Coach: The Pat Burns Story (27 page)

Playing a part, 1993: 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. (
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Facing an uncertain future: As the 1995–96 season got under way, few observers could have predicted that Burns’s shelf life in Toronto was ticking down rapidly. (
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NHL Finals, 2003: At last, with the New Jersey Devils, he’d won the only silver hardware that matters. “My son Jason and my daughter Maureen came in from Montreal.… My wife was there, friends and family from Quebec. I pointed the Cup at them because sometimes you forget the people who are behind you, who were there when things don’t go so good.” (
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“I know my life is nearing the end, and I accept that”: At the news conference in March 2010, where it was announced that an arena would be named after him in Stanstead, Quebec. (
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Line Burns carries her husband’s ashes: The Stanley Cup urn was requested by Pat, who had also asked for a small funeral, conducted by a parish priest. What he got was a grand affair fit for a statesman. (
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F
ROM HIS SEAT
towards the back of the plane, Pat Burns was glaring. Of course, this was his face in repose, brow perennially furrowed, grave stare, expressionless yet speaking volumes. And on this morning, Leafs bound for Los Angeles, he was deeply annoyed. Cliff Fletcher was really the target of his ire, but there wasn’t much he could do about that. “The Boss,” as Burns called his GM, had opened up the team’s travelling entourage to spouses. A convivial sort, Fletcher invited wives of the coaching staff and management staff to accompany the club on their sojourn to California. That’s what really got up Burns’s nose. “I’m not for it,” he huffed. “This isn’t a vacation, for Chrissake.”

So opposed was Burns to domestic intimates tagging along for games three and four of the Campbell Conference final that he had deliberately withheld knowledge of the invitation from his own girlfriend, Tina Sheldon. She found out about it only after receiving a call from Fletcher’s wife, Boots. So then he was in double doo-doo. “Don’t you want me there?” Tina had asked, hurt. He was forced to admit, “No, not really.” Being Burns’s significant other could be a trial. While affectionate and usually considerate—a “big teddy-bear,” as Tina described him—the love
of his life was really hockey, and everything, everyone, came second, at least during the season, and most definitely during the playoffs. But once Boots Fletcher let the cat out of the bag, Burns was caught lying by omission. He surrendered to the inevitable, not graciously, issuing a disclaimer: “Don’t expect me to go for no hand-holding walks on the beach.” In fact, Burns would take that promenade stroll, though in unexpected fashion.

Fletcher threw matters of cost to the wind. The Leafs, he figured, deserved all the coddling his franchise could afford as the gruelling postseason ground on. Players were liveried from the L.A. airport to their posh oceanfront hotel in Santa Monica. While agreeing that sequestering the team outside Los Angeles was a good idea, Burns was testy about the location: too much sand and surf, entirely too laid-back and la-la. There may be fewer temptations farther from the bright lights of Tinseltown, but the hotel was also a considerable distance from both the practice rink and the Great Western Forum in Inglewood. Burns spent plenty of hours sitting in the marble lobby, Buddha-like, casting an arched eyebrow around the joint, making note of players’ comings and goings. Few were tempted to loll poolside with frothy drinks, though brisk constitutionals along the boardwalk or out to the Santa Monica Pier were advocated as therapeutic. Burns did fret about sunburn, reminding players about the time Jacques Lemaire got so scalded on his balding pate that he was unable to pull helmet over head come game time. “Remember sunscreen!” he bellowed.

After sixteen games in thirty-two nights, transcontinental travel was the last thing the Leafs needed. But in Wayne Gretzky’s fifth year as a King, Los Angeles had knocked off Calgary and Vancouver. The speedladen Kings were all glitz; the Leafs a lunch-bucket crew, with a blue-collar integrity they carried with pride, and very much an extension of the man behind the bench. The character of the squad was but one reason—apart from winning—that hockey had returned to its rightful place in Toronto’s bosom. “Not just Toronto, the whole country,” says Dave Ellett, who’d emerged from a prickly first few months of the season under Burns’s custodianship of the team to become one of the coach’s most trusted
rearguards. “We had a bit of a rocky start, kind of butted heads. Pat was a defence-first type of coach, and I liked to jump in on the play. He hated when defencemen passed the puck up the middle of the ice. I always felt I had the ability to do that and I was going to continue to do that. But if it didn’t work out well or the puck got turned over, I’d get ‘the look.’ ”

Ellett and Burns both hailed from the Ottawa area. Early in the season, the Leafs were playing Ottawa on the road and Ellett was on the ice for the pre-game skate. “Burnsie came right out on the ice, made a beeline for me. I could see him coming and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, what did I do? What’s he mad about now?’ ” Instead, Burns inquired if Ellett was the grandson of Abe Cavan. Ellett confirmed he was. Cavan had been the police chief in Ottawa. Burns beamed: “He gave me my first job on the police force! Yup, I’ll never forget him for that.”

Now, decades later, Burns was coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs and they were one series away from the Stanley Cup final. What a strange and winding road. Yet there was an intriguing patchwork of relationships among Burns, the Leafs and the Kings. It was Gretzky who’d hired Burns to coach his junior Olympiques in Hull all those years ago. Los Angeles was a club that had been interested in Burns’s service the previous summer, when he signed with Toronto. Burns got plenty of mileage recounting that story during the series, inflating the narrative—because Burns was never shy about exaggerating—to the point that he had L.A. dangling the GM title too. Majority franchise owner Bruce McNall, future felon, sharply corrected that version of history.

In any event, the Kings hired Barry Melrose, who was almost as colourful a character as Burns. Melrose, a former Leaf, was second cousin to Wendel Clark. They were also teammates on the local fastball nine in hometown Kelvington, Saskatchewan, during the summers of the early and mid-1980s, Melrose catching and Clark at shortstop. Burns’s assistant, Mike Murphy, had been head coach in L.A. for one season after serving as captain of the club for six. Several players had been Kings teammates on other teams. Although operating a continent apart, in different divisions, the teams had commonalities that dovetailed.

There was no dove-cooing in the series. It got off to a rollicking start at Maple Leaf Gardens when Marty McSorley—Gretzky’s personal Praetorian Guard in both Edmonton and now L.A.—flattened Doug Gilmour with a cheap-shot ambush with less than five minutes left in a game Toronto won 4–1. Gilmour completely outshone Gretzky in the affair, The Greater One on this evening, totting a pair of goals and assists, his fingerprints all over every scoring sequence. In the third frame, Toronto outshot the Kings 22–1; that’s how lopsided the match had become. McSorley’s blindside elbow kayoed Gilmour just after Number 93 set up Bill Berg for Toronto’s fourth goal. With Gilmour prone on the ice, Clark—defender of the Leaf realm—hustled over to teach the thuggish defenceman a lesson, laying a whupping on him. McSorley would carry a shiner as memento. “Well, our best player was lying on the ice in a 4–1 hockey game,” said Clark. “That’s something we didn’t want to happen.”

During the melee that followed, fans littered the ice with debris, a crutch included among the items hurled. “Somebody’s got a long crawl home,” Melrose chortled. Gilmour picked himself up, skated directly to the L.A. bench, hung on to Darryl Sydor’s stick and flayed the players with verbal abuse. That stand-up gutsiness awed even the Kings. “Just by coming over to our bench, he was trying to say that he wasn’t going to take anything from us,” Sydor marvelled.

From where he was standing, Burns went ballistic. He raced beyond the end of his bench, stood near the seats that separated the teams, screaming and gesturing at Melrose. Linesman Ray Scapinello had to charge between the men to prevent Burns from crossing over the DMZ. Mullet-haired Melrose—hair would become a trash-talking topic in this series—claimed not to have understood Burns’s screed. “I thought he was ordering a hot dog.” Repelling the tirade with an insolent grin, Melrose then puffed out his cheeks, mimicking Burns’s jowls and nyah-nyahing, “You’re fat!” That further incensed Burns. According to players from both sides, Burns called Melrose “bush” and spewed profane insults regarding the L.A. coach’s dated Rod Stewart shag. “Why don’t you go get a fucking haircut!”

Not exactly Oscar Wilde wit. This was infantile sassing, but it could have been worse, Melrose told reporters later. “I could have said, ‘Have another doughnut.’ ” (It was not an original line. In the 1988 playoffs, angry New Jersey coach Jim Schoenfeld confronted Don Koharski in the corridor and the referee was either bumped or stumbled, whereupon he threatened that Schoenfeld would never coach another game. Schoenfeld: “You fell, you fat pig! Have another doughnut.”)

Gilmour has more than once watched that first Leafs-Kings game, and the others from the ’93 playoff run, on video. “To this day, I want to go over there and grab a piece of Barry. If they’d really got into it, my money would be on Pat for sure. That showed how much passion he had for his hockey club, so it was great to see. The same thing for when he jumped on referees. If he had no emotion, how would the players have emotion?”

After the game, Burns was still fit to be tied about the bushwhacking of Gilmour, asserting he’d never send one of his enforcers on the ice to assault a star opponent. “All I know is that if Ken Baumgartner did that to Wayne Gretzky, we’d be hung from the top of Parliament Hill. I lost a lot of respect for the Los Angeles Kings because of that. I know that wouldn’t happen on our team. I certainly would not allow that to happen.” In the Kings dressing room, McSorley tossed off a glib explanation. “Just call me a cheap-shot artist.” Burns also took a not-so-subtle swipe at Gretzky, comparing the icon unfavourably to Gilmour. “Wayne Gretzky plays less than two hundred feet of the ice. Dougie goes back, picks up his checks and finishes them at the other end.”