Coach: The Pat Burns Story (44 page)

“It makes me mad because Pat should be in the Hall of Fame,” says Savard. “But the thing is, you don’t get there just because you’re still alive. The committee is made up of six former players, six journalists and six former managers—a pretty good mix. We were ranked number one among all sports in terms of process for those elected to the Hall. The votes just weren’t there.” Cousin Robin says Burns didn’t take the rebuff to heart. “Pat said the people around him were more disappointed about it. He reiterated that every time we met: ‘Please tell everyone that I wasn’t upset. I have nothing against the inductees who were chosen, I applaud them.’ ”

There was no shortage of other honours, encomiums and accolades for Burns or in his name, however. Gatineau announced the creation of an amateur sports fund offering training bursaries for coaches. And the town of Stanstead, on the Quebec-Vermont border, 150 kilometres southeast of Montreal, revealed that a new rink, the Pat Burns Arena, would be built on the grounds of Stanstead College, open not just to students at the pricey
academy but everyone in the region. Burns had once coached in the dilapidated old rink.

The impetus for the Pat Burns Arena came from his friend Chris Wood, who’d originally been approached by the college chairman to help with efforts to upgrade a facility that was going to be condemned, such was its advanced state of disrepair. “All right, I’ll make a deal with you,” Wood challenged. “If you name the arena after my good friend Pat, I’ll get involved, I’ll bring the project to Pat, and if he endorses it, we’ll move forward.” Told of the scheme, Burns was deeply moved. “The Red Dogs used to play hockey there, in the old arena,” says Wood. “Pat would drive up sometimes when he was in Boston to join us.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was among the dignitaries on hand when the arena development was formally announced in March 2010, with two-thirds of the $8.4 million budget covered by the provincial and federal governments, largely due to the tireless campaigning of Senator Jacques Demers, who emceed the proceedings. In his remarks, Harper harkened back to the ’93 Leafs team. “My favourite memory was Pat taking the Leafs all the way to the semifinals. Which goes to show that, with the Maple Leafs organization, a great coach can take a team a long way, but only God can work miracles.”

Burns had been collected from Florida by a private plane sent by another friend. Doctors had urged him to avoid flying and crowds because he was acutely susceptible to infection from any virus floating around. He wouldn’t hear of missing the event.

For a public that hadn’t seen him in a while, Burns’s thin and fragile appearance was shocking. He looked like precisely what he was: somebody in the latter stages of lung cancer. But the radical transfiguration was jarring and distressing to many who remembered the coach as robust. Burns had always been such a physical presence. He commanded space.

“I know my life is nearing the end, and I accept that,” Burns told the dozens of invited guests, speaking in an unrecognizably threadbare voice. “Excuse my voice,” he apologized. “I don’t have the thundering voice I used to have to get players going on the ice anymore.” Addressing the
youngsters from local minor teams who’d been invited to the ceremony, Burns wistfully acknowledged he would likely not be around to see the arena completed. “But I’ll be looking down on it. Maybe there’s a Wayne Gretzky or a Mario Lemieux or a Sidney Crosby sitting here. A young player could come from Stanstead who plays in an arena named after me.”

It was an emotional afternoon. Burns didn’t shrink from the truth, not for himself and not for his family in the front row. “As your life gets closer to the end, you realize that your body gets weaker, your mind gets working hard, but your heart gets softer. As you get closer to family, you get closer to God … There are things you realize along the way, all the great people you’ve worked with. I’ve told myself and my kids that when you look back, you don’t cry because it’s over. You’re happy because it happened.”

Burns returned to Florida immediately afterwards. Two weeks later, doctors’ fears realized, he was hospitalized with pneumonia. Yet he recovered and was released. For those around him, the waiting game had begun, alarm spiking with every rattling cough and hint of fever. But it wasn’t just abiding for Burns. He hungrily seized at experiences, each day that remained, as if filling his own album of memories, freeze-framing the moments.

He couldn’t know the timing of his death, but he did know the place. He’d arranged for it.

Burns no longer owned property in Magog. In August, he rented a house there, but stayed in it with Line just a short while. His dear doctor friend from Florida, aware that Burns was in severe pain, delicately counselled that it was time for palliative care. On Labour Day, Burns moved into a Sherbrooke hospice, La Maison Aube-Lumière, for the close-observance ministrations Line and Pat’s family could no longer provide. He decorated his room with photos of his hockey teams and other treasured mementos, including a Bible sent by the Leafs. On weekends, he checked himself out to spend time with friends and loved ones in the world beyond. It was on one of these excursions—while shopping for groceries, actually—that Burns heard he’d died.

The false rumour was pinballing around Montreal, gathering momentum on radio stations and then hurtling out into the blogosphere. It began with an employee at the palliative facility who’d entered Burns’s room and discovered it empty, the bed’s linen stripped—because it was being
changed
—and tipped off someone in the media. In Toronto, Cliff Fletcher strolled into the coach’s room at the Leafs’ practice facility and received a call from a news outlet, seeking comment on the death of Burns.

“I walk outside and all of a sudden, there’s fifty media around me. I’m expressing my condolences. Then somebody said, ‘Hold on, hold on, he’s alive!’ So I break off because I’ve got to call Pat. He answered his cell. I told him, ‘Pat, I’ve got to apologize. Let me tell you how this happened.’ Pat said, ‘Those bastards in the media, they want me dead.’ He was as feisty as ever.” Fletcher, mortified, issued a press statement, apologizing profusely.

Burns took matters into his own hands. He contacted a handful of friends in the media, talking to reporters from the
Toronto Star
, CKAC in Montreal and Bob McKenzie at TSN. “They’re trying to kill me before I’m dead,” he growled. “I’m not dead, far fucking from it. They’ve had me dead since June. Tell them I’m alive.” For the offenders who’d contributed to the erroneous news of his passing, picturing Burns enjoying a good guffaw out of the incident may have salved their conscience. He wasn’t amused. He was hurt.

It was in express retaliation for that false rumour, in defiance of a pending outcome he could not alter, that Burns made another dramatic public appearance in early October, showing up for the groundbreaking of the Pat Burns Arena. Those close to Burns tried to dissuade him. “I said to my husband, ‘He’ll never make it,’ ” recalls his sister, Diane. “But he wanted to prove that he could.” Burns was just a husk of the man he’d been, with sunken cheeks, walking unsteadily on spindly legs, wrapped in a blanket when he took his seat. Making only one brief remark to reporters—“I’m still alive”—he was helped to place a foot on the edge of the shovel and
pressed it a few centimetres into the softened earth. “That was his stubbornness and competitiveness showing,” says Fletcher. “I’m sure 90 per cent of people in his situation, at that stage of the illness, would not have been able to get up there.” He’d shown them, he’d shown them all.

Among those who witnessed this display of resilience were former players Guy Carbonneau, Stéphane Richer, Dave Ellett and Doug Gilmour. “It’s more than courage,” said Richer. “He’s a guy who never gives up—he will never give up till the end.” Ellett was distraught. “I’d never seen the devastation of cancer before, so it was shocking to me.” A heartbroken Gilmour tried to hold back the tears. The players had picked Burns up in an SUV, transporting him to the sod-turning event. “He got into the car and I didn’t recognize him anymore,” says Gilmour. “He wasn’t Pat anymore.”

Returning Burns to the hospice, the players lingered to reminisce, aware they’d never see him alive again. It was a melancholy afternoon until Burns lightened the mood. “When we were inside and got a chance to talk about the old times, it turned into a hell of a day for him,” says Ellett. “He was pretty doped up, but his mind was still there. He never lost that—and his humour. We laughed, rehashed old times.”

The grains of sand were rapidly running out of the hourglass, though. Jason Burns drove down every weekend from Gatineau. Maureen was always nearby. In his final weeks, Burns was visited by other players, some clearly seeking to make amends, to repent for ancient arguments and harsh words rued. Richer came again seeking a kind of absolution and received it. “We were both crying. Towards the end of the conversation, he asked me about my mom and dad. I’m the one who was supposed to be there supporting him, and yet he was supporting me.”

Burns called all his siblings together for a final family meeting while he still had the ability to speak. “We all went together in a van,” remembers Diane Burns. “I said to the family, ‘The one thing he doesn’t want you to do is to cry in front of him, so don’t. It’s going to be a shock to see him, but keep your emotions to yourself until we leave.’

“Pat was sitting up, having his cereal. He didn’t want to talk about
death; that wasn’t the conversation he wanted to have. I asked, ‘Pat, do you have any pain?’ He said no, he was on heavy medications. He never complained, not one word of complaint. But he said, ‘I’m fifty-eight and I’ve got the body of a ninety-year-old.”

To Robin Burns, he admitted: “It’s hard to believe that this is the end, but I’m ready. I’ve accepted it.” He’d had many quiet conversations with a young priest, confiding his regrets and his fears of what lay beyond. He took solace from the priest’s words and from the family Bible next to his bed. Burns was surrounded by gentleness in those difficult weeks. Daughter Maureen stirred admiration in many as she patiently helped feed her father, caressed his cheeks, straightened his bedclothes and plumped his pillow, unfaltering before the degrading realities of dying. She mothered him. “He let us love him,” says Diane. “He let Maureen love him. Jason always loved him. He let Line come in more, closer. He let me in a lot more than ever before in the past.”

“They had good conversations,” says Robin Burns. “I’d told Jason, ‘Go take a tape recorder, sit down with your dad, talk to him, ask questions, because you’re not going to get another chance.’ There was no doubt in my mind that they’d all had issues. Pat was an absent dad for a lot of years; he had baggage. But at the end, he made peace with God and everybody in the family. As terrible as it was that God took him at an early age, he at least had that opportunity.”

As his body broke down, it was frustrating and humiliating to rely on others. “It was so hard for him to be in that condition,” says Jason. “I’d help him to the bathroom. Sometimes, he’d fall. I’d have to pick him up. He’d always been such a big, strong man. Now he depended on all of us. We’d sit around watching hockey games, not really talking much. But I enjoyed that time together with my dad, just being with him. It was good for me. I think it was good for him, too.”

When Lamoriello came to see him, the last time, Burns could no longer speak, communicating only with his eyes. “By that point, it was like, ‘Go to sleep, Pat, don’t wake up again,’ ” says his closest friend, Kevin Dixon. But he was unyielding to the very last ragged breath.

Pat Burns died on November 19, 2010.

Tributes poured in. At the Bell Centre, where the Habs were hosting the Leafs, a video montage of Burns depicting all his mood-ring faces—fierce, glowering, snickering, wryly smiling—was shown on the scoreboard, his image projected onto the ice, to the poignant strains of Lennon and McCartney’s “In My Life.”

In Newark, at their new arena, the Prudential Center, where Burns had never coached, the Devils selected Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You” as haunting musical accompaniment to their video homage, and players wore “PB” patches on their chests. Then they drilled the Capitals 5–0, snapping a three-game losing streak. That, Burns would have savoured. It felt as if he hovered above it all, not quite gone, a testament to his life force.

At her home in Gatineau, Diane Burns opened a closet and smelled cigarette smoke. No one in the household smoked. Her brother had smoked on and off, but gave it up completely when he became ill, enjoying only the occasional cigar until cancer treatments deprived him of any sense of taste. “I felt him there, spiritually. It was comforting.”

Burns had asked for a small funeral, conducted by a parish priest. What he got was a grand affair on an epic scale, a funeral fit for a statesman, at the magnificent Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral in Montreal—a stone’s throw from the Bell Centre—presided over by a cardinal, Archbishop Jean-Claude Turcotte, fervent Habs fan, who returned from Rome for the occasion.

“Here’s your family and look at your friends,” Robin Burns marvelled in his eulogy. “Not bad for a tête-carré from St. Henri.” “Squarehead,” it meant—a Québécois colloquialism for anglophones.