Coach: The Pat Burns Story (36 page)

It was a firestorm Fletcher walked into at the Gardens, as news of Burns’s termination had finally leaked. He was flayed for fibbing, but remained unrepentant. Nick Beverley, a cog in the Leaf front-office wheel, would take over the coaching reins on an interim basis. But the spotlight was now squarely on the GM to salvage the season. It had all been a bust. Most players said the right things—poor Pat, not his fault. Some were sincere, others not. “Let’s put it this way,” says Ellett. “When they fired Pat, there were a few guys who were pretty damn happy.” Gilmour was not one of them. “I don’t think any of the guys were playing to get him fired. But no one will ever admit to that. It’s very possible that some guys did.”

Burns made a few calls during that long night of driving in the sleet to Kingston, where he holed up. Phoned Gilmour to thank him for the years together, dialled Domi to impart some career advice, voice low and strained. “He said, ‘Good luck, kid, I’m done.’ It was really emotional.”
Told his children he was headed home. Told best mate Kevin Dixon, who says, “He was relieved.” Relieved at being relieved.

For the previous month or so, Burns had been back living in his waterfront condo. Tina had finally moved out, taking nearly all the furniture, with Burns’s blessing. The unit was left spartan, uninviting, depleted even of cutlery and dishes so that Burns had to make an emergency shopping trip for the bits and pieces he needed to survive. When he got in his truck that evening, he left two dozen suits in the closet, and all his shoes. Before departing the condo forever, he also phoned his Toronto friend, Chris Wood. “Pat said, ‘Woody, I’m leaving, I got fired. There’s a pair of skates here that I got for you.’ His boots, he said, ‘Just give them to the doorman.’ Pat was very generous.” It was Wood who later sent one of his company trucks to collect the items Burns wanted transported, including the large framed blowup photograph of him astride his Harley, shot by a
Star
photographer at the zenith of the coach’s celebrity in Toronto.

He’d made just a brief stop at the Gardens—glancing around one last time from the bench that was no longer his. The ex-Leaf coach got in his truck and disappeared into the night. He left behind a team in ruins, an angry press corps and, at the Toronto Zoo, a Siberian tiger that a besotted admirer had sponsored, paying five hundred bucks for the magnificent creature to be given the name “Burnsie.”

I
N THE
B
OSTON DRESSING ROOM
, the two men eye each other intently. Harry Sinden is looking for a coach and Pat Burns is looking for a job. The applicant is indisputably qualified, yet Sinden feels a tug of unease. There is so much conflicting history, vivid scars from old wars. Sinden has to ask: “Pat, you were a Montreal Canadien. I’m having a tough time believing you could ever be a Bruin. Can you? Can you be a Bruin?” When Burns answers, Sinden studies his body language carefully. “If I’m on this team, Harry, I’ll be the best Bruin you’ve got.”

Says Sinden: “He convinced me.”

Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley. Tie Domi and Belinda Stronach. Charles and Diana. Odd couples that just didn’t fit together, doomed from the moment their orbits collided. Add to that list the dominant-male-on-dominant-male pairing of Sinden and Burns. Not because they had so little in common, but probably because they were so much alike temperamentally: volatile, and thus destined to trigger each other’s firing pins. Immovable object, meet irresistible force. Sinden was president and general manager of the Boston Bruins, penny-pinching feudal lord of all that he surveyed on Causeway Street, especially with a majority owner, Jeremy Jacobs, who
preferred living in Buffalo. Forever mythologized as the skipper who led Team Canada to victory over the Soviets in the ’72 Summit Series, Sinden never quite shed his coaching skin. Whoever prowled behind the Bruins bench would have Sinden peering over his shoulder as meddler and quibbler. The man couldn’t help it.

Mike Milbury, prototypical Bruin and no trembling faint-heart, tells a story. “I’m coaching my first year in Boston and we get to the All-Star break, two games left to play. We play in Hartford, win that game, now we have one left before a four-day weekend, and we’re in first place overall. It’s my first year coaching and I’m feeling pretty good about myself. We get back to Boston at one o’clock in the morning. I call off the morning skate for the next day, but I go in to look at some tape. I get a call from Harry: ‘Come up and see me in my office.’ So I walk in, first place, won the night before, nothing really to worry about. I sit down and Harry says, ‘You fucking think it’s over, Mike? You think the break has fucking started, don’t ya? You think you’re gonna come in here tonight and win this fucking game, two points, but you’re on vacation already, just like the rest of these fucking guys.’ I was sweating bullets. I left, came back at five o’clock, locked the dressing room door, kicked over chairs, screamed at everybody. And wouldn’t you know it—that was one of the best regular-season games we had all year. See, one of Harry’s favourite expressions was, ‘Hockey isn’t like bridge; you can’t pass. You have to show up and play.’ He was an outstanding coach. But he came in talking like a guy who had coached a Stanley Cup championship team and a guy who had coached the Canadian national team over the Russians in 1972. Harry was demanding on his coaches because he felt—and with good reason—that he knew the right approach to coaching. And Pat Burns was not one to shy away from a confrontation, either. He did not have, shall we say, a politically correct nature.”

That they joined forces in 1997 took hockey people aback. “It would have been unthinkable forty years earlier,” says Serge Savard, recalling the playoff-driven hatred between Montreal and Boston that all but precluded coaching in one franchise and then the other, even with a Toronto stop-off
in between. “I don’t know why Pat went to Boston,” says Cliff Fletcher, shaking his head. “It was ridiculous what happened there.”

There was no mystery to it. Burns was a supplicant, driven to distraction after spending an entire season on the sidelines, with his thumbs up his arse. After getting the hook in Toronto, he’d retreated to Magog, content to sit tight for a while, thoroughly anticipating that job offers would be plentiful over the summer. It appeared likely there would be vacancies in San Jose and Vancouver, to name just a couple of possible destinations. To keep himself occupied in the interim, Burns accepted a six-week contract to provide daily hockey commentary on a Montreal French radio station, CKAC, during the playoffs. He also leapt at a short-term gig to express his thoughts in English during intermissions of first-round playoff games for The Sports Network. Encroaching a tad on Don Cherry’s domain as king of the two-cent coach’s corner opinion, these rhetorical sessions provided a nice temporary focus for Burns’s energies and kept him in the loop. To his own bemusement—because he’d crossed over, however fleetingly, to the media dark side—the unemployed coach proved adroit at extemporizing and opinionating. The time-filler cameos expanded so that eventually Burns was making use of his vocal cords on several AM stations. “You can do radio with your hair messed up,” he snickered. “You can be lying on your couch with a beer.” Radio also led to his encounter with a divorced mother of two adolescent children, Line Cignac, who was working in promotions. Burns fell head over heels. “I’ve met someone,” he told close friend Kevin Dixon.

Where real hockey was concerned, Burns thought he had the luxury of being choosy, cheques still coming in from that one-year-outstanding Toronto salary. Perhaps vainly, he considered himself a hot commodity. Surely another club would come knocking? As the months flew by, however, GMs were not beating a path to his door in the Eastern Townships. He started to squirm. “What happens if the phone never rings? What happens if no one wants you?” When the next season got under way, Burns wrung his hands over maybe being yesterday’s man. He had to accept the fact that his road back to the NHL now depended on some other poor coaching fraternity mook getting canned.

There are always in-season firings. Perplexingly, overtures to Burns were more of the just-looking, not-buying variety. In February, he popped up in Toronto to promote a new line of snowmobiles and provided sound bites for the local press contingent, refraining from making any negative remarks about the chaotic Leaf franchise. “Brother, do I miss hockey, the scrap and challenge of it? I can’t wait to get back at it, and I will, but only if the situation is right.” In fact, Burns was regularly on the blower, urging his agent-cousin Robin Burns to shop his services around at any whiff of an opening. As a between-periods commentator for Montreal’s RDS game broadcasts, he kept himself close to the franchise where his NHL career had sprouted. When the Habs were ushered out of the playoffs by New Jersey in five first-round games and sophomore coach Mario Tremblay was given the heave-ho, Burns expressed interest, with reservations. “I’d have to think about it. I want to coach again in the NHL, but do I want to coach here? I’m on television now; I’m nice and popular. You become the coach, you become a target.”

Quietly, he did throw his hat in the ring, formalizing his candidacy. Simultaneously, other vacancies arose—Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Jose and, most enticingly, Boston. The Bruins, finishing dead last in the NHL and missing the playoffs for the first time in three decades, had fired phlegmatic coach Steve Kasper. Another Original Six team, however currently sad-sack, had Burns licking his lips. But he was not Sinden’s first choice. The GM was wooing Boston University’s Jack Parker, the most highly regarded coach in the U.S. college ranks. Only when Parker rebuffed the offer did Sinden turn his beady eyes towards Plan B—Burns, who was on his way back from a Florida vacation when Sinden invited him in for a feeler chat.

“Pat reminded me a lot of a couple of coaches that I’d had—I’m referring to Don Cherry and Mike Milbury—in his attitude, his demeanour, his personality,” says Sinden, recalling that long meeting in May 1997 that took place in the Bruins dressing room, assistant GM Mike O’Connell also present. “He wasn’t a tactician or strategy guy as they were, but I thought Pat had handled his teams the same way. His background was similar to mine. He grew up in the city streets and had been a cop; I was a guy who’d
worked at General Motors. It seemed to me that he would be a good fit for us. I just had this feeling that he could be a Bruin.”

Burns later recounted that interview conversation to his pal Chris Wood, who was flabbergasted at the career choice. “He called me up and said, ‘Woody, I’m going to BAWWSTON.’ I told him, ‘Listen, I was a big Montreal fan and I became a Toronto fan because of you. But the Boston Bruins? Love you buddy, but no way can I be a Bruins fan.’ And Pat chuckled, ‘You know, Woody, neither can I.’ But, honestly, why wouldn’t he have gone to Boston? It had been a long period between Toronto and the Bruins’ offer. All coaches second-guess themselves, worry about never getting another job. I don’t think Pat had any other serious offers. And it was a lucrative deal for him, his first (almost) million-dollar contract. But Harry turned out to be a tyrant.”

Others tried to dissuade Burns as well: Get a grip, Pat. This is so not smart. He pooh-poohed the negative advice.

For the interview, he arrived in Boston with Robin Burns and Kevin Dixon. Robin, former NHL journeyman and successful entrepreneur—his hockey equipment company, Itech, became third largest in its specialty—had taken over from Don Meehan when rule changes prohibited agents from representing both coaches and players. “Harry had put us at a hotel on the other side of town. Pat signed in as Patrick Jonathan. We were really being hidden away. I guess Harry didn’t want people to know that he was talking to us. But the first guy we run into in the lobby goes, ‘Hey, Burnsie, you here to sign with the Bruins?’ Big secret.”

Burns enjoyed a degree of celebrity in New England, at least among those who followed the game. Dropping into a Lake Placid bar during his sabbatical from coaching, a ballsy waitress once beseeched Burns to autograph her bra. “So he signed, right on the hooter,” Robin laughs.

Following the discussion with Sinden, the Burnses and Dixon retired to their hotel suite and promptly got pie-eyed. Dixon dipped into Burns’s bag, removed all the underwear, soaked the skivvies in water and tossed them out the window. “Pat’s yelling at us—‘You fuckers! You better have kept a pair for me to wear tomorrow!’ ” It was Robin who hammered out
the contract details. “I told Pat, ‘We’re going after four years because Harry will fire you after three.’ ” Burns pulled a face. “I’m not going to be fired.” Robin warned: “Listen, Pat, I’m telling you the truth. Harry will fire you.” So Robin Burns pushed for that deal and got it, with seasonal raises that brought the contract to $950,000 in the fourth year. “I knew Harry didn’t want to break the million-dollar barrier, psychologically. But we had what we wanted. And that first year in Boston for Pat was … magical.”

In Boston, Burns was no longer the son of a French-Canadian mother but the son of an Irish father, his cop cred the cherry on top. What could be more seductive for Beantown, with its romanticized Irish working-class ethos and police-shield stock characters? At his introductory press conference—held a week after Slick Rick Pitino was anointed Celtics coach and Svengali—Burns even revised that off-told childhood anecdote about crying over the Chicago Blackhawks sweater a relative had bought him. Now it was a Boston Bruins jersey with Johnny Bucyk’s name on the back. “This was when Rocket Richard, Montreal’s No. 9, was the hottest thing since sliced bread,” he told a local media corps instantly charmed. “I had to fight my way on the ice, off the ice, and all the way home. But it was mine.” Whatever. He went so far as referring to his off-season home “in Vermont.” Magog hadn’t moved across the border, but Lake Memphremagog did dip partway into the U.S. state.

With his four-year pact, Burns became only the second man (Dick Irvin the other) to lead half of the NHL’s six traditional teams. In a city of dynamic Big Coaches, Burns could more than hold his own. He affixed a black-and-gold Bs licence plate to his Chevy 4×4 and slapped a Bruins sticker on the side of his Harley. Red Sox pitching ace Roger Clemens had just defected for Toronto. It was only fair that Boston got charismatic Burns as compensation.