Coach: The Pat Burns Story (3 page)

In fact, there would be no “years later” for Alfred Burns, who died in 1957, aged forty-nine. The truth is more poignant than any improvised reminiscence.

“In the papers, when he first became coach in Montreal, they said his father took him to games, but that never happened,” says Diane, setting the record straight. “Not that Dad wouldn’t have done that, but he just never got the chance.”

When the family picked up and moved to Châteauguay, with Pat three years old, an uncle married to Alfred’s sister permitted them to reside
in a “house” he owned there. Actually, it was no more than a garage on a piece of property where the uncle’s family lived in a large separate house. But Alfred was handy and converted it into a decent home for his brood. “Dad turned the garage into a house for us,” says Diane. “But we never had papers or anything to prove that the house belonged to us. When he passed away, my uncle kicked us out.”

It was around Christmas. Alfred had been attempting to unclog a frozen well on the property using a blowtorch. He tried lighting the torch several times, to no avail. Nothing happened. As Alfred was peering over the edge of the well, gas fumes from the torch ignited and the torch exploded, the blowback striking him smack in the face. Amazingly, he wasn’t killed—nor, it seemed, seriously injured. He called for Lillian to bring him a towel. She wanted to call a doctor, but Alfred said no.

Louise and Diane had been shopping in town, walking home because they had no car, when they discovered a dazed Alfred. Despite what Pat would later say, he didn’t witness the accident, either. “The explosion burned Dad’s face, singed his eyebrows and his eyelids,” says Diane. “He actually looked okay except for the singes and the fact he had no eyebrows. But he refused to go to the hospital, because it was around Christmas and he wanted to be with the family. At least that’s what he said.”

Within a few weeks, however, Louise noticed that something appeared wrong with Alfred. He was weak and unsteady on his feet. A doctor was summoned. “The doctor came to the house, took one look at Dad and said, ‘Oh no, he’s got to go to the hospital.’ ” His brother drove him. “When Dad got there, he bent down to take his shoes off, had a massive heart attack and died.”

Speculation after the fact was that Alfred had a bad ticker, some undisclosed pre-existing condition biding its time until triggered fatally by the blast. There was no history of heart problems in his family; his father died of cancer, while his mother lived to a ripe, old age. “He may have had a cholesterol problem,” muses Diane. “He was a man with a big appetite—big pie eater, big egg eater. He never went to doctors. You would never know there was anything wrong to look at him. Not at all.”

For the youngster Pat, the sudden loss of his father lacerated his psyche, ripping open a wound, a throbbing ache that would never heal. Even before he could process what had been lost, the ever-after absence of Alfred Burns had marked him. Thus would begin a lifelong search for male mentors, a quest for kindly patriarchs to fill that vacuum. There was always a deep-rooted sadness that Burns, as an adult who eschewed navel-gazing and avoided self-reflection, was loath to even acknowledge. “I don’t think he was ever a happy man,” reflects Diane, who was his closest sibling. “From the day my dad died, there’s been a gap in there so big, so big, that was never filled by anyone else—not men friends, not women, and there were a lot of women. He just had this big, big hole that never got filled. That affected all his relationships. He never learned how to be a father because he never really had one.”

Louise received some insurance money and a widow’s pension, but the family faced hardship. Three of her children—Sonny, Lillian and Phyllis—were working at Imperial Tobacco in Montreal, and Violet, soon to be married, at a plant that manufactured Aspirin. None of Alfred’s offspring would receive a postsecondary education, all of them entering the work force right out of high school. When Alfred’s brother-in-law evicted the family from the garage-cum-house, Louise faced a crisis. Younger children in tow, she returned to St. Henri, renting a small ground-floor apartment on St. Antoine Street. She got a job at a clothing shop. Then Louise was offered, and accepted, a job from her brother, who owned a restaurant in Pointe-au-Chine, not far from Hawkesbury, Ontario. Louise became the cook, and Phyllis also toiled in the restaurant for a year until she married her boyfriend and moved away. Four-year-old Pat was still attached to his mom’s apron string, but Diane, then eleven, was sent to dwell temporarily with her maternal grandparents in Calumet. The family had been dispersed widely. “My mother was just trying to cope,” says Diane.

Within a few years, widowed Louise, with Diane and Pat, relocated the shrinking family to Gatineau. Violet was living there then, and Louise wanted to be closer to her daughter and good-natured son-in-law, Bill Hickey. Another tiny apartment was rented for the three meandering
Burnses. This was not an unpleasant phase in the Burns family annals. The Christmas Pat was six, Louise had set aside money to buy him—at an employee discount because Diane was a salesgirl at the store, Handy Andy’s—a complete set of Canadiens-logo hockey equipment. Dickie Moore was Pat’s idol, the Hab he pretended to be while playing on frozen ponds and at the local rink.

“He would put on his skates at home, on Oak Street, and walk five blocks to the rink, which was next to our parish church, St. Aloysius. He would play there for hours and hours, sometimes by himself, just a boy with his stick and his puck. He’d stay so long that my mother would have to call the priest and say, ‘Please send Patrick home.’ And the priest would say, ‘Oh, that’s all right. I’ve already brought him in and given him dinner.’ Later on, she’d call again and say, ‘Father, really, tell Patrick to come home now.’ When he walked in the house, he’d be so bush-tired, he could hardly stand on his skates. My mother would take his skates off and put his feet in the oven to warm them up.”

Interestingly, in his own recollections, Burns would often transpose these events, resituating them in St. Henri, maintaining the fiction that his childhood was spent largely there, within walking distance of the Forum. But there may have been psychological reasons for editing history.

While closeness to Violet was probably a factor in Louise’s decision to move to Gatineau, that particular event seems also to have been prompted by romance. Louise had by then met the man who would become her second husband. Her children were never certain exactly when or how Louise came to encounter Harvey Barbeau, a widower with a grown son, but it may have been as early as the family’s tenancy in Châteauguay. What they all agree on is ruing the day he became their stepfather.

“He was a filing clerk for Veterans Affairs,” says Diane, “and he was an alcoholic. Mum didn’t know it at first because he never drank in front of her. I really think at this point our mother was eager to get her own home, her own house, which she’d never had. So they got married.” To Diane and Pat, their mother’s new husband was always Harvey, never
Dad. He worked in Ottawa, but Louise insisted on living in Gatineau, which is where Pat came of age.

“It was not a good union,” says Diane of Louise’s lengthy second marriage. “Harvey stayed in her life for thirty-five years. He wasn’t physically abusive or anything, not to me and not to Pat. But my mother was a fighter. So, if he’d come home drunk, she’d fight. Pat and I would go in the bedroom, kind of hide. We didn’t want to be there when the fighting was going on, so the two of us would stay in the bedroom, with the door closed.

“Harvey had a good job with the government and got a good pension, on top of his army pension, so Mom eventually had a bit of money. Oh my God, she did the best she could, a very courageous woman. But this all had a terrible impact on Pat. Harvey was not a good father to Pat. It was actually Violet’s husband, Bill Hickey, who treated us more like he was our father. Pat got very close to Bill Hickey when he was young. Bill took us to the beach, took us driving, did a lot of things with us. Whenever Harvey would have a big blowout, Bill would come and get us, take us to my sister’s house. It was all very scarring—more so for Pat, I think. Pat grew up with a chip on his shoulder, and I can’t blame him. He was only three when our father died, so, whenever we talked about Dad, to him it was like a stranger. I could remember our father, but Pat never really knew him. Then my mother gets remarried to Harvey, who’s an alcoholic and no father figure for Pat. Our family is scattered all over and here’s Pat, hiding under the bed.”

He found his comfort elsewhere. As an adolescent, Burns became deeply engrossed in music, teaching himself to play guitar. Like motorcycles, expensive guitars would later become his adult toys of choice. By age twelve, he had put together his own little garage band, and a year afterwards, when Diane married, that band played at her wedding reception.

Though boastful occasionally about adolescent misbehaviour, the usual scrapes and snarls that accompany the ripening of boys, Pat was in fact no trouble as a teenager. He had lots of friends and was somewhat protected from temptations within the bubble of sleepy Gatineau. He was
a poor student, his worst marks in math; had zero interest or scholarly aptitude to pursue college; never even got his high school diploma, so impatient was he to get on with growing up and earning his own livelihood. Burns attended St. Aloysius until Grade 9, endured Grade 10 at St. Patrick’s High School, and then quit. He continued playing organized hockey as a decent winger—a bruising type, with a bum knee, never rising very high in junior, undrafted, realizing early that there would be no NHL for him, although allegedly invited to attend the St. Louis Blues’ training camp as a walk-on, which he declined.

For a year, he’d been a member of the Governor General’s Foot Guards and studied welding at Ottawa Technical School. Then, shocking everyone in his family—and lying about his age—the seventeen-year-old joined the Ottawa police force. Louise wasn’t having any of that. She marched off to the office of the Gatineau police chief—a man she’d never met before—and demanded that her son be hired on the local force, if the teen insisted on becoming a cop. Louise Burns Barbeau in mother-hen dudgeon was a formidable, irresistible force. “If she wanted something, she’d get it,” says Diane. “Harvey used to call her the mayor of Gatineau.”

For his part, Burns would say that it was the Gatineau chief who’d lured him into law enforcement as a career. “I said something like, ‘What, are you crazy?’ Then he said, ‘You know, we’ve got motorcycles.’ And that was it. I was sold.” In fact, that wasn’t it, and the Gatineau police didn’t have motorcycles. But to an unskilled, unschooled teenager, policing offered a preferable alternative to working in the local paper mill, the town’s major employer. “There weren’t a lot of choices open to me,” said Burns. So he was dispatched to the police academy in Aylmer. When he formally earned his cop chops and took up duties in Gatineau, in 1970, Burns was making a whopping $39 a week. “What do I do?” Burns asked of his police chief when he started on the job. And he was told: “Here’s the hat, here’s the whistle, here’s the gun. Just follow the older guys. And point the gun away from you. It you want it to work, you pull that trigger.”

He was given twenty-four uniform shirts and wondered, why so many? First shift on the job, working 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., police were called to break up a fight at a hotel. “I just knew half my friends would be in this place,” Burns recounted to a Boston reporter years later. “Sure enough, I walk in and it’s a bunch of my friends. I tell ’em to break it up, and they just laugh and say, ‘Bleep you.’ All of a sudden, I get stung, hit by a good punch on the side of the head. I’m covered in blood and my shirt gets torn off. Right there, I said, ‘Hey, that’s why they gave me twenty-four shirts.’ ”

It was around this time that a “gorgeous” young woman, Suzanne Francoeur, entered the picture. All his life, Burns would draw some of the prettiest ladies in the room, enticed by his sexy manliness, charmed by his personality, then inevitably crazed by his inability to stay put on the porch. Not long after they met, Suzanne discovered she was pregnant. That floored Burns. He was nineteen.

“I remember him coming home and telling my mother that Suzanne was pregnant, and Mom telling him that he had to marry her,” says Diane. “It was a shotgun wedding. Suzanne wanted to marry him, but Pat was forced into it. He’d just started on the Gatineau police force at the time and he didn’t want to cause a scandal. So he just gave in and got married. But he always knew this would be a short-term marriage.”

Eleven months was all it lasted, just long enough to see Suzanne through the birth of their daughter, Maureen. The couple was not compatible and had issues thornier than their youthfulness, their palpable unpreparedness for matrimony. Suzanne, whisper relatives, was “a drinker,” alcohol perhaps consolation for a rapidly disintegrating marriage. In one mortifying incident just before the couple separated, Burns responded to a police call about a drunken woman who needed assistance.

“Pat and I are in the squad car, he’s driving,” recalls a fellow Gatineau officer. “So, we show up at this address, and guess who it is on the street? Yup, Suzanne. They were going through stressful times as a couple. When she saw Pat, she took a fit. She was screaming, ‘Get away from me! Get away from me!’ I tried to calm her down, then she started giving it to me, too. Finally, I managed to cool her down and an ambulance showed up,
took her away. That was tough for Pat. He was upset and embarrassed.”

More frequently, it was his inebriated stepfather that Burns was called upon to scoop off the street. The army vet Harvey Barbeau was a habitué of the Legion hall. “Other cops would call Pat and say, ‘Go get your stepfather and take him home,’ ” says Diane. “That would embarrass him no end, but he’d do it. And he’d give Harvey shit, but nothing changed.”

Separated and then divorced from Suzanne, Burns became a fading presence in his young daughter’s life, though he did try, clumsily, to fulfill his responsibilities as a daddy. “He’d go by once in a while and bring Suzanne back to my mother’s place,” says Diane, who was godmother to the child. “Of course, Mom would end up babysitting Maureen more than anything else. Pat did and paid what he could, but there was no formal child-support arrangement.” It was a parental abandonment for which Burns would attempt to atone many years later.