Coach

by Rosie DiManno

  Working undercover was the coolest cool of all. Burns tackled that challenge enthusiastically, growing his hair long—for a while, he actually sported a salon-perm Afro—cultivating goatee, sideburns and moustache, outlaw biker–style. He was fascinated by the desperado creed, felt at ease within that anti-establishment ethos. On many occasions later in life, Burns would admit that, had he not become a police officer, he might very well have gone the other way, seduced into vice. To a large extent, as a civilian, he would reproduce a quasi biker gang among friends similarly piggish about hogs, choppers, Harleys—the “Red Dogs,” they’d call themselves—setting off on long vroom-vroom rides across Canada and the U.S., rarely missing the annual motorcycle rally in Laconia, New Hampshire. His fondness for that culture—and some of the genuine biker gang kingpins held him in affection, too, probably too close an arm-around—would land him in hot water two decades later, when Burns’s name came up in intercepts captured during a police investigation of Montreal’s motorcycle mob.

  “There was a pool room on the main drag in Gatineau, and all the bikers hung out there,” remembers Janusz. “They had their patches and their shaved heads. They were called the Popeyes, out of Quebec, and then they became the Hells. They were involved with drugs, fencing stolen goods. Pat would go there and talk to them. He used to call them scumbags. But he could talk to them and feel comfortable with them, go the whole nine yards. He didn’t fear them. Was he respected by the scumbags? Yeah, I really think he was.”

  In one of his own versions of those undercover days, the exaggerating Burns would claim to have actually joined the Outlaws, at a time when that gang was in full-out war with the rival Hells Angels, Hull affiliate. “Had my hair in a ponytail, drove a big Harley-Davidson. That wasn’t a bad assignment. Drink beer all day and watch the girls dance in the topless bars.”

  Burns would never shake off the street-savvy cop reputation in his reincarnation as a coach—indeed, his law-enforcement background is precisely what captivated prospective GMs—but sixteen years on the force, deeply immersed in the funk of criminality, tainted him forever as well, skewed his view of the world and fostered a deep-rooted distrust of humanity. “Once a cop, always a cop,” says Janusz. “People who are in our business, you get to see everything that’s wrong in the world because nobody calls police when things are going great, only when something is wrong. You see that stuff and you learn; it stays with you always. It’s hard for us to trust anybody. We might come to trust you, but it ain’t gonna be on the first date.”

  It’s easy to forget how much time Burns put in as a cop. But all the while, he kept up his interest in, and participation with, sports. He continued playing on a Junior B team in Hull, then a senior team, despite bad knees. “It was all fights, rough Slap Shot hockey, with people throwing rocks at the bus when we left town,” he recalled. He joined the police force’s softball team and immersed himself in coaching kids, from mosquitos through peewee, bantam and midget. One of his midget teams, the Hull Kiwanis, featured a shy kid from a rural Quebec town by the name of Stéphane Richer. A midget team he took over lost a tournament to the Ville-Émard Hurricanes when an elegant fourteen-year-old named Mario Lemieux scored an overtime goal. As time allowed, Burns attended local coaching clinics, thirsty for Xs-and-Os insight.

  “He played a lot of sports, and was damn good at them, but he loved hockey,” says Janusz. “At that time, when we were in criminal investigations, on Friday, towards the end of the afternoon when things were slowing down, everybody getting ready for the weekend, we’d all be sitting there and Pat would be talking about hockey. Like, if there were any big games coming up on the weekend, Pat would preview the game. And when we came back on Monday morning, sitting around drinking coffee and getting our files together, Pat would review the game. He’d give us his opinions as to the players, the coach, nah-nah-nah-nah-nah. He’d say, ‘That idiot coach did this or did that, I would have done this and that.’ He was essentially analyzing the game and telling us what he would have done as coach, the decisions he would have made. Where did that hockey smarts come from? You’ve got me. It’s not like he’d had anybody mentoring him.

  “I always said, ‘Pat, one day we’re going to see you on the screen analyzing hockey.’ I’d joke, ‘Pat, you’re going to be the next Don Cherry.’ Because he had … not necessarily the same attitude as Cherry, but Pat could be funny and also get to the point. Programs you see now on TV where they’re talking about hockey, guys on a panel, we had that with Pat then. He was doing this long before he became an NHL coach, analyzing and assessing. He saw things the rest of us couldn’t see. We were fans, but it was as if he was investigating the games.”

  Burns was coaching a Midget AAA team, roped into the gig by an ailing friend and taking it all the way to a championship, the Daoust Cup. At the buzzer, he looked up and motioned to Janusz to come and celebrate with them on the ice at the Robert Guertin Arena in Hull. “So I go down there, never imagining what he’d become one day. There’s Pat with this trophy. It was a small trophy, but it meant so much. After that, things kind of started opening up for him in hockey. He got his opportunities.”

  Balancing those midgets and his day job was a time-juggling strain. The manager of the midget team was himself a Gatineau police inspector who cut Burns some slack on the roll call. More often, it was Janusz covering for him. “The scheduling was, we worked two weeks of days and one week of nights, Monday to Friday. There were weeks where we worked nights, starting at three in the afternoon and going to midnight. Plenty of nights, Pat had hockey games to coach. He’d say, ‘Fuck, John, I have to go, gotta go, gotta go, you’re going to cover for me, right?’ I’d say, ‘Okay, but if the shit hits the fan, a homicide or something else really big, you’re gonna have to get your butt out of the arena and back over here.’ To be honest, I was kind of nervous about it. I mean, he’s kind of cheating the company a bit. But it’s hockey, right? So I did it and I’m comfortable admitting that today. That was my little contribution to his career. But did I ever think this would all lead to him becoming an NHL coach? Nope. At most, I thought maybe he might coach in juniors or the minor leagues, maybe as an assistant coach in the NHL. But head coach? Coaching three of the Original Six clubs? Coach of the year three times? The Stanley Cup? Noooo, I would never have bet any money on that.”

  While with the midget team, Burns did a bit of scouting on the side for the Hull Olympiques (now the Gatineau Olympiques) of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Meanwhile, they’d been scouting him. He was offered, and eagerly seized, the job as Hull’s assistant coach in 1983, while continuing full-time employment as a police officer. “It was crazy, eh,” he recalled. “I was a detective-sergeant by then, working days with the fraud unit, seven to three, mostly writing reports. I’d go straight from the station to the rink. Practice was from four to six. Games. Road trips. I worked a deal where I took my vacation time in hours instead of days. I’d work until noon and then get on the bus and go to the game. Crazy.”

  The next season, after finishing second-last and missing the playoffs for the fourth time in eleven years, head coach Michel Morin returned to teaching and the gig went to Burns. But mountains had to be moved to make it so.

  Sniffing around the team at that time was a veteran hockey hand by the name of Charlie Henry, with his quarter-century of experience in the minors and junior ranks. Henry was, and remains, an avuncular aide-decamp to none other than Wayne Gretzky. “I was working for Wayne then. I still work for Wayne now.” The Great One had just sold his 46.5 per cent ownership stake in the Belleville Bulls of the Ontario Hockey League. “He said, ‘Why don’t we buy another team?’ and I said fine. Lo and behold, the Hull team looked available.” In fact, the sad-sack Olympiques, then owned by the city, had just declared bankruptcy. “Once they found out that Wayne was looking to buy the team, they were on their knees to sell, right?”

  Burns, as assistant coach, would have been part of the package, but Gretzky and Henry, who became
general manager, knew they wanted him as top boss behind the bench. “We were looking to change the attitude of the team,” says Henry, who’d clandestinely observed some of the practices that Burns ran. “And we didn’t have to look very far. I’d investigated other possibilities when we were buying the team. I looked all over, change this and change that, but we had the coach we wanted right there. It was a matter of ‘This is who we want.’ I talked to Pat and he jumped right in.”

  It was Gretzky who made the come-hither call. Burns was at home when the phone rang. “Pat, it’s for you,” said his girlfriend. Yeah, who is it? “They say it’s from Edmonton, person-to-person,” she said. “They say it’s Wayne Gretzky.” Burns thought it was a prank, but took the phone. The voice on the other end said, “Hi Pat, this is Wayne Gretzky.” Burns, still convinced his cop pals at the station were having fun at his expense, growled: “Yeah, quit [bleeping] around.” Caller: “No, really, it’s me.” Finally, Gretzky was able to convince the suspicious Burns that he was legitimate. He wanted Burns to stay on the job as Hull head coach. “Look, I appreciate it,” said Burns. “But I’m a police officer, not a hockey coach. I’ve had no time off and you don’t understand, I’ve gone through hell the last year.”

  But the next day he was on a plane to Edmonton, at Gretzky’s expense, and a deal was struck. Obvious logistical issues remained. “He still had a full-time job with the police department at that time,” recalls Gretzky. “But we really believed he was going to be an NHL coach one day and that, if we got him, his tenure with the Olympiques probably wouldn’t last that long. I said to Charlie, if we’re going to pursue him, we’d have to catch him when we could, dive right in. There was a potential of us losing him rapidly. We thought we might be able to keep him for a year before an NHL team came calling.”

  No way though that Burns could maintain the manic pace of two jobs, each requiring his full attention. Gretzky personally made a call to the Gatineau chief. Henry followed up. “I went to see the mayor,” says Henry. “I said, if we want to make a coach out of this young man, because he’s got the capability, I need a [year’s leave] of absence for him. That had never been done before. But I knew the mayor and he agreed. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you a year, but that’s it.’ ” As Gretzky remembers it, denying with typical modesty that his participation in the plot carried any significant persuasive effect on Hizzoner: “They were very obliging. They knew that this was somebody who was going to be an NHL coach someday. I’m not sure anything I did was responsible for pushing it over the edge. Maybe I nudged them a bit. The people up there understood this was Pat’s destiny and the NHL wasn’t going to be very far down the road. Pat had such a good hockey mind, a strong presence, and he was a very hard worker.”

  Convinced that having a cop on staff who simultaneously coached for a Gretzky-owned team was an ambassadorial coup for the community, the police chief made the necessary arrangements, granting the leave of absence. Burns was doubly delighted because he received a good salary to coach the Olympiques while keeping his accumulated police force seniority and benefits. At that point, he and partner Janusz essentially parted professional company, though they remained friends till the end of Burns’s life. Eventually, Janusz would become chief of police in Gatineau. Today, he’s Director General, Security Services—deputy sergeant-at-arms—for the House of Commons. For a couple of scruffs from Montreal, each made good.

  What Gretzky and Henry most liked about Burns were the obvious assets he brought: his hockey savvy—self-taught—and the hard-nosed cop reputation that preceded him. “He was disciplined, no-nonsense and firm in his decisions,” says Henry. “When you talked to the players, they liked him, but they were scared of him. Oh yeah, he was tough. He could be a real P-R-I-C-K. I don’t know if he could coach today, to be honest, because the type of discipline that he brought … a lot of times there was a lot of fear. Players were scared of Pat, and that was true when he got to the NHL, too.” Adds Gretzky: “These were young guys he was coaching, sixteen to twenty years of age. He would be sharp with them, whether they liked it or not. He was always extremely honest with all of his players, sometimes even if they didn’t want to hear it.”

  Henry would become yet another in the long line of substitute dads for Burns. “He could have been looking for a father figure.” And the weathered hockey guru was careful not to put the team’s well-being ahead of the “beautiful man” he came to love. While confident this novice would ultimately land in the NHL, he prudently attempted to craft a Plan B, lest that didn’t happen. Known widely in the Ottawa region, where he’d been a fireman, and with a slew of contacts in all manner of business enterprises, Henry one day suggested to Burns that, well, if things didn’t work out hockeywise, he could probably arrange for Burns to be hired as head of security at A.J. Freiman’s, the capital’s largest department store. He was taken aback by Burns’s explosive reaction. “He got insulted! What I’d meant was, he didn’t have to worry about ending up unemployed if he didn’t go back to the police force, that he could go the department store and be the man in charge. Pat was, ‘Jesus Christ, you think all I’m good for is security!’ ”

  In any event, when that year’s leave of absence was over—the Olympiques had shot up to second place in their division and fifth overall, losing the championship semifinals in five games—Henry was not about to let his coaching gem return to pounding a beat, or even solving homicides. “When that year was over, Pat was told he wasn’t getting another leave. So now I went back to the mayor in Hull and got him to come with me to see the police chief, the two of us together, to get Pat Burns another year leave of absence. Lo and behold, we got it again.”

  There would be no need for a third sabbatical. As a cop, Pat Burns was done.

  He’d never once drawn his gun.

  Chapter Three

  Adventures in the “Q”

  “Sure, I was a bit of a showman coach in junior hockey.”

  IT WAS THE DAY after a stinker of a night before. The Hull Olympiques had lost a big game—lost it bad. Players, geared up, were huddled in the dressing room prior to practice, nervously awaiting the thunderclap of Pat Burns, a coach who could peel the paint off the walls with his blistering tirades even when his team won. “The trainer tells us nobody goes on the ice until Pat comes in,” recalls defenceman Cam Russell. “Of course, we’re shaking in our skates, worried about getting skated until we threw up. And Pat finally walks in with the trainer and four cases of beer. So everybody sat around and drank. It was a different time, right?” Burns circulated around the room for two hours, talking to the players. “The running joke became, if we had a bad game, we were always hoping the next day would be a beer practice. That was Pat. He had a lot of tricks up his sleeve and he knew went to pull them out.”

  Burns as trickster—and devotee of silly slapstick pranks—would remain a calling card throughout his career. Much of his future style behind the bench was forged during the three eventful years Burns spent as coach of the Hull Olympiques in the fiercely hardscrabble Q—the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Never a keen technician, Burns’s particular strengths quickly emerged as motivator and ingenious hockey alchemist, a guy who could draw every last ounce of potential out of his players. This skill would be the catalyst for the rapid improvement of all NHL teams he took over, especially in his first year with clubs, and it was what made him so alluring to GMs.

  Every player who fell under the Burns spell in junior hockey would subsequently acknowledge how crucial he’d been in their evolution towards the NHL, a roster of comers that included the likes of Russell, Luc Robitaille and Benoît Brunet, all of whom passed through his hands in Hull, a team Burns took to the Memorial Cup in 1986. The past is a different country in the United States of Hockey—in it, Pat Burns was slim and sported a perm for a while—but Burns identified, recruited and enhanced raw talent, foster-coaching teenagers into young men who could step into an NHL lineup.

  The Hull Olympiques (renamed Gatineau Olympi
ques in 2002, following municipal amalgamation) shared a junior hockey market and intense rivalry with the Ottawa 67’s across the river. When Burns arrived as an assistant coach in 1983, club ownership was still held by the City of Hull. The previous season, the team had finished forty points behind their quarter-final opponents, Laval, though they would extend them to a seven-game playoff round. The city then relinquished ownership to a non-profit corporation.

  As an assistant in the 1983–84 season, Burns didn’t work from behind the bench because head coach Michel Morin preferred to act alone at ice level. Instead, Burns watched every game from the bleachers, taking notes. What he observed wasn’t pretty; the Olympiques finished second to last in the Lebel Division, the fourth time in eleven years they had been excluded from the postseason, even with a very impressive left winger, Robitaille, drafted onto the squad and immediately saddled with the nickname “The Franchise.”

  Morin lasted only a year and returned to academia as the reins were handed to Burns, still shuttling between his policeman job and the rink. In ’84–85, the Olympiques ranked second in their division, Robitaille acquitting himself as advertised, scoring 55 goals and 148 points. The team lost in five games against Verdun in the semifinals. Meanwhile, Gretzky formally assumed ownership, his press conference at the Hull convention centre attended by nearly 150 journalists from across North America. With Gretzky’s éclat, the Olympiques would no longer fly below the radar. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was in the stands at their season opener.

  In Burns’s second season in charge, the team was assembled to win, with Robitaille its flashiest star. “When I went to Hull the first year, Pat was an assistant coach-slash-cop,” says Robitaille. “He would do most of the games at home and, when he could, he would travel with us. The next year, he took over as coach. The year before, we’d made the playoffs and got out in the first round, but we had a very good team coming up. That’s why Pat kept his job when Wayne came in: because they knew he was doing something pretty special already.”