Coach: The Pat Burns Story (28 page)

So there was that. The war of words, to the delight of reporters, would continue throughout the series.

The next day, with his right eye blackened and nearly swollen from Clark’s pummelling, McSorley sarcastically invited photographers to take all the close-up pix they wanted. “Everybody get a good picture. A couple of stitches—big deal.” Otherwise, he was the picture of innocence. Unable to resist, McNall got in on the lip-flapping, saying he had no clue what words
had been exchanged between coaches. “What was he yapping about at Melrose? I thought maybe he was mad Melrose got the job Burns was begging for all [last] year.” When two large bouquets of balloons were delivered to the visitors’ dressing room, Luc Robitaille piped up: “One’s from Doug and one’s from Wendel.”

Burns arrived at practice with an hours-old haircut—clearly, he was the one who’d visited the barber—patiently giving journalists a chance to comb through the feud fallout, then stated he wanted to put the kerfuffle behind him. “Irish tempers flew. I’m in a good mood and I want to stay that way. Barry can talk about it all he wants. I love the Kings today.” Barry did continue to yammer, now indignant over the remark Burns made about Gretzky. “Anyone in hockey that criticizes Wayne Gretzky is not very smart. Pat Burns is making a lot of money in hockey now because Wayne Gretzky hired him to coach his junior team.” He suggested Burns had had a “brain aneurysm.” He revisited the November incident where Gilmour broke Tomas Sandstrom’s arm, with Burns accusing the Kings of “always crying about something” when they groused about the non-game suspension. “Who’s whining now?” Melrose taunted, noting the hypocrisy over McSorley’s mauling of Gilmour.

Mischievous Melrose knew how to stick in the needle, though professing to have sworn off physical confrontations since the time when, as a first-year coach with Medicine Hat, he’d gone after a fan who slugged him during a game, which led to sixteen-year-old players swinging their sticks like hatchets. “I vowed not to lose control again. I was embarrassed.” So he swallowed his temper, even staying cool during a 10–2 demolition by Philadelphia earlier in the year. “I had a leather strap between my teeth.”

As for his much-mocked mullet, which Burns had targeted for ridicule, Melrose explained: “The only thing my dad and I ever fought about was my hair. He always made me keep it short. When I left home at fifteen, I said I would never have it short again. Everybody likes it. Well, you know who doesn’t? Bald people.” Ba-da-bing. Burns rolled with the jokes about his thinning pompadour—“I don’t have much hair on top anymore”—but he was genuinely aggrieved by the punch at his paunch. “Maybe when
Barry hits forty-one or forty-two, he’ll find the stomach will grow out a bit, too.”

Reporters quickly noticed Gilmour wasn’t on the ice for practice. Cracked Burns: “Doug has gone back to his planet for a rest.” It was the only rest the double-shifted Gilmour would get.

In game two, it was the Leafs who utterly lost their composure. The raggedy match could have gone either way; neither team distinguished itself. Near the end of the first period, after McSorley swatted him again, Gilmour skated up to his tormentor with fire in his eyes and head-butted McSorley bang on the schnozz. The Kings were outraged that Gilmour was not assessed a major penalty or game misconduct, both players receiving minors for roughing.

Toronto wasted a 2–1 lead and lost 3–2 on Sandstrom’s tie-breaker in the third, set up by Gretzky, who disputed accusations the Kings were a one-dimensional run-and-gun team. Indeed, L.A. had matched Toronto’s grit and slow-down style in the snooze cruise, while Gilmour, as one columnist put it, “went from super-duper to super-stupor” in the space of two days. At the time, Gilmour denied head-butting McSorley, saying: “We were just head-to-head.” Today, he says: “Oh, I head-butted him.”

Off the ice, Melrose was wrangling with Don Cherry, who was hardly a neutral observer of the series—he planted a smooch on Gilmour’s kisser on national TV after game one. “I just don’t feel that
Hockey Night in Canada
should be cheering for one team over another,” said Melrose, miffed. “We have as many Canadians on the Los Angeles Kings as the Leafs do.” In retaliation, Melrose forbade his players from appearing on
HNIC
. Cherry fulminated on the air that Melrose “was a candy-ass as a player and he’s a candy-ass as a coach.” Prudently, Melrose passed on the opportunity to tell the bombastic commentator to kiss a relevant part of his anatomy.

Cherry further slammed Melrose for looking like “Billy Ray Cyprus” on account of the hair—which actually cut closer to the bone for Burns, who’d proclaimed Billy Ray
Cyrus
his favourite country crooner. Meanwhile, Melrose’s wife, Cindy—notable for stripper-style fashion, all lace and
bustiers—grabbed a piece of the inter-coach baiting by going on KISS radio and calling the Toronto bench boss “Fat Burns.”

Toronto had not won a game two throughout the playoffs. Burns was ticked that his team had failed to show much, squandering the opportunity to take a two-game series lead. “We all seemed to sit back and wait for the Doug Gilmour Show to start. Maybe some of our guys still don’t realize what this is about.” Now they were winging to the coast, distaff partners in tow—but not for the players. Burns had no inkling what was about to hit him.

A Los Angeles radio station, making light of Burns’s girth, urged its listeners to send a doughnut to the coach, identifying the team’s Santa Monica hotel. When the Kings caught wind of the prank, officials called the station, firmly urging it to cease and desist. Not a chance. Eighteen dozen doughnuts arrived. In a quite brilliant counter-thrust, Burns and Tina distributed the pastry to vagrants in Santa Monica and Venice. “I was a king this morning. I may be the most unpopular person in L.A., but the homeless guys who sleep on the beach think I’m the greatest. I thought they were going to carry me around on their shoulders. They told me it was the best breakfast they’d had in years.” Knock it off though, Burns requested. “I advise people not to waste their money, because Tim Hortons doughnuts are the only ones I eat.” Good-natured about the gag, Burns put a different spin on the fans’ gesture, suggesting they weren’t ribbing his portliness. “I think it has to do with my previous years as a police officer. We do hang out in doughnut shops a lot, to have coffee and stay awake so we can protect all those guys who have big mouths.”

He was growing weary of the shtick and the spotlight. “While all this stuff has been a lot of fun, it’s time to get down to brass tacks again. Barry and I aren’t the point of this thing at all. We’re just a sidelight. We’re here to win some hockey games, not bicker like a couple of schoolchildren.” To that end, Burns put the Leafs through a lung-burning practice, rejecting any suggestion the club was physically worn down. “They shouldn’t be tired. The piece of meat between their ears is tired, maybe.”

Hundreds of fans came to the Forum armed with doughnuts as
projectiles to hurl towards Burns. Gilmour-badgering from spectators began halfway through the Canadian anthem. “They had these signs,” recalls Gilmour. “On one side it said ‘Gilmour Head Butt.’ Turn it around and it said ‘Gilmour Butt Head.’ That was actually pretty funny. I should have kept one.”

Gilmour was blowtorch-tailoring his sticks (made of wood in those dinosaur days) in the corridor of the Forum before the game. “This guy walks by and says, ‘Hey you, take it easy on us.’ As soon as I heard the voice, even without looking up, I knew who it was—Sylvester Stallone. I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’ There were all these Hollywood stars coming to the games and we were in awe. Pat said, ‘We don’t give a fuck about who these people are, okay? Who cares if Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn are in the stands? Don’t even look at them. They’re not cheering for you.’ ”

The Kings tipped Toronto 4–2, twice beating Félix Potvin on shorthanded goals. While Gretzky continued to play pedestrian hockey—for him—Burns was uneasy about an imminent explosion from Number 99. He implored his players to take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves, “How much do we want this?” They must have heeded his directive, because an efficient, forceful effort resulted in game four, which Toronto took 4–2, winning all the one-on-one battles within the encounter. “We are at our best when we think we’re done,” observed their appreciative coach. “We have to play scared.” “It’s going to be a long series,” Gretzky predicted. “We know that now.”

There was anxious remonstration about 99. His last remaining objective in hockey was to lead the Los Angeles Kings to a Stanley Cup. But where was the tour de force performance that had been anticipated? “Wayne’s Wane” went the refrain. At the start of the series, the thirty-two-year-old Gretzky declared that he hadn’t felt this good in ages, but there was little evidence of that on the ice. Alas, as everyone now knows, he was saving it for the final act, the curtain-dropper.

Rattled, the Kings called in their positive-thinking guru, Anthony Robbins, the celebrated late-night TV pitchman for books and tapes on
personal power and author of
Awakening the Giant Within
. Melrose was a devotee. Burns, back in Toronto, scoffed at the New Age approach to hockey; how very California. Besides, Burns said, the Leafs had their own motivational expert in team psychologist Max Offenberger. “I’ve got Maxie. We smoke a cigar, have a cognac and everything looks better. Anyways, Max has home-couch advantage.” On home turf, Toronto’s fans would show the L.A. mob a thing or two, Burns promised. “The Madhouse on Manchester will become the Crazy House on Carlton.”

The coaches fired another round of verbal salvoes, each accusing the other of shattering the ceasefire. Burns believed there was an implied slur when Melrose made a comment about the Leafs having an older lineup, which forced them to play a middle ice–clogging style because they couldn’t otherwise keep up stride for stride with the Kings. It was a soft lob, but Burns went nuclear. “Barry Melrose doesn’t show any respect to anybody. He has been the same since the playoffs started. He thought he could distract me with that doughnut thing. I was a cop for sixteen years. I’ve been called a pig, a dog. I’ve had beer bottles broken over my head. I’ve been kicked in the groin. I had a woman I was arresting try to scratch my eyes out. If he thinks calling me a doughnut is going to distract me … I don’t think Barry understands that coaching is a fraternity. We should respect each other. We’re alone out there. Someday he might be alone.”

There was cunning to his jawing. It was deliberately shifting media attention away from his players in the Toronto pressure cooker. “I don’t know if that’s something Pat learned from Scotty Bowman or if it came naturally,” says Gilmour. “Scotty always had something to say about nothing. He’d complain that the benches were short or the ice wasn’t satisfactory. The focus was obviously on us, and Pat was trying to deflect it. And he didn’t want us reading the clippings, especially if they were negative.”

Game five at the Gardens reached the sixty-minute buzzer deadlocked 2–2, Toronto clawing back from a two-goal deficit. In sudden death, Leafs carried the play by a wide margin. With thirty-nine seconds remaining in the first extra period, Glenn Anderson cut in from the left circle, skated by a crowd that included Gretzky and belted a shot that seeped through the
legs of Kelly Hrudey “like a croquet ball through a hoop,” as a
Los Angeles Times
story described it. “I was thinking, ‘Just get a shot on net,’ ” said Anderson, who’d been the most inspirational Leaf from among a decidedly flat pack. “We pulled a rabbit out of the hat,” admitted Burns. “But rabbits are getting pretty scarce. After the first period, we reached down and pulled out a chicken.”

Toronto was one victory away from their first Stanley Cup final since their last Stanley Cup championship in 1967. Burns placed a dressing-room ban on any mention of the Montreal Canadiens—home and idling, waiting for an opponent to be determined—but the city was going bonkers. Players barely had time to register their win before boarding the plane back for L.A. “We played every other day but it felt like every day,” says Gilmour. “We knew what was going on in the city, but the players were all in our own little world together. I look back sometimes and say to myself, ‘Did that really happen?’ ” Gilmour is referring not to his heroics but his own occasional savagery, the frantic reaction provoked by Burns urging them all: “Just bleed, boys.”

“People, kids, ask me all the time, but it’s so hard to explain. I thought for sure we were going to win that series. I put that helmet on and, honestly, sometimes I was a complete fucking asshole. I’d take the helmet off after and ask myself, ‘Did I really just do that?’ It really felt like we were a team of destiny. Man oh man, it was an unbelievable feeling.”

Unbelievable is how game six felt, too, even more so when looked at in the rear-view mirror, nearly two decades later. L.A. built up a two-goal lead and then Wendel Clark took over, delivering arguably the finest, most gallant game of his life. He scored once, he scored twice, he scored thrice. Two of those goals came in the third period as Clark almost unilaterally drew the Leafs into a 4–4 tie. “It was a career game,” says Mike Foligno. “Wendel took it upon himself to cover all the mistakes of the team and singlehandedly get us back into it, to give us a chance to win. He showed us what kind of a man he was with that kind of a performance. That game proved to everybody why he was the captain of the team. I remember the jubilation in the dressing room, that he was able to take it into overtime for us.”

Clark is modest about that glorious night. His troublesome back had been aching all day. “I took only a two-minute warm-up and wasn’t even sure that I was going to play. Then I went and had therapy with team physiotherapist Chris Broadhurst. You never know when you’re going to have that kind of game. I certainly hadn’t sensed it. The puck just followed me all night.” He pauses. “The next night, the puck just followed Wayne Gretzky.”

For the rest of his life, Burns would argue there should never have been a next night, that Gretzky should not have been on the ice to score the 5–4 winner at 1:41 of overtime, a power-play goal with Anderson in the box for foolishly boarding Rob Blake, squaring the series at three apiece and setting up a third game seven for Toronto. Kerry Fraser called the penalty with 12.1 seconds left in regulation. In his press conference that evening, Burns didn’t quibble much about an infraction whistled at so crucial a juncture. “What are you going to do? It was a good call.”