Coach: The Pat Burns Story (35 page)

It didn’t help matters when
Le Journal de Montréal
quoted Burns as saying he might bolt the Leafs in the coming summer if a rival club made an attractive offer. It was now known that Burns had an escape clause in his contract that gave him three weeks to weigh other job offers once the season ended; otherwise, he would remain Leaf property. “If I were to receive a three-year offer from another team, I would have to seriously consider it,” Burns told
Le Journal
. “These are things that happen only once in a lifetime. I’m no dumber than anyone else. I like security.”

Along with Terry Crisp, Burns was at that point the longest-serving bench steward in a league of coaching musical chairs. Instead of agreeing
to a formal contract extension or negotiating a new deal, Burns and the Leafs had signed a “letter of intent” that included the opt-out clause, essentially making Burns a limited-opportunity free agent. If Burns chose to defect, the Leafs would be off the hook financially. If he decided to come back and the Leafs wanted to keep him, a one-year guarantee was in place. But if Toronto didn’t want him, they’d have to pay that year’s salary, $850,000, for Burns
not
to coach. This would become a critical detail.

Trade rumours in January engulfed the team, adding to feelings of uncertainty. “It’s starting to weigh on certain individuals,” said Burns, while straining to undo the damage his Buffalo eruption had caused. “There is no dissension here. The door is never closed. There’s nothing going on.” As for his own status, no longer unimpeachable: “Who knows? Maybe Cliff might say he’s had enough of me. But I’m not looking to move. I fit in fine here. It’s the media that keep talking about the contract. I’m not restless. I don’t want to leave. I love Toronto. Why does everybody say I want to go?”

To
Toronto Sun
columnist Steve Simmons, Burns justified his remarks about being receptive to a better deal elsewhere. “If you were in my shoes and you were offered a one-year contract and a three-year deal, which one would you take? You’d take the three-year deal, right? So is it wrong to say that?”

Burns was practising gamesmanship with Fletcher and, frankly, he was out of his league. It would have been smarter to button his lip. But he thought he had ammunition and expected to have more of it when Toronto got to the playoffs. They would make it there, that spring, but without him.

Fletcher augmented the roster in a complicated three-way trade that brought Kirk Muller to Toronto. He made no immediate impact. A winless streak had crept in the window, seven and counting. When they were stoned 4–0 by St. Louis at the Gardens, fans booed and bayed lustily. Players were embarrassed. “They want to face the music,” Burns insisted. “We all want to do that together. Nobody’s going to hide. Nobody’s going
to be in shame around this city. We know we’re on our own right now. We can see by the reaction of the fans. We can imagine—by the reaction of certain members of the media—that we’re going to have to stick together.”

Yet the Leafs were coming unhinged. Maddeningly, Burns rejigged and re-rejigged his lines, sometimes shift to shift, seeking a spark. He explained his endless experimenting, pleading for time as the club adjusted to trades and injuries: “I’ve slept on it, showered on it, put names in a cup and thrown them on a table. It’s going to take some time—be patient, and wait to see what the right chemistry is going to be.”

Zero wins in eight games and just fourteen goals in those matches—scoring droughts being a chronic problem on teams coached by Burns. “A dark cloud follows us all over the place,” he grumbled when the team landed in a San Jose rainstorm. This was Toronto’s longest skid since Burns had taken over the club. “You start to ask yourself, ‘Are we ever going to win another game?’ We’ll take a win against anybody. We’ve got to win a game now.” It wouldn’t be against the Sharks, Leafs pathetic in a 6–4 defeat.

One week into February and the change in Toronto’s fortunes was stunning. On New Year’s Day they had sat comfortably, eight games above .500 and contemplating a shot at first place in the Western Conference. Now they were winless in nine, one off the record of ten set during the ’66–67 season. Fletcher was so distressed that he left a general managers’ meeting in Arizona and joined the club in Anaheim. Squelching speculation the coach would be canned, he declared Burns was staying behind the bench for the rest of the season and “he’s our coach for next year, too, if he should decide to return. His future is no different now than it was when he got us to the final four two years in a row.” Fletcher did hold a closed-door meeting with the players. “I wouldn’t say I read the riot act. That’s dinosaur stuff. But we do have some players playing at less than their potential. I had some things to say to them. That’s it. Period.”

Burns was grateful for the vote of confidence but admitted worry nonetheless. “I’m sure a couple of players are questioning themselves right now, saying, ‘Pat could be gone.’ Some might even be happy with that. But
others might say, ‘Hey, it’s not his fault.’ I haven’t been unfair to anyone on this team.” He bristled at suggestions his charges had perhaps tuned him out. “I don’t feel the players have quit on me, and I’m not going to quit on them.” Gilmour, when asked if the team’s ineptitude could be attributed to their coach, snapped: “That’s a bunch of crock. Not one guy on this hockey club has a problem with Pat Burns. Pat has been very, very calm and very, very positive. We should be thanking him for staying so positive. We just have to go out there and work harder for him and work harder for us.”

Toronto edged the Ducks 2–1, Burns ditching the spectacles he’d worn most of the season. “Maybe I was just afraid to watch,” he joked. But in Los Angeles, the winless streak was reset at one, the Leafs repelled 4–3. “This puts us right back where we started,” Burns moaned. On that night, as it happened, Dan Aykroyd had arranged a birthday party at the House of Blues for fellow Kingston native Muller. The Leafs weren’t flying home until the next morning and were expected at the restaurant following their game against the Kings. Instead, Burns ordered all players on the team bus by 11 p.m. Defiant, the players simply moved the party to one of their hotel suites. House of Blues had baked a towering birthday cake that they delivered to the hotel. Some of the players heaved it on a cart, pushed it to the coach’s room, knocked on his door and then ran. It was not true, as later rumoured, that someone had written on it: ‘We hate you.’ Still, Burns was not amused. In the midst of the team’s horrifying downward spiral through the standings, there should have been no revelry, he fumed. The players should have gone directly to bed to ponder their sins.

Eight of their eleven previous games had been against teams below .500, and yet the Leafs had gone a deplorable 1–6–1 in those matches. The team was in utter disarray. Returning to Toronto, an exasperated Burns committed what was arguably his worst mistake—publicly throwing up his hands in what certainly sounded like surrender. “I don’t know what more we can possibly do. I’ve tried yelling at them. I’ve run the crap out of them. I’ve tried reasoning with them. What else can I do?” A coach never, ever, waves the white flag. By admitting he’d run out of answers to fix
what was wrong, he stabbed himself in the front, giving the franchise an excuse to dump him.

Close friends who spoke with him in those harrowing days suspected Burns was deliberately tempting his own execution. “I believe Pat basically fired himself,” says Chris Wood, a Toronto businessman who had a summer residence in Magog and had become tight with Burns. “Even strong people sometimes doubt themselves. Near to the end, Pat would call and say, ‘I’m going to get fired, I know it.’ It was a self-defeating thing, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s almost like he made it happen himself.”

The sense of gloom around the club was oppressive. Toronto had one win in one month. Frantic, Burns banned newspapers from the dressing room. Up 2–0 on the Sabres, the Leafs had to settle for another tie. The coach’s discomfort in media scrums after practice and games was palpable. He looked like a man headed for the gallows. There was a slim bright side: Toronto was in fourth place in the West before the team began its jaw-dropping slide and they were still in fourth place. Also, the Leafs had a brief resurgent period, 3–1–1 in five outings. Burns promised he would halt the discombobulating line tinkering, try to afford his players a bit of consistency. And then the second slump struck.

Leads blown, undisciplined penalties and four losses plummeted Toronto below .500. Repeatedly, Fletcher stated, “I’ve never fired a coach in midseason and I don’t intend to start now.” At their Have a Heart charity dinner, Burns excoriated his troops to reporters who came sniffing. “I don’t know how the players can walk around Toronto. I have a lot of trouble walking around this city. I’m embarrassed.” He was coming undone. An eighteen-game tailspin isn’t a slump; it’s almost one quarter of a season. But Fletcher gave him a stay of execution. “It’s his job, period. That isn’t even an issue.” Quietly, however, he met individually with the players. Five weeks of virtually uninterrupted funk prompted the club to bring in an outside sports psychologist. Even Burns submitted. Beleaguered, the coach was saying one thing publicly and another privately to confidants. “More than ever, everything that has been written and said has made me want to come back next season even more,” he told circling journalists. “If Cliff
will have me back, I’ll be back. Toronto is the greatest place to coach if you’re winning, and I’ll win again. I didn’t get dumb in three months.” Offstage, he was telling friends he couldn’t take it anymore.

In Winnipeg, the team choked and squandered a 3–1 lead, falling 4–3. “I’ve never in my life felt as much strain and stress,” Burns admitted. “I can’t sleep at night. I lie awake for hours, trying to figure out what we have to do to break out of this slump. I’ve never experienced anything as bad as this before.” His outspoken dismay further discomfited the players. One, quoted anonymously, suggested the breakup with Tina had thrown the coach for a loop from which he hadn’t recovered. Nonsense, Burns told the
Globe
’s Marty York. “First of all, I’m glad we’re not together right now because, even though I had a fine relationship with this woman and we remain good friends, I’d rather be on my own during tough times like this.” He snidely pointed out that Fletcher had also separated from his wife, Boots, on Boxing Day. “I’m sure the players who think I’m distracted by my personal situation also think Cliff is distracted by his. Well, I don’t think any of this has to do with our problems.”

Something had to give. Slipping out of a playoff spot, the team embarked on a three-game road trip to Winnipeg, Dallas and Denver, Fletcher feeling the heat. He went on the road with the team. “We can’t go back to Toronto with nothing to show for this three-game trip.” But Toronto lost all three, pounded by the Avalanche 4–0 in what would be Burns’s last game behind the Leaf bench.

In the midst of that trip, despondent and deeply paranoid, Burns called a friend in Toronto, complaining bitterly about a rump group in the dressing room that was playing to lose, playing to get him fired. Burns identified Jamie Macoun as leader of the alleged cabal. Fletcher, looking back at that dismal period, rejects this out of hand. “Jamie Macoun is an off-the-wall type of guy. He says what he thinks. But no professional athlete would purposely not play well to try to undermine a coach, because what they could end up doing is put themselves right out of a job. No, I
don’t buy that. Jamie Macoun, like most professional athletes, loves money and wanted another contract. When things go bad, everybody looks after number one—themselves. There was no doubt some of the players were feeling sorry for themselves and felt it was the coach’s fault. But that happens in every dressing room. Nobody was going to blame themselves. They’ve always got to point the finger at somebody else.” Dave Ellett adds: “Macoun and Pat didn’t have a good relationship. But I can honestly tell you nobody on that team tanked. We were feeling the heat, too. Jesus, it was a miserable time.” Mats Sundin: “Pat was so quiet that last week, not like his usual self at all.”

After the Avalanche game, Burns walked away from the bench with stooped shoulders, face darkened. “For the first time in his career, he was at a complete loss,” says Ellett. Toronto had lost sixteen of their last twenty-two games.

The Leafs spent that night in Denver. Early the following morning, Fletcher summoned Burns to his hotel room. Whether the GM fired Burns or Burns asked to be relieved remains sketchy. What needs to be remembered, though, is that if Burns had quit, he would not have received the $850,000 remaining on his contract.

“I wanted him to continue,” insists Fletcher. “I said, ‘Pat, we can get through this together.’ But Pat felt that he’d lost the team. He really didn’t think he could continue. I’d watched him behind the bench the night before and he looked so frustrated, so dejected.” Tears swim in Fletcher’s eyes as he remembers their solemn meeting. “Coaches can sense it, when they have command of a team and when they start to lose it.” He likens the situation to university students having the same professor for four years, for every class. “By the end, you’d have a hard time paying attention to what was said, you’re no longer hanging on every word like you were the first year. It’s the same thing for a coach. It’s hard to keep everyone’s interest, to continually motivate a group of athletes who’ve already heard everything you’ve had to say over the course of time. In a coach’s mind, he knows full well when he’s not getting through anymore.”

Fletcher remains stunned at how drastically everything went to hell in
a handbasket over six weeks. He had immense pity for the man who sat before him in that Denver hotel room. “I’d seen coaches struggle before, but not like this. Pat was so much in charge of the situation all that time. In his mind, to have it unravel and not have any control over what was happening, knowing he had to win … it just got to him. I was hoping to buy time. But Pat wasn’t having anything to do with buying time.”

The humane act was to relieve Burns of his burden. It’s what the coach wanted. “It was a mutual decision,” says Fletcher, whose parting gift would be that one-year severance, never begrudged. But they told no one, not even Burns’s assistant coaches, and certainly not the travelling media when the team boarded its flight home. Fletcher outright lied to reporters, including the second wave that met the team upon landing in Toronto, assuring everyone Burns would be behind the bench for the next game against New Jersey. He makes no apologies about giving his severed coach a head start out of town. “He asked me for it. And he deserved it, if that’s what he wanted. Pat had done so much for this franchise, brought back the Leaf fever. He called me later that night, said, ‘Cliff! I’m in Kingston.’ I said, ‘Okay, Pat, I’ll have fun tomorrow morning at the press conference.’ ” It was morbid humour. Softly, he adds, “I loved Pat.”