burns got to town, but the opposite resulted as he dressed for only six of Montreal’s first fifteen games. Kordic didn’t hide his displeasure. “Burns makes no secret that he’s got ‘his boys’ and he’s going to play his boys. I thought I was one of his boys at the start, but obviously not. I told them if they weren’t going to play me, I wanted out. I told them to get rid of me.”

There had been an infamous incident early on that poisoned the relationship between Burns and Kordic, although it went unreported at the time. They’d almost come to blows. Burns recounted the episode to his old mentor Charlie Henry. “This guy’s yakking off in the dressing room, this and that, how he’s not playing enough. Then he comes right into my goddamn office. He’s standing there mouthing off at me. I had a big glass ashtray on my desk. So I took the ashtray and I threw it at him. Just lucky I didn’t hit him, hit the wall instead and it broke into pieces. Kordic put his hands up and says, ‘You’re fucking crazy!’ ” Burns responded menacingly:
“I
am
crazy. And if you’re not happy, we’ll go down in the street right now and there will be no linesman to stop me.” Instead, Kordic ran into the dressing room, screaming, “The fucking coach is crazy!”

Kordic stormed out of the rink. Burns waited a few minutes, and then poked his head into the dressing room, inquiring, “Where is he?” The players said, “He’s gone, Coach.” To Henry afterwards, Burns fumed, “That nut could have jumped over the desk and killed me.” What Burns told reporters much later, revisiting the scene, was: “I told him to come back when he got some manners.”

Burns also embarrassed Kordic when, after finding him in the team’s whirlpool tub, he made a crack about being sure to drain the water lest sexually transmitted diseases be spread to his teammates.

Something had to give. Kordic was already so disgruntled that he spent as little time as possible at the Forum, even putting aside his passion for working out in the weight room. Such was his stress that at one point he landed in hospital for a few days with chest pains. What was allegedly unknown at the time was Kordic’s heavy drug use—cocaine addiction compounded with alcohol, double demons that would ultimately bring him to a sad end, death by cardiac arrest in a Quebec City hotel room, just twenty-seven years old.

Burns reported the ashtray incident to Savard, but the GM had already heard enough about the increasingly volatile Kordic. In young Toronto general manager Gord Stellick, he found a sucker—er, agreeable trading partner—with Leaf coach John Brophy enthusiastic about making the deal. In return, Montreal got Courtnall, the speedy sniper who’d been languishing on the pine under Brophy. As a Canadien, Courtnall would be reborn, his offensive creativity valued by Burns on a team that had dim scoring wattage.

“I couldn’t believe how young he was,” says Courtnall, recalling his introduction to Burns. “It was only about twelve games into the season, so not too many people knew much about Pat yet. He was a tough man, a tough coach. Sometimes we didn’t understand what he was really wanting out of us. But he was good to play for because he really demanded the most out of you.”

Brophy—who would be canned by late December, replaced by George Armstrong—had been a screamer, too. “But there was a difference,” says Courtnall. “Pat had Jacques Laperrière as his assistant, and they ran good practices. Pat didn’t say a lot unless we were not doing what he wanted us to do, and then we’d hear it.” Laperrière, the Hall of Fame Habs defenceman, was a gentle yin to Burns’s tempestuous yang. “They were a really good team together. Jacques was quiet, but he had played in the NHL. And Pat, when things needed to be sorted out, came down on us pretty hard.”

Courtnall was impressed by the Canadiens’ use of videotape for instruction, though Burns was no Roger Neilson disciple and often left those sessions largely to Lappy. Says Courtnall: “We watched video before every game. We studied other teams, dissecting their strengths and weaknesses. Pat’s teams always understood before every game what the other team did really well and what they didn’t do well.”

Astutely, Burns moved Courtnall from centre to right wing, to exploit his speed and shooting ability. “At centre, you have a lot of defensive responsibilities,” says Courtnall. “When I went to right wing, I had less on my plate to worry about and the game became a lot easier for me.” It proved a brilliant move. Courtnall would finish the season with 22 goals in 64 games for Montreal.

In Toronto, Kordic was tattling to anybody who would listen about the purported dissension in Montreal’s dressing room, with veterans and francophones disgruntled over ice time invested in anglos and young’uns, Burns favouring his “Sherbrooke” boys, Mike Keane and Brent Gilchrist. “Some of the older guys, some of the sharpshooters on the team, aren’t too happy,” Kordic blabbed. “In the last minute of a game, you don’t see Bobby Smith and Mats Naslund on the ice. You see Keane and Gilchrist.”

There was truth in his accusation. Burns’s attachment to Keane and Gilchrist was noted, disapprovingly, by the French media, always quick to pounce on any perceived snub of francophone Habs. “Mike and I, we didn’t read the French newspapers or listen to French radio and TV, which was probably an advantage,” says Gilchrist. “But Pat spoke the language.
They accused him of not liking francophones, and Pat at first thought that was funny. He’d say, ‘But I
am
French.’ He played the players he wanted to play, the ones he believed in. Mike and I were criticized at times, but I think for the most part we proved ourselves and those days disappeared. Those first two or three months, though, there were some strong young French-Canadians playing in the American League—they eventually became Montreal Canadiens—but we got there first. And Pat stuck to his guns. He took a lot of heat. I think Pat knew if he was going to be successful, he couldn’t cave in to the media telling him who to play. He said, ‘I’m going to play the guys I think can help us win hockey games.’ And we did.”

Burns was simply glad to shed the pain in the neck Kordic had been. And Courtnall was thriving under his direction, pulling spectators out of their seats with his rushes. There was no fuzzy warmth between Courtnall and coach, however. Courtnall credits Burns with making him a top-notch professional hockey player, but allows that the gruff boss always remained something of an enigma.

“He just didn’t want the players to get close to him. Every morning for four years, I’d walk by his office and stick my head in his door, say good morning. And not once would he say good morning back to me. Ever. One time I ended up having breakfast with him, by accident, near the Forum and it was
so
uncomfortable. He was a grumpy coach. He just didn’t want his players to get too close to him.

“Once you left his team, went to play somewhere else, he was totally different, nice and jolly. In the Forum, at practice, he would jump up on the boards and talk to guys on other teams, laughing. There were guys he’d coached as juniors, and he was very friendly with them. We were always, like, ‘I wish he was like that with us.’ We didn’t have the best of relationships, Pat and I. I think I was a player that kind of frustrated him at times. But I sure played hard for Pat. Everybody wants to get recognition for what they’re doing well or their hard work. Pat just wasn’t a guy who would too often pick you out of a lineup and say, ‘Hey, good game tonight.’ ”

Abruptly, the good-game nights started coming as the team began
putting together winning streaks. By November 25, the Canadiens had gone undefeated in eleven of their past dozen, if largely on the strength of superb goaltending from Roy, who was proving unbeatable at the Forum. Burns was suddenly coaching one of the hottest teams in the league. With a victory over Boston on December 12, Montreal had lost only two of their last twenty-two and led the Adams Division by twelve points, opening up a huge bulge over Boston that the Bruins would never bridge. At Christmas, the joke in Montreal was that, when the Canadiens began the season 4–7–1, Burns was a dopey cop. Now he was an Einstein coach, tacking 100 points onto his bench IQ. They went four-for-four on a swing through the Smythe Division and extended their win streak on the road to eight games, even absorbing, without alarm, the broken right foot that would shelve Gainey for six weeks.

Burns basked in his plumped celebrity as “new thinker” genius while always carefully commending his players. “The secret has been twenty-five good individuals who can pull together and who care about hockey and want to give their best to the game. It’s funny, but three or four bleep-bleeps on a team can screw things up. Well, we don’t have any of those.”

Except that he did have an expletive deleted—and Burns used them all—in the exasperating enigma that was Stéphane Richer, fallen idol. Coming off a fifty-goal season, the quintessential Flying Frenchman had fallen to Earth with a crashing thud and nobody could fathom why, least of all Richer. The young superstar tortured himself like a hockey Hamlet, trying to regain his Midas touch and tattered self-confidence. Acutely sensitive and mentally fragile, Richer had become a haunted man, repeatedly subjected to upbraiding by his coach, Burns monumentally mistaken in the belief that harping would be helpful. He’d known the twenty-two-year-old for nearly a decade and should have realized that a boot in this particular butt would pay no dividends. He punished Richer by reducing his ice time, which only exacerbated the scoring funk. A ten-game suspension early in the season for clubbing the Islanders’ Jeff Norton with a stick set the
template for a season of woe. When Richer took himself out of a game, claiming the flu, Burns sat him for the next match. When the Richer melodrama appeared on the front page of a Montreal paper twice in one week, Burns went ballistic. “I’m fed up to here with Richer,” he thundered.

At the Forum, cheers turned to jeers and Richer was stricken. “When I make a check, they laugh. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Look at him; he finally hit someone.’ ” Reporters dined out on the purported breach between player and coach. The more Richer took his grievances to the media, the more Burns seethed. “I feel like I’m in a war,” Richer told journalists, bewildered by the controversy that raged in the papers and his aimless season. Roommate Guy Carbonneau stood in as layman therapist, providing the emotional support that was not forthcoming from an unsympathetic coach. Never a patient man, Burns was galled by the whole soap opera. “All that we’ve accomplished as a team suddenly doesn’t seem to matter,” he harrumphed. “All everyone is talking about is Stéphane Richer. I coach the Canadiens, and what’s important to me is the team. I can’t be concerned with just one player. I’ve played him regularly and on the power play. I can’t do any more. I can’t go out and play for him and I can’t stop the fans from yelling at him.”

In fact, Burns would claim for years afterwards—even from his deathbed—that he loved Richer like a son. That may have been the problem. Burns was no doting dad. He didn’t show the love. And Richer, who personified the term “flake,” often appearing to inhabit another planet, drove him nuts. “Huh, he loved me so much he traded me,” Richer says now, not without affection. “It doesn’t make sense, but it makes sense.”

That trade was still far in the future, though, during the season of 1988–89, a crucible year for Richer. In retrospect, he doesn’t blame Burns, or the hounding media. He was susceptible to depression, mood disorders that would not be diagnosed until middle age. “I was struggling inside,” he says. “I didn’t even know why. If I knew why at the time, it would have been easier to talk about. At the time, I was young. You don’t know what’s happening, [you’re] looking for answers and not finding any. I’d ask myself, ‘Why am I struggling like this?’ I didn’t have any fun on the ice. With Pat,
it’s A or B, there’s no in-between. I tried to talk to him. I said, ‘Pat, I’m struggling with some things.’ But Pat, he didn’t want to be involved with this. He had enough coping with me while I was struggling on the ice.”