Coach: The Pat Burns Story (17 page)

Someone—Corson thinks it was Skrudland—rang up Burns when police permitted the obligatory one phone call. “But he didn’t come right away. He left us there till morning.” News of the arrest had already broken, and Burns tried to sneak his wayward threesome out the back exit. “He wasn’t happy,” says Corson. “He gave us shit. Pat said, ‘We’ll talk about this later.’ ” That afternoon, after practice, Burns sat the three quasi-felons down for a stern chat. “Pat wanted to know what happened. We realized the best thing was to be honest, tell the truth. I explained about the girl getting beat up and that we hadn’t started the fight. Pat said, ‘Okay, did you learn something from this?’ We said yeah, definitely. And that was it.”

For Corson, this was neither the first nor the last time he’d have brushes with the law. More often, his shenanigans were harmless—on that same trip, Corson and Keane picked up a Christmas tree in the hotel lobby and dumped it in Chris Chelios’s room. But on other occasions, fuelled by alcohol, things turned ugly. Eventually, when Burns was no longer there to watch his back, the bar brawls would get him tossed out of Montreal.

Life for a Montreal coach is always eventful and never predictable, no matter how precisely charted in a schedule that’s released well in advance of every new season. In the late summer of 1990, that schedule sent the
bleu, blanc et rouge
across the Atlantic. The “Friendship Tour,” a promotional brainwave of the NHL, had the Canadiens, their wives and their children boinging from Sweden to Latvia to the Soviet Union over a fortnight of exhibition games. Pat Burns loathed the whole undertaking.
“I don’t think it’s going to be the kind of training camp that a coach would like to conduct,” he grumped prophetically as the travelling circus aboard Air Habs landed in Stockholm.

Perhaps, given his history at the junior worlds in Czechoslovakia, the league should have had a rethink. The NHL was, after all, at that very moment trying to soothe feathers ruffled by Sergei Fedorov’s walking away from the Soviet national team to sign with Detroit. Burns didn’t do unruffling very well.

The excursion had started mildly enough. It would conclude with an ugly brawl and empty vodka bottles hurled at the “dirty” Canadiens. Following an unremarkable match in Leningrad, the team had flown on to Moscow, worn out, sleep-deprived and grouchy. The culture shock had already knocked them for a loop, and now they were simply eager to go home. In the capital, Stéphan Lebeau had his clothes stolen, players complained about the food—until Patrick Roy discovered a just-opened Pizza Hut, placing a massive to-go order—and everyone was pretty much confined to their hotel, partly because of the language barrier and partly because there was nowhere to go, few Habs particularly interested in camera-clicking tourist jaunts to the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral or Lenin’s Tomb. Burns claimed several wives had been accosted by Russian men who thought they were hookers, and so the women were afraid to venture outside the hotel.

It quickly became apparent that the Soviets were taking these games all too seriously. “To us, this is preseason hockey, it doesn’t have too much importance,” Burns objected. “But the Soviets have put a lot of emphasis on these games, too much emphasis sometimes.” Yet it was Montreal that was criticized for playing too aggressively in the first Moscow encounter, a 4–1 loss to Dynamo. That was merely the aperitif. The next night, facing a keyed-up Central Red Army squad, was déjà vu for Burns, fingered as the culprit in yet another diplomatic fiasco. Fights had already twice stopped the game. In the third period, a couple of bottles smashed on the ice after being thrown towards the Canadiens’ bench, and the glass had to be swept up before play could resume. Several Montreal players were
hit with coins. A number of scuffles broke out simultaneously, Shayne Corson and Stéphane Richer jumping off the bench to join the fray, giving the Canadiens a two-man advantage on the fight card that ensued. Petr Svoboda was ejected for a deliberate attempt to injure. Peace was just being restored when fans began pelting the visitors with debris, so Burns ordered his team off the ice. “When that vodka bottle broke in front of the bench, Coach Burns said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ ” said defenceman Mathieu Schneider. Burns insisted that Soviet hockey federation president Leonid Kravchenko get on the public address system and calm the unruly crowd. Having done so, Kravchenko pleaded with the Canadiens to finish the match, adding, as a bizarre pleasantry, his hopes that the visitors would leave the Soviet Union with good memories.

“It hasn’t been much fun,” Burns fumed later, after Red Army edged his team 3–2 in overtime. He justified his ten-minute timeout as a necessary precaution. He’d been worried about his players’ safety. “When the president of the [federation] comes over and says how sorry he was and says his fans were hooligans to throw bottles and this and that, and then he comes back and says he wants our wives … to leave with good memories of Russia, you sort of look at him and say, ‘What?’ We’ve been stalled and we’ve been lied to and we’ve been almost shafted in every corner in nearly every place we’ve been.”

Red Army coach Viktor Tikhonov blamed the Canadiens for the melee. “They started this fight and they had no right to leave the ice.”

As the Canadiens bid their fare-thee-well to Mother Russia, legendary ex-goalie Vladislav Tretiak and others delivered parting shots at their guests, castigating Montreal for the third-period donnybrook. “Can you believe it, they felt insulted,” he told the Tass news service. “They provoked a clash and were forced to leave the rink. Canadian players have always been clean sportsmen. But in this match they used the dirtiest moves—hitting players already down on the ice and jumping out from the bench to help their teammates in hand-to-hand fights.” Soviet customs officers got the last laugh, confiscating dozens of jars of caviar at the airport, the Canadiens’ flight delayed for three hours as a thorough search of the
players’ luggage was conducted. Montreal had arrived with $3,000 worth of medical supplies and equipment to donate to Soviet hockey. They left with a bill for fourteen rubles, accused of stealing two tiny, rough-textured towels from the Moscow visitors’ dressing room.

When training camp reconvened as normal in Montreal, Burns tried to put the whole sorry affair behind him. “If we get beat in Boston in April, I’m not going to blame it on Russia. If I have a heart attack next year, I’m not going to blame it on Russia. But it will affect us at the start of the season. When we got back, we had to start training camp all over again.”

Turns out, Burns was prescient about Boston.

The regular season came and went, bringing with it Burns’s 100th NHL win and nasty jeering for Stéphane Richer—who scored 51 goals the previous year—on Fan Appreciation Day at the Forum, with his coach observing, “Here, you can go quickly from hero to zero.” But the frustration of late-season slumps had been trained on the delicate flower that was Richer, the hockey public continuing its love-hate relationship with its star. Richer had done himself no favours by revealing he’d consulted with an astrologist about his scoring travails. “As a Gemini, it’s all or nothing with me,” Richer told snickering reporters. “I’m loved or I’m despised.”

If the love was no longer quite as fervent for Burns either, he remained very much Montreal’s celebrity coach, more ink-worthy than a tepid pool of player personalities, even Denis Savard—proving less than the spin-o-rama saviour advertised. The diet Burns put himself on in preparation for the postseason was closely documented: twenty pounds lost, smoking habit snapped. Canadiens finished second in the Adams Division, eleven points behind the Bruins, and thus drew Buffalo for a second straight playoff-opening opponent. What was expected to be a low-scoring wrangle between defensive-oriented squads was anything but: forty goals scored through the first four kooky games; each club taking two apiece on home ice; pucks going in off skates, shins and shoulders; Patrick Roy yanked during game four and then returned to
the net for the next period. Montreal eked out a 4–3 overtime victory in game five and then ripped the Sabres 5–1 at the Memorial Auditorium to close it out with a bang.

That set the table for another
mano-a-mano
with bitter rival Boston. Francis Rosa wrote in the
Boston Globe
: “April has become official. Daylight Savings Time has come, as it does every year. The Red Sox have opened the season, as they do every April. The Marathon is upon us, as it is annually. And the Bruins and Montreal are matched again in the playoffs. All is well in our corner of the wonderful world of sports. The Bruins and the Canadiens for the 10th time in the last 15 years. Now, that makes spring official.”

Boston had a firm regular-season edge over Montreal, with a 5–2–1 head-to-head record. Yet there was anxiety over the “Montreal Jinx,” even though Boston had won two of their last three series and even after the Bruins tasted first blood, grinding out a 2–1 decision in the plodding, eye-glazing opener on Causeway Street. Burns had warned this would be a tight and emotional playoff set. “There was the jinx for years and years, how Boston couldn’t beat Montreal. That’s over now. They don’t believe in the ghosts anymore. Anyone who’s not motivated to play Boston shouldn’t even put on skates. You see it when you go into the old Garden and they’ve won five Stanley Cups, and it’s the same for them when they come into the Forum and see our twenty-three banners. This rivalry is good for everyone.”

Mike Milbury scoffed at the Montreal jinx. “If you look back at the Montreal teams that beat Boston, they were probably mostly better teams. Now the talent has evened out a little bit. We don’t have the sword of Damocles hanging over our head. It puts us more on an even footing psychologically.”

Game one was an unusually polite, fight-free affair that had fans wondering what had become of the Flying Frenchmen and the Big, Bad Bruins. One wag suggested game two would be played with both sides wearing tuxedos. Asked why there wasn’t more emotion, Burns was miffed: “I can’t understand that question. Why do you ask it? Because we’re not throwing the gloves and not fighting? Everyone’s waiting for
a brawl because it’s Boston and Montreal. Well, it’s not going to happen. We don’t have the ammunition for that and I don’t think Mike Milbury has either. It may not seem so upstairs, but it’s rough hockey down on the ice level. It’s tough but it’s clean.”

The ice-level excitement was considerably cranked in game two, Montreal staging a dramatic come-from-behind effort, Richer tying the score 3–3, beating Andy Moog with 8:30 remaining in the third period. “I was really surprised to be by myself in front of the net. In the Garden, it’s so small that every time you get one shot off, you get pushed out of the way.”

Burns rested Richer and his first-line mates for the rest of regulation time. He had a feeling, a hunch. When the horn sounded and the teams retired to their dressing rooms, Burns pulled his goal-scorer aside. “I told Richer, ‘You’re going to win the game for us in overtime.’ ” Twenty-seven seconds was all it took. Richer struck for his second goal of the night. “Am I a coach or a prophet?” Burns crowed.

Moog missed the Bruins team bus to the Forum for game three because he was watching golf on TV in his hotel room. He hitched a ride with some Boston media and slipped into the dressing room without Milbury noticing the tardy arrival. The goalie made the difference in the net with forty saves, holding off the Canadiens after Ken Hodge scored the 3–2 marker with just under a minute and a half remaining in regulation time. “We deserved to win, but Andy made saves like I’ve never seen,” said Burns, tipping his hat. “I don’t think he can have another game like this.”

In game four he most assuredly didn’t, Montreal storming back 6–2, Shayne Corson leading the way with two goals and two assists. Burns had called his tough winger out for particular criticism, his idea of motivation, and it was front-page fodder for the press. But the tactic worked. “That’s one thing Burns was awesome at,” says Corson, “knowing which players he could push hard and call out, and which he had to be a bit more delicate with. He knew he could kick me in the butt and get the best out of me.” Corson came out of the chute in the fourth game like a man on fire. He completed his lively evening by picking up a five-minute major and game
misconduct for high-sticking Dave Christian. “It was probably one of the best games I’ve seen him play since he first put on the uniform of the Montreal Canadiens,” said Burns. Just a couple of months earlier, Montreal had almost traded Corson to Toronto for Wendel Clark, but backed off the deal, leery of the Leaf captain’s injury stats: 159 games missed over the three previous seasons.

Milbury was apoplectic over his team’s performance, deciding the series required drastic intervention. “I felt the momentum had completely shifted to Montreal,” he recalls. His solution was to pluck the Bruins from their comfy beds at home and schlep them all to a one-star motel in the strip-mall boonies, sequestering them in low-rent surroundings the night before game five. “It was really a welfare motel. I can’t describe it any better than that. It’s still there. We went to a dumpy little rink where we held an intense practice, me mostly out of control. If somebody from the outside world had seen me, they would have had me put in a loonie bin. I screamed at the guys for about an hour. I knew I couldn’t beat them up physically, but I needed to make a point. Pat’s team had stormed back and was going to take control of the series. So I made them stay at this dump. We practised, had dinner, and then I sent them out bowling. But that’s the kind of stuff you had to do in order to stay even with Pat, because his force of personality, his presence, was obvious. He had that ugly snarl about him, and his team played with that same ugly snarl, and you had to be ready to match that competitiveness or you weren’t going to win.”

Something worked. The Bruins smartened up and played their best hockey of the year in the fifth game, slamming Montreal 4–1. “We had guys that thought it was all over,” Burns fumed, smoke coming out his ears. “We had guys who didn’t have ten games’ experience in the National Hockey League making big quotes to the media. We didn’t respect the opposition; that’s where we missed out. They outplayed us, outskated us, outhit us, out-everythinged us.”