Coach

by Rosie DiManno

  Copyright © 2012 Rosie DiManno

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  DiManno, Rosie

  Coach : the Pat Burns story / Rosie DiManno.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67637-3

  1. Burns, Pat, 1952-2010. 2. Hockey coaches—Canada—Biography. I. Title.

  GV848.5.B88D54 2012 796.962092 C2012-902434-1

  Cover image: Michael Stuparyk/GetStock.com

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Our Fathers

  Domenic DiManno

  &

  Alfred Burns

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: The Running Man

  Chapter One: The Fatherless Boy

  Chapter Two: Detective Story

  Chapter Three: Adventures in the “Q”

  Chapter Four: A Year on Serge’s Farm

  Chapter Five: Under the Montreal Microscope

  Chapter Six: So Close

  Chapter Seven: Lost in Transition

  Chapter Eight: Rioting Russians, Milbury Mind Games

  Chapter Nine: Hoedowns and Harleys

  Chapter Ten: Last Tango in Montreal

  Chapter Eleven: The Passion Returns

  Chapter Twelve: Twenty-one Games in 42 Nights

  Photo Insert

  Chapter Thirteen: Gilmour vs. Gretzky; Burns vs. Melrose

  Chapter Fourteen: Out of Gas

  Chapter Fifteen: Locked out and Loaded

  Chapter Sixteen: Hitting Bottom in Leafland

  Chapter Seventeen: Butting heads in Beantown

  Chapter Eighteen: Redemption in the Meadowlands

  Chapter Nineteen: Chance and Fate

  Chapter Twenty: A Surge of Affection

  Requiem

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Credits and Permissions

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The Running Man

  “They’ve all had that gun out for me.”

  IT’S WELL PAST MIDNIGHT, sleeting, and Pat Burns is halfway home.

  There’s a six-pack on the seat next to him, a duffel bag containing a few articles of clothing, and a cell phone stamped with the Toronto Maple Leafs logo. Just outside Kingston, the vacancy sign of a Super 8 motel beckons. Burns is tired right down to his bones—so weary, eyes puffy from sleeplessness, spots blurring his vision—so he prudently pulls his pickup off Highway 401 and into the motel’s parking lot. At the front desk, the bored clerk doesn’t recognize the dishevelled guest who checks in for just the one night, and Burns is grateful for that. Anonymity is what he craves at this moment, not an autograph-seeker and definitely not an armchair expert with advice for a hockey team that has been imploding spectacularly. All the world’s a coach when it comes to hockey in Canada.

  But the Leafs aren’t Burns’s problem anymore. He’s not their coach anymore. It’s March 4, 1996.

  Only a handful of people are aware of this development, however. It’s a secret, a hush-hush contrivance that was the final gesture of mercy offered to Burns by the franchise where he’d been as much a Leaf luminary as Doug Gilmour, his beloved Dougie. In the fight-or-flight response common to all creatures faced with stress and fright, Burns has chosen to flee. He is running, in the middle of the night. A man who has always prided himself on never dodging any challenge or ordeal has lammed it while the city sleeps.

  So many times, Burns had made this trip between Toronto and the Eastern Townships of Quebec, by truck and by Harley. Three and a half years earlier, he’d set out in the opposite direction on a hot summer’s day, music blasting on the CD player, the future unfolding as brightly, as welcoming, as the open road, signposts whizzing past. Now he’d shifted gears into reverse, the Big Smoke disappearing in his rear-view mirror, all that anxiety and amassed failure left behind, along with twenty-five suits, hundreds of ties and two Harleys stored at a Richmond Hill dealership.

  In the spartan motel room that’s illuminated by the flash of headlights from the highway, Burns shucks out of his parka, kicks off his hand-tooled cowboy boots, sinks onto the bed, fires up an extra-mild cigarette and flips the cap on his first beer. The brew is unpleasantly warm. Burns isn’t much of a beer drinker anyway—he prefers scotch or wine, the expensive stuff. Once, when taken to dinner by a reporter who was working on a Burns profile, he’d blithely ordered a $400 bottle of California Opus One as the journalist gagged over an expense that would never be approved by the office. Burns could be mischievous that way, or thoughtless.

  In his solitude now, the coach who’s no longer a coach sips intermittently and ponders events from a whirlwind forty-eight hours, the last gasps of a job that had seemed so secure at midseason, when he’d been offered, and accepted, a provisional contract extension by Leafs general manager Cliff Fletcher. The kicker is that Burns was still being paid a deferred salary from his earlier tenure as coach of the Montreal Canadiens, a dream gig that had ended just as precipitously, though less ignominiously, at the end of his fourth season behind the bench. A four-year coach with a three-year act—the rap that would be pinned on him again, Burns frets. He picks up the phone and dials a friend. “I’m gone,” he says, ever so softly.

  At 10 p.m., unseen even by security guards, Burns had slipped into his office in the bowels of Maple Leaf Gardens and cleared out his desk, tossing a few personal items into the duffel bag. In the eerie quiet of the dressing room—the dank venue where, on one memorable occasion during his first season in Toronto, he’d conducted a blistering postgame media scrum deliberately staged so that his players would get an earful of the diatribe aimed specifically at them—Burns scribbled a departing message on the blackboard, GOOD LUCK BOYS, and signed it “BURNSIE.” He left a well-wishing note also for the interim coach, Nick Beverley, who would replace him. Then he jumped in his truck and pointed it towards his rustic off-season cottage on the shore of Lake Memphremagog, ten miles north of the Vermont–Quebec border.

  That he’d got his ticket punched in Toronto was inevitable, if agonizing in the long goodbye—six weeks of lurching through mounting losses, first one tailspin and then, after a brief respite, another. Fletcher had been adamant that he wouldn’t fire his coach—indeed, had never in his lengthy and distinguished career as a hockey executive canned a coach in midseason. On February 6, Fletcher assured reporters that the coach’s job was not in jeopardy. “Pat Burns is 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. It’s not an issue.” Burns, flailing, appreciated that Fletcher had his back, though suspicious that some players were stabbing knives in it, even as he publicly denied rumours of team dissent. “I don’t feel the players have quit on me and I’m not going to quit on them.” On February 25, with the club plummeting in the conference standings, Fletcher issued another vote of confidence to quell the media masses: “It’s Pat’s job—period. That isn’t even an issue.” Seven days later, he gassed him.

  Everybody watching had sensed the omega moment of the alpha-dog coach approaching. A roster tailored to suit
Burns’s personnel desires had gone off the rails and Gilmour’s aching back couldn’t bear the burden anymore. Players generously rewarded for past performances seemed to have lost interest; certainly, they’d lost the motivating fear of Burns that the coach had instilled in them. The team was a shambles as February gave way to March, caught in a downward spiral that put them in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time in four years. For public consumption, Burns remained stalwart, if sounding increasingly defensive and peevish. “More than ever, everything that has been written and said has made me want to come back next season even more. If Cliff will have me back, I’ll be back and I’ll win again. I didn’t get dumb in three months.”

  Shock therapy was looming, though.

  The Leafs were on the road that final week. On the Saturday, in Burns’s 600th game as an NHL coach, they were beaten in Dallas. On the Sunday, they lost 4–0 to the Colorado Avalanche, their eighth consecutive defeat—they had won only three of their past twenty-two matches. Since mid-January, the NBA-expansion Toronto Raptors had won more games than the Leafs.

  They tried group meetings, individual meetings, psychologist sessions, scoldings, avuncular chats, trades, yet nothing reversed the descending trajectory. In desperation, Fletcher tapped alumnus Darryl Sittler, the one-time captain and franchise hero of the ’70s, latterly a “consultant” for the club, to facilitate communication between the dressing room and the coaching staff. Burns had deeply resented that; he believed Sittler was functioning as de facto spy for management. One of Sittler’s first moves as part of his increased role with the Leafs was to corral Gilmour for a heart-to-heart, and that also irritated Burns, who was proprietary about his captain. But he was a profoundly paranoid coach by that point.

  On the road, Burns has been reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

  He spoke frequently with his closest buddy back in Magog, Quebec, Kevin Dixon. “He’d say, ‘It’s coming, it’s coming. Fuck, it’s going to be coming any day, any day.’ He thought Mike Gartner was against him, Jamie Macoun was against him, guys he believed were telling Cliff that he had to go. Think about it, what it was like for him: the team was digging itself a bigger hole every night. He’d get behind that bench and after every first period, he’d look up at the scoreboard and the Leafs were trailing. They’re down, he’s down. Honest, he should have been on antidepressants, that’s how bad it got. Then he called from Phoenix and it was just, ‘I’m done.’ ”

  Before that Avalanche game in Denver—with key player Mats Sundin out of the lineup—Burns told his players that they had a ready-made excuse for yet another loss. Don’t accept that alibi, he pleaded. “I stood in the middle of the dressing room for a long time. I looked in their faces. Only about five of them could look me in the eye. I knew it was over.”

  Peppered with questions afterwards, Fletcher told the travelling media that Burns would definitely be standing on the riser behind the Leaf bench—designed to give the home coach a subtle height advantage over his opposing number—for Toronto’s next game on Wednesday, back at the Gardens, against the Stanley Cup champion New Jersey Devils. Unusually, the team didn’t leave immediately following the Denver game, remaining overnight at their Mile High hotel.

  Early Monday morning, Fletcher summoned Burns to his room. The two men conferred briefly. It was a painful meeting, with Burns actually consoling the older man, his friend and benefactor, in a puddle of tears now as he took away the job he’d bestowed with such hopefulness at the start of their adventure together. Fletcher had been weighing the decision for two days, praying the team would pick up at least one victory on the road trip, something positive to go home with. “We can’t go back to Toronto without a win,” he’d warned. Didn’t happen, and that forced Fletcher’s hand, which trembled. “I told Cliff I won’t quit. But I understood that this is what he had to do. I said, ‘Cliff, I know you’ve never fired a coach in midseason and I know this isn’t easy for you. Don’t worry. I understand. You’ve been great to me.’ ”

  Burns professed to be most concerned about who would be taking up the reins and approved the choice of Beverley, who’d never coached a day in the NHL, as interim. He’d been Toronto’s director of player personnel. “I was happy to hear it was Nick. He’s a good man.” Eventually, the position went to Mike Murphy, who’d been through three campaigns as an assistant coach with Burns over the years. Burns had never trusted him. “He wants my job,” he’d confided to a friend, and he was right. Burns was not offered a lateral movement within the Leaf franchise and wouldn’t have accepted one anyway. And he did not offer to resign. He was axed. But he did stretch out his neck, inviting the blow.

  In truth, with the deed done, Burns could exhale. “It was like, ‘Whew, take the gun away from me, don’t point that thing this way no more,’ ” recalls his confidant, Dixon. “He said, ‘They’ve all had that gun out for me—“Shoot him!” ’ Oh yeah, he was relieved.”

  Each swearing to keep his lips sealed, Burns and Fletcher shook hands, embraced in an awkward hug, then proceeded to the airport and boarded their flight, poker-faced. The con was on.

  It might seem atypical for Burns to, essentially, skulk out of town. He’d claimed to have never run away from a fight. Actually, he’d been a runner all his life—from a bad marriage and crumbling relationships, from parental responsibilities, from commitment, from jobs that no longer inspired or suited, from the risk of failure, from wreckage. None of this made him a bad man—far from it. But, like many complicated people, he was so much not what he often appeared—not tough and hardened to his marrow, but sensitive and easily wounded; not forthright, but secretive; not brimming with self-confidence, but frequently insecure; not honest, but … deceptive. He was, in fact, his own greatest invention: a persona crafted over the years to hide what really lay beneath—all the doubts and vulnerabilities and hurts, the fatherless boy who learned by his wits to become a man of substance and was still learning on the day he died.

  In his motel room that icy March night in 1996, these were the demons pressing in on Burns, relieved as he genuinely was about being released from the horror that coaching the Leafs had become through a fifty-three-day ordeal of compounding disasters, withering behind the bench, perspiring in front of the media glare. He was too stricken to show his face to the media, and that’s why he’d fled, why Fletcher had consented to the all-is-fine ruse.

  Burns told only a handful of intimates, calling Gilmour to thank him “because that guy gave his heart and soul to this team and I’ll always remember that,” informing his cousin and agent, Robin Burns, and breaking the news to his two kids, daughter Maureen inconsolable.

  By mid-morning the following day, word had begun to leak, however, and the Leafs called a press conference, Fletcher visibly shaken as he addressed the media. Reporters were bitter at having been duped. They wanted a carcass to pick over and accused Fletcher of duplicity. The absent ex-coach was unapologetic for leaving his media scrutineers, some of whom had believed themselves close to Burns, in the lurch.

  “I spoke to everybody I wanted to speak to,” he would say later. “Isn’t it my choice now? They had the chance to say I was a no good, rotten son of a bitch for four years and I never objected to talking to anyone on the job. But now it’s my time. I walked away. I shut my mouth. I took my pill and I went home. I never said anything to hurt a player’s career. I didn’t throw darts. I still have great respect for Cliff, and I don’t blame him for what happened because he was always fair with me. They made the change and that was it. But was it better after I left? How far did they go in the playoffs? Is that my fault, too? I gave four years of my life to the Toronto Maple Leafs. I emptied my guts. And we proved something. Maybe we didn’t prove the whole thing, because we didn’t win a Stanley Cup. But we proved something.”

  On the road home that morning, the weather had cleared, the sky was blue and Burns’s spirits lifted somewhat. Like a wounded bear, he was going to a place where he felt safe—“I’ll hide in the woods
for a while”—though never anticipating his hibernation would last quite so long, a full season to come out of the game that was his only real passion. In Magog, because his own lakeside retreat was rented out until the end of the month, he took refuge in a friend’s cedar-shingled house across the frozen pond, a twenty-five-acre property with all the conveniences of city life, a soapstone fireplace and a fat tabby called Li’l Bastard. Looking out the window, he could occasionally spot deer emerging timidly from the bush. “I’m just going to relax and let things go by. I certainly don’t plan on leaving the game. I still think I’m a good coach. I think I’ve proven that. I don’t think I’m a bum now because I’ve been fired. I’ll be back somewhere.”

  He’d been down this road before and would travel there again. Seven years further on, he’d reach his ultimate destination—holding aloft that ungainly silver trophy bequeathed by Lord Stanley—the boy from St. Henri who’d willed himself to triumph, from cop to NHL coach to championship parade in a dreary New Jersey parking lot, not quite as he’d imagined it. Still, fate had smiled on Pat Burns. And then it delivered a death rattle.

  Chapter One

  The Fatherless Boy

  “This big, big hole that never got filled.”

  PATRICK JOHN JOSEPH BURNS was born April 4, 1952, in St. Henri, Montreal, the lively working-class francophone and Irish-immigrant neighbourhood immortalized by Gabrielle Roy in The Tin Flute. But this was St. Henri in its pre-gentrified era, grungy and grasping and insular.

  So proud was Alfred Burns, Sr. of this new addition to the family, a second son who would be the last of six children, that he immediately set about planning a future immersed in hockey, as did thousands of other fathers in Quebec, dreaming about the National Hockey League for their squealing boy infants. Alfred Burns was such an ardent Montreal Canadiens fanatic that, upon returning home from the hospital to the family’s upstairs flat at 819 Laporte Avenue, he bought two hockey sticks and nailed them, in an X-shaped cross, above the baby’s crib. The family may not have been able to afford fancy layettes and mobiles to amuse their newborn, but from the first days of his life, Baby Patrick’s hazel eyes would open on a sacred hockey montage.