Coach: The Pat Burns Story (18 page)

Facing elimination, Burns had to counter Milbury’s extracurricular wang-dang-doodling. So he hijacked the team bus. While reporters waited for the Canadiens at their suburban practice rink, wondering what the
heck had become of the no-show Habs, Burns had absconded with the players in full equipment, ordering the bus driver to take them all on a scenic tour of Montreal’s seedier neighbourhoods. “Take a look,” he told the players, directing their gaze at blue-collar life. These were the folks who lived and died by the Canadiens. The players owed
them
the best they had to give in game six. It was pretty hokey stuff. Burns didn’t rant or rave; he was preternaturally calm. “He told us stories,” says Corson. “He wanted us to remember how lucky we were, how fortunate we were to play a game that we loved to play and to make good money at it. That’s what he tried to explain to us that day.” And Burns reminded his charges they hadn’t lost anything yet; the Adams Division final was still there for the taking. Then the bus returned to the Forum, where players changed back into street clothes and went out for a team meal.

Psyched up, the club matched Boston’s intensity from game five in game six, Corson again providing the heroics. “It was warfare,” he says. “At that point, I would have gone through a wall for Pat.” The Bruins had a 2–1 lead with barely four minutes left in the third period when Corson chopped a rebound past Moog, who’d just made a sparkling save on Richer. In overtime, Patrick Roy needed to be at his awesome best, because Boston had the edge in play and scoring chances. At one point, he put his face in front of a shot. Then, practically carrying Craig Janney on his back, Corson swept in a pass from Brian Skrudland, falling down as he shovelled a shot that knocked in off the right post at 17:47 of OT, giving Montreal the 3–2 decision needed to send the series back to Boston for game seven.

Burns didn’t have much personal experience of game sevens in hockey, but claimed to have been at the Forum in 1979 for the famous too-many-men-on-the-ice encounter with Boston. “My brother-in-law got me the ticket.” When Yvon Lambert scored the winner, “I jumped up just like everybody else.” Who knows if that was true? Burns was never beyond fabricating for a good anecdote.

At their Cambridge hotel, Burns cancelled the off-day practice, reasoning his players needed a rest for the final showdown more than they needed to skate. He’d pondered pulling another motivational trick, but was stumped. “I tried to think of something on the plane, but I couldn’t. So I just let them be themselves. I asked them not to be lying around the lobby, but to maybe go out for a walk together.” That’s what he always did on a game day. “We’ll have a team dinner and then a team meeting together, and that’s about it. I asked them to be relaxed. I don’t want anybody walking around in his hockey underwear in the lobby, but I want them to stay as loose as possible. We don’t want anybody to be too tight. We want them to think about it, but we don’t want them not to sleep about it.”

One thing Burns had done was caution his players against putting too much faith in Montreal’s historical knack for winning the big games. “I don’t believe in history at all. I think the things that were done in the past are in the past and don’t reflect on anything that’s going to happen here. Hockey’s different now. Teams are different.”

In the Boston dressing room, Milbury tacked up a story written by a Montreal columnist, saying it was “mandatory reading” for his troops. The column ridiculed the Bruins, theorizing that they’d been put on earth for the express purpose of losing important games to the Canadiens. “He called us ugly and dumb. Ugly I can accept, but never dumb,” said Milbury. “It gave my guys something to think about it. They were focused. The writer thought he was pretty clever, I guess, but he actually helped us.” Then Milbury brought in Harry Sinden—winning coach in the ’72 Canada-Soviet series, the pinnacle of hockey competition—to preach the Boston gospel.

Game seven would be a down-to-the-wire finish, Moog magnificent from start to end. Scoreless in the first period, Boston got on the board in the second and then made it 2–0 early in the third when Cam Neely converted on a power play. Moog’s shutout was spoiled by Stéphan Lebeau’s backhand with one minute remaining in regulation time, a controversial goal because Moog had knocked his net off its moorings during a goalmouth scramble. Officials determined it had been a deliberate ploy, and the goal stood.

Burns pulled Roy with 2:49 left on the clock. The final minute was mayhem and madness as Montreal desperately sought the equalizer. At the other end, four Boston shots at the gaping Canadiens’ net were blocked by Montreal skaters, and several other shots went wide. Milbury couldn’t believe his eyes. “For the life of me, I don’t know how we didn’t score.” In fact, he thought it was Montreal that had scored on one of their surges. “There was a goalmouth scramble around the front of the net where Brian Skrudland and Shayne Corson were using their sticks like machetes on Ray Bourque,” he recalls. “It was incredibly vicious.”

“It was wild,” an exhausted Moog said afterwards, savouring the hard-earned 2–1 victory and 4–3 series decision. “They just rushed the net and were right on top of us. The pucks just hit me.” It was the first time Boston had ever defeated Montreal in a game seven.

Being bested by Boston stuck in the craw. But there was nothing to berate the Canadiens for in this series, or their coach. Burns was rightly proud of his team, players black and blue and bloodied as they readied for the flight home. In painful, poignant defeat, he was also classy. “I just wish Mike and the Bruins good luck. I hope they go all the way so we can say we went right down to the wire with them.”

The Bruins were halted in the conference finals by Pittsburgh. But any Montreal ghosts that had been hanging around had been exorcized for Boston in a gut-check series that could so easily have gone the other way. Said Milbury, “The gods were with us.” And then, because hockey gods are fickle, they weren’t.

I
T WAS CALLED
the Stogie Shack and it’s where Pat Burns played—literally.

Eight fine guitars, electric and acoustic, nested in their stands, as lovingly tended as his Harley-Davidsons, strummed or plucked as the mood struck. While coaching in the NHL was a dream come wildly true, Burns had other fantasies—guitar picker, cowboy, Hells Angel—and often dressed the part.

In wrangler mode, Burns wore hand-tooled boots, bolo tie, soft lambskin vests and suede cattleman’s hat fitted low over his brow. As motorcyclist, it was fingerless gloves and stompers. And as the Nashville crooner he fancied himself, there were flamboyantly embroidered shirts tucked into belts with ornate buckles. Country ’n’ western was always on the radio in his pickup truck—his preferred vehicle. It was the music he rarely convinced players to blast in the dressing room. “With Pat, it had to be country and nothing else,” recalls Pat Brisson, the hockey agent who played for Burns in Hull. That was but one of several notable passions for the blue-collar Renaissance man. In another life, if perhaps not the Harley outlaw who would always beguile, Burns might have taken to the
honky-tonk stage. He possessed a velvety singing voice and was totally in his element in front of a crowd, requiring no coaxing to perform.

The kid with the garage band who’d entertained guests at his sister’s wedding had grown up into an adult who could afford expensive toys: bikes, boats and Fenders. Frugal in other aspects, he’d spend top dollar on a custom-made axe, caressing its contours as if running his fingers along a woman’s curves. Though he couldn’t read a note, Burns had taught himself the basic chords and remembered all the lyrics to songs, including—off the hurtin’ twang reservation—the complete Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens canons.

Who was Pat Burns when he wasn’t being PAT BURNS, coach of the Montreal Canadiens? Even players who considered themselves close to their boss had no real clue, nor was there any reason to explore the personal side. These were professional relationships, forged on the ice and fortified under the hot lights of NHL rinks, inside dank dressing rooms, aboard planes, idling in hotel lobbies; motley groups of individuals, the game their only common denominator, who might spend up to ten months together, from training camp through playoffs, then scatter into the diaspora of the off-season, perhaps never to cross paths again except as opponents, formerly of the same crest. The intensity of a season burns furiously and is then abruptly extinguished. Hockey life is both unstable and relentlessly forward-thrusting. There’s no standing still. Burns burned his candle at one end—as coach—but simmered down at the other end, unwound.

He found his traction, his equilibrium, in the Eastern Townships, surrounded by people who had no connection to hockey, a bucolic Neverland where he could relax, stop being Coach Burns, though his thoughts never truly strayed from the game. In the dog days of summer, he’d still be scribbling potential line combinations on bar napkins or considering players he coveted while sitting at the pilot wheel of his fishing boat. Fishing was for contemplating, entire days spent on the sun-dappled water, and Burns went through one particularly ardent angling phase, kitting himself out with the most sophisticated gear. But usually, he preferred boats with speed, towing water-skiers or just crashing across the lake’s gentle waves.

The Stogie Shack was no more than a shed at the rear of a property he owned near Magog, the upscale resort town on the shores of Lake Memphremagog, close to the Vermont border. Burns had assembled an upright piano and drum set, with propane stove seeing service as another percussion instrument. Various friends sat in for jam sessions late at night, everybody often well oiled. If any of them picked up one of his guitars, Burns would growl: “Don’t fuck with that. It’s worth a lot of money.”

He’d first found his Magog niche—Donald Sutherland was among the local residents—while coaching in Sherbrooke, and would thereafter keep it as his private base of operations, handy enough to Montreal—even, later, Boston and New Jersey—for quick getaways as well as long, languid summers, children Maureen and Jason spending weeks with him. Burns was eager to make up for all the years he hadn’t been a hands-on dad, barely present, especially for Maureen. He relished giving them this tiny piece of paradise.

His buddies, high-spirited and idiotically silly—most of them sufficiently well-heeled to indulge in leisurely sabbaticals when Burns was
in situ
, one of them a senator’s son and heir to the Daoust hockey equipment fortune—constituted a kind of jesters’ court for the off-duty coach. The “Pat’s Court” retinue was a familiar sight around the Forum during the season. “Fools and jesters,” sniffed a thoroughly unimpressed Ronald Corey, team president. The Magog gang, which adopted the name Red Dogs—from a beer company mascot—were all motorcycle enthusiasts who every summer would embark on a lengthy road trip aboard their hogs, Burns and his posse rarely missing biker week in Laconia, New Hampshire, a vroom-vroom convention. The crew grew out of a friendship Burns had struck up with his next-door neighbour his first summer in Magog, a fellow known to all as Pecker. A narrow driveway separated the houses, and that’s where long boozy nights had their genesis. “We were always there, drinking and being stupid, and then Pat joined in,” recalls Kevin Dixon, a friend of Pecker’s, who became Burns’s closest amigo. “He didn’t have any friends. Maybe some, from the police force in Gatineau, but he’d left that world behind.”

Dixon, a jack of many trades, became Burns’s go-to guy, multitasking as pseudo-agent, realtor, accountant, amanuensis and fellow goof. “Pat was so dedicated to hockey that he’d have a hard time taking care of paying his bills. At one point, he needed a notary to take care of his alimony. He got himself into a position where he had to trust somebody. I guess he trusted me. He knew I wasn’t a crook.” During the off-season, they were inseparable, to the point that some teased them about being lovers. Burns claimed Dixon wasn’t his type. But it was very much a testosterone-infused band of fellow travellers, seriously stag, all coarse jokes and nonsense.

For a long time, there wasn’t a lot of money. Burns continually deferred his salary. In Toronto, later, he was still cashing cheques cut by the Canadiens, and he was careful to stash as much as possible for the future, aware that this year’s coach of the year could be next year’s unemployed stiff. “All the big money that you think he was making, he didn’t actually have it,” Dixon reveals. “He was trying to cover himself for the future, not knowing what was going to happen.” Apart from his big-ticket toys, including a boat he named the
Rum’n Dick
, Burns contentedly lived a frugal life. That came naturally to a fundamentally unpretentious man. It was not until his third season in Montreal that he actually bought his own house in Magog—a regular place, nothing gaudy—rather than rent.

Outgoing on the surface and certainly approachable by fans on the street, Burns was in fact a deeply private individual, even shy, quite distrusting, who let very few people into his inner circle. He was wary of hangers-on who wished to befriend him because of who he was, or as entrée to the hockey heights. Genuine intimates had to prove faithful and closed-mouthed, the farther removed from the hockey beehive the better.

Those who were in his company daily, “at work,” were befuddled by the tales they heard of a laid-back Burns who never barked or scowled. Stéphan Lebeau had a summer home on the same lake and couldn’t reconcile it. “We used to live very close, almost neighbours. I would hear all these stories about how funny he was, what a great person. I figured he had two completely different personalities.” To his Magog cabal, Burns’s meltdowns and patented histrionics behind the bench were the source of
endless hilarity. “We’d watch him on TV taking a fit, and it would crack us up,” says Dixon. “Away from the rink, he never showed that anger. Sometimes, we’d even mock him for that, like when some dopey boater came flying past, making wakes that would rock Pat while he was fishing, and he wouldn’t yell, wouldn’t say a word. He’d just laugh it off. He was never confrontational. I know there were times when he was steaming mad, but he never let it out.”